The driver’s reaction is a set of skills that allow you to timely prevent an emergency and apply the brake.

Driving a car requires special attention from drivers. They must respond in time to all kinds of obstacles, be able to predict emergencies. Sometimes there are only a few seconds to apply the brake, and those seconds can cost someone their life.

What determines the reaction rate

Many factors affect response time. It is not only the brand of the car, the weather conditions on the street that matters, but also the individual characteristics of the organism.

What is the average driver’s reaction time and what does it depend on:

• The gender of the person. It is scientifically proven that men react to potential danger faster than women. Their reaction time is on average at 1,8 s. While for ladies, the speed of reaction to danger is 2,8 s.
• Age. Motorists under the age of thirty react faster to impending danger. Young drivers react to a potential accident in 1,54 seconds. The reaction time in the elderly increases to 2,05 s.
• Driving experience. People who have driven a vehicle for more than 5 years can react faster to impending danger than those who have recently driven.

Additional factors:

• time of day at which movement is carrying out;
• weather;
• the speed at which the car is moving;
• the quality of the road surface;
• the level of illumination of the road at night;
• the general well-being of the driver while driving.

Also, the speed of response to probable accidents depends on the physical fitness of the person driving.

What happens when you drink alcohol?

To find out how alcohol affects the driver’s reaction, it is necessary to understand the mechanism of the effect of alcohol on the human body as a whole.

Alcoholic drinks are basing on ethanol. They have a calming and inhibitory effect. Therefore, a drunk driver is a potential killer. Such people can harm not only themselves but also other motorists who drive without breaking the rules.

When drinking alcohol, the speed of reaction to a potential danger decreases, the criticality of assessing a difficult transport situation is distorting. All this leads to road traffic accidents, which can turn into dire consequences.

Also, alcohol itself negatively affects the work of the heart, brain, blood vessels.

Drinking and driving: understanding the risks

It is strictly forbidden to drive while drunk, even if you have drinking very little.

How alcohol affects the driver’s reaction time:

1. Small doses of alcohol also negatively affect the nervous system, as a result – the reaction is inhibiting.
2. Ethanol enters the brain, which leads to a deterioration in the activity of the nervous system. An untrained driver may face attacks of headaches, increased pressure, chest discomfort while driving, which is likely to provoke an accident.

How alcohol influences driver reaction time

When drunk, the ability to quickly respond to danger and make timely decisions in difficult situations on the road is lost.

At the same time, many drivers, having drunk alcohol, overestimate their abilities and believe that they can prevent an accident, almost completely losing their vigilance.

In fact, it turns out that their reaction is slow, although the motorists themselves do not think so at the time of movement.

Experts believe that a drunk person is much more dangerous than an elderly or sick person. After all, older people control their actions, are in a sane state, and do not overestimate their abilities. Rather, on the contrary, they have excessive vigilance.

But alcohol and a quick reaction to a difficult road situation are practically incompatible things.

Often, drunk drivers want to throw out their energy and feel the excitement due to a surge of adrenaline:

• they begin to drive at high-speed
• drunk drivers try to repeat any tricks that they would never do in a sober mind
• they try to overtake passing cars, periodically driving into the oncoming lane.

All this creates potential conditions for road accidents and the death of innocent people.

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The US issued a warrant for the arrest of Martin Winterkorn

This is the first in the framework of the diesel scandal, the detention of the current head of the whole company. However, the most notable name in this matter is another: Martin Winterkorn. In 2007-2015, he served as Chairman of the Board of the Volkswagen Group (VW) and was – both by virtue of his position and due to his personal qualities – one of the most powerful and well-paid captains of big business in Germany.

But it was with him that the company began to install on commercial scale diesel-powered cars of Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche brands, software that fraudulently understated the content of harmful substances in the exhaust emissions. That is why Winterkorn in September 2015, as soon as the US revealed these manipulations, resigned, stressing that he assumes responsibility as head of the firm, but he personally did not allow any violations.

For one and a half years it seemed that by this retirement he had brought himself out from under the blow. However, in January 2017, the Prosecutor’s Office of Braunschweig reported that it was expanding the number of defendants in manipulating the emissions of diesel cars and that now 71-year-old Martin Winterkorn is on this list. He is charged with fraud and violation of the law on fair competition, as well as the manipulation of the market. Such a charge was put forward by the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office.

And the US authorities in May 2018 even issued a warrant for the arrest of Winterkorn. Since Germany does not extradite its citizens to the United States, the former Volkswagen does not face an American prison until it leaves the territory of Germany.  When it comes to court and there it will be proved that the head of the concern learned about the manipulations much earlier than he now admits, or, moreover, helped them, the multimillionaire may lose a significant part of his fortune.

Oliver Schmidt and James Liang are already in prison in the US

But the 49-year-old Oliver Schmidt, who in 2012-2015 was responsible for environmental issues in the American division of Volkswagen, did not immediately blame his guilt, but admitted. He was arrested in January 2017 in Miami (where he had come from Germany on a hard-to-explain naivete) and until August persistently denied his guilt. However, Schmidt then went on a deal with the prosecutor’s office, which in response withdrew most of the charges against him.

As a result, in December last year, the top manager was sentenced by a court in Detroit to seven years in prison and a fine of $ 400,000 for a conspiracy to deceive the authorities of the United States and for violating the law on air purity. After all, Oliver Schmidt assured US officials several years that the cars of the Volkswagen concern fully comply with the environmental standards in force in the country.

Schmidt became the second manager of Volkswagen, serving time in an American prison. The first is a citizen of Germany, 64-year-old engineer James Robert Liang, sentenced in August 2017 in Detroit to 40 months in prison and a fine of $ 200,000. He admitted that he participated in the development of software for diesel engines to deceive authorities and buyers, and actively cooperated with the investigation, becoming his key witness.

Disclosure
September 2015. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) publishes a sensational investigation. It is claimed that a minimum of half a million Volkswagen cars with diesel engines installed software that allows you to bypass standards. Emission of harmful substances exceeded the norm by almost 40 times. The carmaker faces a fine of no less than $ 15 billion.

Compensations to buyers of Volkswagen cars, on which the software, underestimating the actual emissions of harmful substances, stood at $ 15 billion, which was a record for the industry.

The exact amount of payments will be announced by the American representatives of the German giant in Washington.

According to media reports, the final amount includes $ 10 billion to repair or repurchase defective cars and up to $ 10,000 compensation for each of the 428,000 owners of these diesel-powered cars.

In addition, $ 5 billion will have to go to the study of environmental impact from poor-quality motors.

Last year, US authorities ordered Volkswagen to withdraw almost half a million cars that were launched to the US market from 2009 to 2015. In addition, the investigation is being conducted in several other countries.

In January, the US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the corporation after the company confessed its fraudulent activities with the emissions of its diesel cars.

In this regard, the final amount of compensation will have to be approved by the court in Detroit.

According to the company, falsification of test results affected 11 million cars with diesel engines around the world.

Picture Credit: LAWJR

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Whenever a car accident takes place, the driver or drivers responsible or involved need to follow some traffic laws after such incident.  In most cases, the steps to be taken are based on factors like if the accident caused property damages, injuries, death etc. Damaging a parked car, causing injuries to a pedestrian, passenger or another driver are taken into consideration. If the accident resulted in the death of a passenger, pedestrian or another driver is also considered in such cases.

According to traffic laws in state, the driver engaged in car accident should immediately stop the vehicle when it’s safe and secure to do so. The driver needs to exchange identification along with relevant contact information with another driver directly related to this incident. Whenever a driver runs into a vehicle which is unattended or a stationed property, as per law in majority of states, the person should make substantial effort to recognize the property owner. They should be notified and alerted as early as possible regarding the happenings. Delaying to do so won’t help the cause in a car accident case. The best possible thing would be informing them everything about the happening in clear words.

In case the damage is suffered by a car parked in a space, noting down this vehicle’s license no would be a good step. Similarly after a car accident, the driver responsible can leave a written note at the real scene of car accident.  This note should also have driver’s identification details in case a property suffers damage. There is no point in fleeing the accident scene for it elevates confusion and panic levels for the driver responsible. It is better to cooperate with the sufferer and follow rules to avoid severe penalties, fines and punishments.

In case any accident causes injuries, drivers should be responsible enough to take proper steps for helping the injured person. It is one of their legal duties to offer assistance by contacting immediate medical services. They should report such unfortunate accidents to a nearly law enforcement office. It helps in dealing with the case in a proper way for both the law enforcement officials and injured persons.

Any vehicle driver who is unable to perform his or her legal duty post their involvement in car accident, is likely to get at least single ticket. With some case, as soon as an accident leads to death or injury, the driver fleeing the scene irresponsibly may be booked under severe criminal charges.

Image credit: Dmitry Kalinovsky

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