Vehicle safety checks are vital to ensure your drivers can continue to do their job and stay on the road without any issues. In this article we take a look at why it’s so important that your drivers do their checks and the potential consequences of ignoring this advice.
Our recent article make sure your drivers are always prepared talks about what drivers should do to be prepared before a journey including the following safety checks, in this article we take a look at these checks in more detail:
- Tyre pressure,
- Engine oil, screen wash and coolant
- Windscreen, lights and body work
Tyre Pressure
Poorly inflated tyres not only impacts vehicle efficiency, but also vehicle safety. Vehicles with poorly inflated tyres are unable to tackle the road in the same way, handling is impaired which can impact on breaking distances and the ability to tackle corners. In an emergency brake situation tyre pressure could be the difference between a collision and a near miss. It’s really easy for you or your drivers to check the tyre pressure in your vehicles you simply need a pressure gauge and 5 minutes of time. Keeping your tyres at the correct pressure will also save fuel and reduce costs.
Engine Oil, Screen Wash and Coolant
Engine oil is vital for the normal functioning of any vehicle, without the correct engine oil level vehicles can fail, stall and seize up. This can be very dangerous to the driver and passengers of the vehicle if this happens. Checking engine oil level is easy to do by pulling out the dipstick, wiping, replacing then removing again and checking the oil falls between the two levels on dipstick indicator. Always ensure your drivers perform this check when the vehicle is cool and on a flat surface.
Engine coolant is even easier to check, you can see when opening the bonnet if the coolant is at the right level without the need to touch anything. Driving a vehicle with low coolant levels is very dangerous and can lead to serious issues and irreversible engine failure.
Windscreen, Lights and Body Work
It’s important your drivers check their windscreens for any damage or chips regularly, small chips can easily be repaired for a low cost. Leaving these chips to develop into cracks can result the whole windscreen needing to be replaced, which is a much bigger and far more costly process. We recommend your drivers do a quick check of their windscreens every two weeks. The same applies for car body work and lights, if your drivers’ lights are broken this can make the vehicle unusable and illegal to drive, lights are usually easy to fix by just replacing the bulb.
Vehicle Checking Policy
To ensure your drivers are safe and road legal we suggest businesses put a policy in place that requires drivers to check their vehicle on a regular basis and confirm through paperwork that everything meets the required checks. Having a process like this in place protects drivers, business owners and the vehicles, to ensure that everyone is kept save and road legal.
