What precautions should you take when driving at night?

When driving at night, it is essential to use headlights, reduce speed, and increase following distances to ensure safety. Headlights are crucial for visibility as they illuminate the road ahead, allowing you to see potential hazards, pedestrians, and other vehicles. Reducing speed is important because distance perception can be more challenging in low light conditions, and it gives you more time to react to any unexpected situations. Increasing following distances is also vital; at night, it becomes harder to judge the speed and distance of vehicles ahead, so maintaining a greater distance helps to prevent rear-end collisions and provides a safer buffer zone.

Choosing to increase speed and use high beams may seem beneficial for visibility but can lead to dangerous situations, as high beams can blind other drivers. Keeping windows down does not effectively enhance visibility and can actually increase noise and distraction. Driving without headlights in well-lit areas is not a safe practice, as it reduces your visibility to others and does not provide you with guidance when conditions change. Therefore, using headlights while driving at night is the most responsible and safest approach.