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The Best Safety Features You Should Be Looking For

When it comes to safety, car manufacturers are constantly coming up with new tech and features to make their cars better. There seem to be so many safety features available on the market, and some of them sound more useful than they actually are. Whatever the car safety feature may be, many drivers have different …

When it comes to safety, car manufacturers are constantly coming up with new tech and features to make their cars better. There seem to be so many safety features available on the market, and some of them sound more useful than they actually are. Whatever the car safety feature may be, many drivers have different preferences in how they want their car to help make their individual driving experience safer.

Safe driving from the front

The front of the car typically holds a majority of the safety features, and this is because it is the direction our car travels in the most. There are a handful of safety features that focus on the forward motion of the car, and some of them can work in conjunction with each other to provide a safer driving experience.

2020 Ford Fusion safety feature graphic
2020 Ford Fusion safety feature graphic | Ford

Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking typically go hand in hand, and if you get one in a car you usually get the other – although that isn’t always the case. These systems are designed to help reduce your risk of a front-end collision and can be helpful if you get a little too close to the car ahead.

These systems can also partner well with adaptive cruise control, one of the most underrated features you can find in a car. Adaptive cruise control allows you to set a cruising speed, as you’d expect from standard cruise control, but it will automatically make necessary adjustments to the set speed based on the traffic in front of the car. That means if the car in front of you is slowing down, your cruise control speed will decrease accordingly.

The dreaded lane change

Accidents happen when we change lanes because it can be difficult to know for certain where other cars are in regards to your blind spot. Some cars have much larger blind spots than others, and even though some manufacturers are pushing to reduce blind spots as much as possible, we will likely never get perfect visibility.

Side-view camera and screen of an Audi e-tron 55 car during a press day ahead of the Geneva International Motor Show |HAROLD CUNNINGHAM/AFP via Getty Images

Another problem is when a driver is focused on traffic behind and to the side of the car, their attention is taken away from what is in front of them. Car manufacturers have created some safety systems for changing lanes that help the driver navigate more safely without requiring too much attention.

Features like lane-keeping assist and lane-centering assist can help by ensuring we stay in the lane that we intend on, reducing our chances of accidentally side-swiping a car when you’ve gone too far over the diving line. This is also helpful with new drivers because it instills safe driving habits like using your turn signal, as the lane-keeping assist in many cars will alert you if you are changing lanes with proper signaling.

It is important to look at the safety features offered by the cars you want to buy because they can make a big difference in keeping you and your family out of harm’s way. It is also important to recognize which safety features are the most important to you because some safety features aren’t as useful to some drivers as they are to others.

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