What distance is safe to maintain? Whenever you drive in traffic, you keep asking and answering this question every moment over and over again. How should you approach this task in order to always be as safe as possible, from the defensive driving point of view? What are the rules and guidelines, and what internal and external factors should you consider?

The usual rule of thumb is to keep two-seconds distance, with variations of three and even four, and sometimes ...

Our friend Joshua Nestor did some investigation on Texas defensive driving phenomenon.

Gas Saving Tips - The Comprehensive List

Well, with gas prices approaching $4 all over the USA, this may be an interesting topic to talk about. I tried to put together all my experience and knowledge, and came up with the list of tips with explanations. They do tell you why every particular advice helps or does not help you to achieve best gas mileage.

Give it a try, I am pretty much sure you'll see a noticeably better gas mileage if you do - and no gas savers needed

I'm thinking about making a video series "Driving with Misha". The idea is that I just drive and comment on what is going on on the road. I think it is going to be much better than a dry lecture on defensive driving. I have a wealth of information in my head, but it's a kind of tricky to get it from there when I'm sitting at my workstation and typing. Everchanging road situations usually trigger the memories, and information should be better consumed in relation to what happens on the screen (or I hope so).

I'm posting the test episode that I just filmed today on my way to the cit...

Popular belief seems to be just that - Speed kills! With the meaning - higher than speed limit speed kills. And the popular remedy to road dangers is - Slow down stupid! That's how many homegrown defensive driving classes have it. However, most experts in the field and almost anybody who takes time to seriously think about the issue come to the conclusion that speed per se is not the cause of deadly accidents, i.e. speed does not kill.

How this could be possible? And who is right? Since I did some serious thinking about driving, I came to the conclusion that speed does not kill. Now you are...

When you are driving an automatic car, your transmission is deciding when to switch gears. When you are driving a car with manual transmission this is your job. While it is definitely not a rocket science, it still requires some thought and skill.

There are quite a few myths circulating around on what is good and what is bad and how you should and how you should not switch gears. I can’t just cover them all, so you ask if you have any concern, OK? You can hear for example that you should never let your engine rev higher than, say, 2000 rpm. Others will tell you - you should rev it all the ...

I'm posting here a story of a guy who survived a serious car crash, caused by him ignoring road conditions while driving a performance car. He learned his lesson hard way, and now he wants to share his story with as many people as possible, so you guys can use his experience in your driving. It's a long story, but it's worth reading. It might in fact change the way you look at driving. You might even realize that defensive driving is not just an empty term.

After reading the story and watching the video, I invite you to think what exactly were his mistakes and what in his driving could he h...

There are just two methods of starting your manual car up a hill that I’m aware of. I don’t think other methods exist.

First is the easiest one, but somewhat slow and sloppy. You wait for a green light with your parking brake engaged. As soon as light turns green, you depress the clutch, shift into the first, and release the clutch to engagement start point. Then you simultaneously release parking brake, add gas, and release the clutch. It seems a bit complex on paper, but it is not. Basically you start as usual, you just add parking brake release, simultaneously with clutch engagement. It ...

Driving in India is worse - have fun watching

Now, when you managed to start your car, you accelerate and a few seconds later you hear your engine is revving really high. Time to change gears! Relax, it’s much easier than starting a car, and since you managed to start the car, you can master changing gears, too. Interestingly enough the hardest part for novice is to change from first to second.

Why? Because it takes so long to change the gear at first, that your car comes to complete stop by the moment you start engaging clutch. How to remedy this? Practice, surprisingly. Before you start changing gears in real life, you want to sp...