Doing some traveling during the holiday season and thinking about that long drive ahead? Preparing your vehicle for travel can be stressful, but ensuring your car is equipped for the mystery travel holds is important! Often overlooked, headlights can make or break your road trip. Especially since the winter months bring shorter days and more hours of darkness, you need to make sure your headlights are in optimal condition to avoid accidents that become more likely at night time. Here are some pro-tips on making sure your lights will light the way on your road trip:
Replace them BEFORE they burn out
We all like avoiding accidents and unexpected inconveniences, right? Well here's an instance where you can do just that. Go ahead and replace your lights if you haven't for a while. This way you can have peace of mind that they won't burn out on you at an inconvenient time (like on your family trip to Disney World). How often you should change your lights completely depends on what type of lights you have, and how often they are used. In general, the older the lights, the dimmer they become. So, if you can't remember last time you had them changed, it may be time to consider replacing them!
Change them together
If you have a headlight burn out, it makes more sense to change out the other one as well while you're at it. We say this for safety reasons. If you have one new light and one old, the older one will be dimmer than the new, causing an uneven vision field on the road at night, increasing the chances of an accident.
Don't stay basic
Did you know that you can feel more secure at night by upgrading your headlights? Any upgrade from your basic headlights will increase downward view of the road so that you can see further so that if there's an object on the road, you have more time to react to keep yourself and your vehicle safe. Whiter lights with a greater down-road visibility are the best to look for when shopping for light upgrades.
Restore old headlights
Walk to the front of your vehicle and take a look at your headlights. Are they trapped behind a cloudy film on the plastic? It's ok, the average car on the road is about 11 years old so you're not alone. This can be fixed! There are different types of headlight restoration kits that can remove that sun-damage film on the plastic. Don't feel comfortable taking on this challenge? The professionals at West Automotive Group can clean your headlights for you. Cleaning them can let up to 3 times the amount of light through the plastic! It really makes a difference.
Make sure to keep yourself safe with these headlight maintenance pro-tips. Happy traveling!
