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Tips For Avoiding Pothole Damage to your Windscreen

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Tips For Avoiding Pothole Damage to your Windscreen

Potholes are the one of the leading cause of damage to car windscreens, more so than accidents and general wear and tear. As the financial constraints on local government increase year on year, less and less money is made available for road maintenance, meaning the number, and size, of potholes increases all the time.

This leaves the motorists to bear the brunt of fixing their cars, but with a bit of knowledge and some simple driving tips, you can avoid potholes and the expenses they can cause.

What Are Potholes

The term pothole refers to any kind of damage to the surface of the road where the tarmac has been worn away. In light cases, heavy rain will have washed a few millimetres away over time, making the steering a little heavy as you drive over them. In the worst cases, water enters a deeper hole then freezes and expands, making the hole bigger and making it a real road hazard to drive over.

Tips For Avoiding Potholes

Unless you have an incredibly short bonnet, seeing potholes ahead of time can be tricky. Here are a few tips to help you miss the ones that will really hurt:

  • Don’t tailgate – if you’re too close to the car in front, it’s likely that you can’t see the road surface under their vehicle until it’s too late
  • Keep to the speed limit – there tends to be more potholes on main roads where people drive quickly, and by driving at the limit you’ll give yourself the best chance to avoid them.
  • Use less common roads – potholes get bigger the more times they get hit, so if you can avoid high traffic routes, you’ll find yourself facing less potholes.

The Dangers Of Potholes

Any uneven surface is dangerous for your car, but potholes can cause problems with the following:

  • Tyre damage – the most common problem is damage to the tyre, whether it’s buckled alloys causing the wheel to collapse or cracks in the tyre wall that can quickly become a serious puncture.
  • Unaligned tracking – losing the tracking in your car means that the steering becomes much less responsive and in the worst cases you lose any connection between the motion of the steering wheel and the direction your front tyres face in.
  • Wheel balancing – the dramatic and instant difference in height that you suffer from driving through a pothole can cause your wheels to become unbalanced. This means that the axle isn’t flat to the road and you’ll put much more pressure on one side of your car than the other, causing the tyres on that side to wear out much faster than normal.

Potholes and Your Windscreen

Possibly the biggest concern about driving through potholes is the debris that your car spits up. Not only does this make the hole bigger for the next person, but it also causes damage to your body work and windscreen.

Even at 30 mph, a small bit of tarmac from a pothole can cause a crack in your windscreen, making it unsafe for driving.

Similarly, if you have a small chip or crack, or damage to the seal and edge of your windscreen caused by general wear, hitting a pothole can send vibrations through your vehicle that will cause the damage to deteriorate resulting in a bigger, more dangerous crack.

The Windscreen Company

Any cracks or chips need to be fixed or replaced as soon as possible, otherwise your whole windscreen could collapse or shatter at any time, causing a major accident.

Here at The Windscreen Company, we have years of experience repairing and replacing windscreens to the highest standards to ensure your safety. For any more information, an emergency repair or to book a chip repair – simply get in touch today.

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