Security Driving is a decision-making process that requires the driver to manage time and distance, and anything that slows that process down can and often does become an emergency. Whether driving the boss to work, in a low-risk environment or driving an armored vehicle in a high-risk environment, understanding the basic principles of managing time and distance is life-saving knowledge.
Our frame of reference for measuring time and distance is the speedometer which supplies information in units of kilometers and hours – KPH. The driver does not have an hour or a kilometer to make life-saving decisions; in a vehicle emergency, Kilometer Per Hour is an irrelevant unit of measurement.
An Explanation
To make sense of a vehicle emergency the driver needs to convert KPH to Meters Per Second (MPS). Traveling at 60 KPH the driver is moving at the rate of 16.67 Meters Per Second (MPS). Converting KPH to MPS requires some elementary grade arithmetic; you need to multiply the KPH number by or .28 (Actually.27777778). Driving at 50 KPH the vehicle is moving through space at 14 Meters/Second, (50 KPH times.28) at 80 KPH the vehicle is moving 22.2 Meters/Second (80 KPH times.28).
DISTANCE
- At 40 KPH the driver travels 11.2 meters/Sec
- At 60 KPH the driver travels 16.8 meters/Sec
- At 80 KPH the driver travels 22.4 meters/Sec
- At 100 KPH the driver travels 28.0 meters/Sec
As mentioned above, any delay in the decision-making process adds exponentially to the level of difficulty needed to survive the event, not delays measured in seconds but delays measured in tenths of seconds. As an example; at 40 KPH, in.2 seconds, the driver travels 2.24 meters, at 60 KPH in.2 seconds the driver would travel 3.36 Meters.
Why two-tenths of a second? Because that is how much time it takes to blink your eyes. When you are driving 60 KPH, literally in a blink of an eye, you move 3.36 Meters. Any training that can speed up the decision-making process – by as little as a blink of an eye dramatically increase the chances of surviving the emergency.
| KPH | Distance Travelled In The Blink of an Eye |
| 40 KPH | 2.24 Meters |
| 60 KPH | 3.36 Meters |
| 80 KPH | 4.48 Meters |
| 100 KPH | 5.6 Meters |
Traveling 60 KPH
| In a half of a second you would travel 8.4 Meters |
| In a second 16.8 Meters |
| In 2 seconds 33.6 Meters |
| In 3 seconds 50.4 Meters |
| In 4 seconds 67.2 Meters |
| In 5 seconds 84 Meters |
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