Five easy upgrades to make your older car safer

Vehicle safety has improved massively over the past two decades – and has been rapidly escalating in recent years – as car manufacturers continuously improve their vehicles and develop new technology to avoid a crash occurring and, if the worst should happen, making the car as safe as possible for its occupants.

Independent safety bodies such as the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) have also had a positive effect, with maximum five-star ratings now considered a minimum requirement that in turn have encouraged car-makers to ensure their latest vehicles meet the increasingly stringent testing protocols.

That’s all very well if you can afford a new car, but what if the budget doesn’t stretch that far – or if you have no plans to move from your beloved old-timer? Maybe those plans include passing down the older car to a new driver in the family?

While there is little you can do to make your older car structurally safer – its performance in a crash depends on the engineering at the time of design, development and manufacture – there are many things you can do to improve a car’s ability to avoid a crash occurring in the first place.

The golden rule is to ensure your car is well maintained, maintaining logbook services and attending to any issues as soon as they arise.

But in addition to that, here are five key changes you could make to an older car to improve its safety performance:

It may sound obvious, but your car tyres’ grip on the road is a critical factor and could be the difference between avoiding a crash or getting involved in one. It’s also fair to say that buying the cheapest new tyre you can is not likely to offer the best grip.

While buying the most expensive tyre is no guarantee, it’s worth not flinching at the cost of a good-quality tyre set. Have a look at buyer reviews of tyres to get a feel for what holds the road best.

Daytime running lights (DRLs) are the lights at the front-end that stay on whenever the car is switched on and are intended to make your vehicle more visible when driving in daylight, even when the headlights are switched off.

DRLs are not just a fancy look-at-me trinket either, according to a study by the Monash University Accident Research Centre. This study found that DRLs reduce non-night-time multi-vehicle crash involvement by 8.8 per cent. What’s more, a 20.3 per cent reduction in crash risk was associated with the fitment of DRLs during dawn or dusk, with a 13.8 per cent reduction in speed zones greater than 75km/h. While there is still no Australian Design Rule (ADR) requirement that DRLs be fitted, many newer cars have them as standard due to such requirements overseas.

It’s worth checking if your car has DRLs fitted already. Sometimes, they can be disabled in a settings menu. Otherwise, there are many aftermarket options to get DRLS fitted. If buying aftermarket DRLs, make sure that they are ADR-compliant and meet requirements on where they are fitted.

Much of the guesswork has been taken out of slow city manoeuvres with factory-fitted parking sensors and cameras, but there are still plenty of cars that don’t have the security afforded by these features.

Happily, there is a well-established aftermarket in affordable sensors and cameras – even some that can be bundled to work with an aftermarket, integrated infotainment screen.

If your particular car had such features available an option when new but weren’t actually fitted, there is potentially another option – buying components from an auto recycler (or possibly even a dealership) and having them professionally retrofitted to your car.

A head-up display (HUD) is a great addition to any car, helping drivers keep their eyes on the road while also keeping close tabs on their speed and other car functions.

An aftermarket HUD is well worth considering, projecting the current speed onto the windscreen to avoid both driver distraction and going above the posted speed limit. The aftermarket devices don’t look all that integrated, sitting up on top of the dashboard, but they certainly do the job.

Blind spot monitoring (BSM) is basically an extension of the parking sensor technology that has been around for more than 20 years as factory fitment and in the aftermarket.

Using radar technology, there is an illuminated warning usually fitted to the front doors or exterior mirrors to inform the driver that there is a vehicle in their car’s blind spot.

Depending on the vehicle, this is generally not too much more involved to fit than an aftermarket parking sensor system or get it fitted by a pro like the below blind spot detector from Driven Sound Vision Technology.