How do I drive safely in bad weather?

Start with the one you can settle in the next minute from a parked car, because it is the one that decides whether anybody can see you at all.

Your tail lights are probably off. Your tail lights are probably off says there is a good chance that in daylight rain your car is lit at the front and completely dark at the back, with nothing on the dashboard telling you. Daytime running lights come on by themselves, so the front glows and the instruments light and every cue says the lights are on; they generally do not turn on your tail lights. If the wipers are on, turn the headlights on with the switch, properly, not auto and not the running lights. This is a rule about how the lights are built rather than a telling-off: federal lighting standards used to require tail lamps to be lit whenever the headlamps were, and that requirement was amended in 1993 so tail lamps need not come on when the headlamps run at less than full intensity, which is exactly what a daytime running light is. In many US states, wipers-on-means-lights-on is written into law outright, and where it is not spelled out the general low-visibility requirement usually reaches the same place. The reason it is not about you: your headlights in rain are how the other cars find you, because in heavy rain or spray a car without lights does not read as a car, it reads as more grey until it is close. The opposite mistake gets the same minute: high beams do not help in fog or heavy rain and usually make things worse, because the light hits the water in the air and bounces back as a bright wall. And if you have raised your vehicle, your low beams now point where your high beams used to, which is a small re-aiming job.

Spinning digs the hole deeper. Spinning digs the hole deeper takes the driving instinct away from you first: a spinning tyre polishes the snow under it into ice and digs itself a grave at the same time, so more power makes the hole deeper and then makes it slicker. Stop spinning, clear the snow from the tyres and the tailpipe, put something gritty under the drive wheels and feed the gas gently, because you rock a car free rather than powering it free. Two safety facts come before any technique. The tailpipe: if snow has banked around the rear, clear the exhaust before anyone waits inside with the engine running and open a window a crack, because a blocked pipe routes carbon monoxide into the cabin. And the firing line: once a tyre grips, whatever was under it can leave at speed, so helpers push from the sides and nobody stands behind the drive wheels. Then the sequence: look first, including whether the parking brake is actually off, dig a path a car-length long rather than a hole, lay down grip, clay cat litter, sand, gravel, or dirt from under a nearby bush, and rock with light throttle, forward, released, back, forward. The page carries the floor-mat argument, four accounts to five, and the split is about what is under the mat rather than who is right: it works where the problem is soft material and fails on a slick surface, because on ice smooth rubber slides exactly like the tyre it was meant to rescue.

How low the tank should go. Where’s the bottom of the tank? says nobody in that argument defends running on fumes, and the fight is only about the margin. One school treats a quarter tank as the floor year round, and their evidence is Monday-morning shaped, the empty tank discovered while already late, the local gas panic that emptied every pump; underneath sits a mechanical story, because the fuel pump lives in the tank and uses the fuel around it as coolant, so a chronically low tank runs the pump hot. The colder school raises the floor to half in winter and fragile seasons, because empty space collects moisture that can freeze and ice the fuel lines, and because if you end up stranded the gas in the tank is your heater, with the tailpipe kept clear of snow first, always. Diesel drivers get a hard quarter, because running low pulls gunk into the fuel filter much faster. And when the needle sits low because the money does, that page does not scold: the reframe that helped one person is that moving your personal empty line up does not spend more, it moves the same money forward. A full tank is an exit you keep ready is the same habit for a different reason: fill in the evening rather than the morning you need it, because on a bad night a full tank is independence with nothing left to ask for, no detour and no ten minutes exposed at a pump. That page names its reasons without drama, a natural disaster, someone who has to reach an emergency room before dawn, escaping domestic abuse. And if a full tank is out of reach this week, it says that is a money problem rather than a character one.

If they flash you, check your own lights first. If they flash you, check your own lights first is six separate conversations giving one answer to every flash: check your own lights, ease off, and look further up the road. Twenty conversations there say a flash can warn of a hazard ahead, and one correction backed by three accounts says the lights cases are commoner, with eighteen saying it may mean your headlights are off and fifteen that your high beams are blinding someone; the one response covers all three and costs a glance at the dashboard, where the high-beam symbol is blue and the ordinary one green. Four things not to do, from that page: do not stamp on the brakes, because a misread flash can cause the dangerous manoeuvre it was meant to prevent; do not decide what it meant before checking your own car; do not keep flashing at a driver who ignores you, because it reads as hostility; and do not pull over for a flashing car at night or anywhere you feel unsafe.

Who this is not for. The lights page names its own gap plainly, and it is a large one: none of it covers the driving itself, not braking distance, standing water, tyres, or what to do when the back of the car goes light. It also names a reader with nothing to do, because some cars switch the full lights on by themselves in low light, tail lamps included, and the only way to know is the walk-behind check. The snow page’s quiet consensus is that winter tyres beat every trick on it. And the flash page adds one external line: the UK Highway Code says to flash only to let another road user know you are there, so every meaning in those conversations is a habit rather than a rule, and where you drive decides which habits you meet.