Tips to prepare your vehicle and insurance for winter roads

While Tennessee may not be as far north as the states that get the worst winter weather, that doesn’t mean that the seasonal change won’t affect your safety on the road. More crashes tend to occur in the winter months, which means you’ll need to take extra steps to keep yourself safe on the roads when the temperature outside starts dropping.

Although you won’t have any control over how other people drive during the colder months, you can take a proactive approach to your own safety by performing seasonal maintenance on your vehicle and reviewing your insurance policies for ideal levels of liability protection.

Late fall or early winter is when you want to inspect your vehicle

When the roads are wet and slippery, you need to know that all major systems in your vehicle will function optimally. You don’t want to just assume your vehicle is fine because there haven’t been any flashing lights on your dashboard.

Taking your vehicle in for an annual fall or winter inspection can help ensure that everything from your brakes to your tires will be in proper working order when winter weather hits. You can also get a heads up about potential issues from your car in the near future. From replacing your wiper blades to upgrading to a new set of tires with better treads, there are maintenance options that can help you stay safer on the winter roads.

Crash risks are high in the winter, so protect yourself

A combination of holiday-related alcohol consumption, bad weather conditions and seasonal changes in mood due to less sunlight can all contribute to increased risk of traffic collisions in the colder months. Tennessee residents should know that their insurance policy is one of the most important protections they have in the event that they get into a car crash.

Your insurance policy will protect you against liability if you cause a crash that results in property damage or injury to someone else. The policy of the other driver will protect you if you get hurt or your car gets damaged in the crash they cause. However, quite a few people on the Tennessee roads, roughly 20% or one out of every five drivers, do not have active insurance policies on their vehicle at any given moment.

That means that you could be at risk of getting into a crash caused by a driver who doesn’t have liability protection. Reviewing your own insurance policy can help you protect against this. If you don’t currently have special policy protections for crashes caused by drivers without insurance or with inadequate Insurance, adding an uninsured or underinsured driver rider can increase your coverage and protection on the road without drastically increasing how much you pay.