2001 Pontiac Aztek Owner's Manual - Page 253

To help you learn more about driving in different conditions, this section contains information about city, freeway, and off-road driving, as well as other hints for driving in various weather conditions. Defensive Driving The best advice anyone can give about driving is: Drive defensively. Please start with a very important safety device in your vehicle: Buckle up. See "Safety Belts" in the Index. Defensive driving really means "be ready for anything." On city streets, rural roads or freeways, it means "always expect the unexpected." Assume that pedestrians or other drivers are going to be careless and make mistakes. Anticipate what they might do. Be ready for their mistakes. Rear-end collisions are about the most preventable of accidents. Yet they are common. Allow enough following distance. It's the best defensive driving maneuver, in both city and rural driving. You never know when the vehicle in front of you is going to brake or turn suddenly. Defensive driving requires that a driver concentrate on the driving task. Anything that distracts from the driving task -- such as concentrating on a cellular telephone call, reading, or reaching for something on the floor -- makes proper defensive driving more difficult and can even cause a collision, with resulting injury. Ask a passenger to help do things like this, or pull off the road in a safe place to do them yourself. These simple defensive driving techniques could save your life. Vehicle Design According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, utility vehicles have a significantly higher rollover rate than other types of vehicles. Utility vehicles do have a higher ground clearance and a narrower track or shorter wheelbase than passenger cars to make them more capable for off-road driving. Specific design characteristics like these give the driver a better view of the road, but also give utility vehicles a higher center of gravity than other types of vehicles. This means that you shouldn't expect a utility vehicle to handle the same way a vehicle with a lower center of gravity, like a car, would in similar situations. But driver behavior factors are far more often the cause of a utility vehicle rollover than are environmental or vehicle factors. Safe driver behavior and understanding the environment in which you'll be driving can help avoid a rollover crash in any type of vehicle, including utility vehicles. 4-3