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Night driving is responsible for thousands of accidents a year, and many of the road deaths.Why is night driving dangerous?Because there are fewer cars on the road at night there are fewer accidents after dark than during the day. However, the proportion of fatalities caused by night driving is much higher. According to the AA, the main causes of these night accidents are tiredness, inattention, driving whilst under the influence and reduced visibility. Darkness also means depth perception is reduced, which can cause impaired judgment and delayed reflex actions.How do our eyes work at night?When you walk out of a brightly-lit place, such as your own living room, it can take up to 30 minutes before your eyes start working at even 80 per cent efficiency again. It can take double that for your night vision to be at its best. Approximately one in five adults has defective vision - from mild short-sightedness to night-blindness. Motorist who find night driving a severe strain on their eyes should consult a doctor or optician, and consider avoiding night driving all together.Busy eyes see betterWhen you are driving at night, try not to focus at a single distance because this increases eye fatigue. Instead glance around at different distances and focus on objects on the edge of your headlight beam. A poorly-lit object is easiest to see if you focus slightly to one side of it - peripheral vision is less affected by poor light than central vision.Reduce your speedIt goes without saying that you always should drive slower at night. A good rule of thumb is to never drive beyond your range of vision - that is, you should be able to stop under within the length of road illuminated by your headlights. Therefore, if you are driving with low or dipped beams you must reduce your speed commensurably. Following distances should also be increased, and the car ahead should be kept in the far limit of light from a dipped beam.Don’t blind other driversAlways dip your headlights before an approaching car comes within range. If the other driver fails to realize you are approaching, flick the beam back to high for an instant before dipping it again. Do not keep the high beam on - having two blinded drivers instead of one just doubles the risk. When approaching a car traveling in the opposite direction on a right-hand bend, remember to dip the beam early. Otherwise it will sweep across the curve and blind the other driver. Conversely, on a left-hand turn your headlights shine away from approaching traffic. However, it is good road manners to always dip your lights when another motorist approaches.Make sure your headlights point the right wayHeadlights should be adjusted periodically, especially when your car is loaded more heavily than usual - this adjustment can be done at a garage. Having passengers in the back seat or heavy items in the boot can cause a dipped beam to shine too far ahead. This has the double disadvantage of dazzling oncoming drivers and failing to properly light the road. Always remember to reconfigure the beams when driving with a normal load again. Likewise, always adjust your tyre pressure before loading your car before holiday traveling.

In engineers’ terms, fuel efficiency means the thermal capacity of converting the energy contained in the fuel to kinetic energy, or work, needed to move your car. For a vehicle, fuel efficiency means the output one gets for a unit amount of fuel input, such as “miles per gallon” or “litters per 100 kilometers”. For you, fuel efficiency simply means less fuel wasted and more money in your pocket. The automotive industry believed that by maintaining the air/fuel ratio of 14.7:1 by electronic means, like electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition systems, they had already achieved the best combustion process that assures the best fuel economy.Unfortunately this is not always true because is not sufficiently known, but there are a lot of very ordinary daily driving situations that makes than the engine operate steady at low speeds, creating less temperature in the combustion chamber. It makes that the stock spark plugs results operating too cold, which affects the combustion process, because the low temperature do not allows burning completely the air/fuel mixture in the combustion chamber.Unburned fuel is wasted fuel and you paid for it. Wasted fuel is wasted money.These very common driving or traffic conditions are:• Steady city driving, where prolonged idling or short distances and stop-and-go driving prevails.• Extended low speed driving, or short distance driving or even in the freeway driving where the automatic transmission maintains the engine under 3000 RPM.• Low speed cruising.• At high elevations, above 3000 ft.• Weather conditions, where the humidity rises.• Moreover, these conditions may combine in endless ways.And believe it or not, this situation is not the exception, in fact is almost the rule for more than the 75% of the cars worldwide. You can confirm it simply by seen the exits of the exhaust tips in any parking zone and in anywhere around you. Most of them are covered with dry black soot produced by the unburned fuel. And this is not due to an incorrect air/fuel mixture adjustment in the carburetor or the fuel injection system; even this occurs in a well maintained vehicle which just passed the smog test satisfactorily.This is because the stock spark plugs are being too cold for those operating conditions, consequently are no longer adequate and must be substituted by spark plugs with a different and hotter heat range.Why it occurs? Because the heat range of the original stock spark plug was defined by the manufacturers at their laboratories, based on different and theoretical speeds, and trips, that supposedly should be done by the potential target market who conceptually will buy an specific model and type of vehicle. But in the real life, not all the people have the same driving habits nor lives in the same geographical and under the same weather conditions, or drives in the same traffic conditions neither gives the same maintenance to their vehicles.Do you still have doubts? Think just a minute that the traffic between big cities like LA is very different from a smaller city and from a town. A teenager drives different from his mother and she drives different to her husband, whom drives different to his neighbors, whom tows a trailer. Additionally from

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