Tips for Head Checks - Checking your Blind Spot

A car, motorcycle or bicycle in an adjacent lane can easily be positioned beyond the area visible in the mirrors.

Checking your blind spots is an essential observation skill as many crashes occur because drivers do not turn their head and look over their shoulder before steering.

Frequently not performing observation checks will result in a fail.

Due to nerves, wrong advice during the learning process or just misinformation, many students fail to do these head checks during the test and this will result in a fail - you can only miss two!

So, when is a Head Check required?

You must turn your head and check your blind spots before:

• Changing lanes

• Leaving or returning to the kerb

• Merging or diverging

• Reversing - when reversing you must turn your head and look over your shoulder to check through the rear window for vehicles and pedestrians that may not be visible in your mirror.

• Turning left – looking for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists who could be beside you in your blind spot

• Turning right – looking for vehicles that may be overtaking you

• Joining the traffic stream

• Leaving the inside lane (the left-hand lane or the lane nearest to the shoulder of the road) of a multi lane roundabout. I recommend that you do a Head Check when leaving any lane of a multi lane roundabout.

Observation errors are recorded on the Driving Test score sheet as a circle around ‘D’ (decision) and an ‘H’ (Head Check) in the notes column.