The right reaction to safe driving

Reaction times are vital for safety. Photo / Jacqui Madelin

Jonny Eastwick has invented a reaction time device he says will make drivers safer on the roads.

The former farmer has built a driver-training facility at Boomrock, high in the Wellington hills overlooking Cook Strait. He's gathered a team of trainers that include Stuart Owers, a multi-winner at the 24-hours of Nurburgring, and he hopes to teach the nation's drivers safer use of their cars.

Eastwick and his team measure your reaction time in an emergency.

They then teach you not how to drive faster, but how to drive safer. They ensure drivers know what ABS and stability control systems are, and how they work. And they concentrate on the one common denominator in all crashes - the driver.

Brent Harkins, GM Procurement for GSB Supplycorp, which sources vehicles for fleets, says: "We had a client who returned a car because it cut out on corners. It turns out he was driving it at the limit, and the ESP was cutting in." That driver didn't know the car had ESP or what it did, and had no appreciation that he was flirting with the laws of physics. No doubt he got a fright from the reaction time test, which uses a device linked to the brakes of Boomrock's Mercedes C-class cars.

Owers talks us round the course, then intermittently fires the red light that triggers us to emergency brake.

The device measures the time from red light to brake light. Take two seconds to react at 100km/h, and you've travelled 54m before you hit the brake. That almost doubles your stopping distance, to 114m.

Take 0.75 seconds and your reaction and stopping total is 55m - which could be a life-saving difference.