Off-road driving is all about unpredictability: you’re in the wild, you don’t know what might happen next, and you don’t always know exactly where you’re going. You see the world in a way you’ve never seen it before, and you experience adventure. But it’s also about being a responsible, safe driver. Of course, if you don’t know the measurements of your car, you’ll end up with a fender bender even in a small town. But when you drive off-road, you need to know your car’s height, width and other measurements to the millimeter.
Knowing the height of your car is important in environments that have a lot of crags or woodland vegetation. Don’t worry about brushing the top of your car against a few leaves, but you wouldn’t want to hit a branch. In normal circumstances, it’s easy to avoid branches, partially because there aren’t too many of them and partially because the road is either flat or uneven but with smooth, gradual changes. Off-road terrain, on the other hand, changed heights all the time. The ground underneath a tree might be higher than the ground immediately before it. You need a solid understanding of your car’s height in order to eyeball that distance and make sure you can maneuver through each area.
It’s also important to understand the width of your car. Everyone knows that squeezing into tight spaces requires a comprehensive spatial picture of your car (we’ve all parked between other cars before), but tight off-road spaces are more challenging. If you can’t estimate the width of a space, get out of your car and measure it before driving through. More importantly, you need to know how far apart your wheels are. If you drive on an elevated path and don’t know the width of your car, one of your wheels could slip and your car could slide – or fall – down a hill or cliff.
It’s also useful to know the distance between the bottom of your car and the ground so that you can figure out which bumps you can drive over and which will cause you to get stuck. As you can see, off-roading is fun, but you need to have certain knowledge and skills to be able to do it well, and knowing the measurements of your car is a great place to start.