If you’ve ever been in a car during a storm, you know how scary the experience can be. You don’t even have to be the driver to dread every moment of it. That’s why I always advise people driving through bad weather to stop in a parking lot and wait it out. Slowing down isn’t enough if the rain makes seeing the road in front of you difficult.
It turns out there’s a trick you should consider using in those situations where you have to drive through bad weather: Using your phone in place of your eyes. As you’re about to see, turning the phone’s camera and pointing it at the road will help you see what’s in front of you, even if your eyes can’t make anything out through the windshield.
A video from China went viral on the InterestingAsF**k subreddit as it showed the smartphone trick in action.
As you’ll see at the end of the post, the passenger turned on the smartphone’s camera, allowing the driver to see the road in front of them during heavy rain. The visibility is significantly improved compared to looking at the road ahead directly through the car’s windshield.
While the life hack is amazing, it’s still rather irresponsible. The driver is still speeding through that storm, which isn’t great. Moreover, he’s paying attention to a smartphone display, which is a risky behavior while driving.
Still, the life hack works because of how the smartphone camera is engineered. Jalopnik explains that smartphone cameras feature polarizing filters that allow the light to only come in from certain directions. This makes it easier to see the road ahead in the situation described above via a smartphone than using your own eyes. The following clip shows polarized lenses in action, explaining how they work:
Conversely, polarized glasses might also help during storms if you have any within reach.
Before thinking these solutions are perfect for driving through heavy rainfall, you’d better reconsider. You shouldn’t use your phone while driving to see the road if you’re by yourself. Also, speeding during bad weather of any kind is a bad idea. Your best bet is finding a parking lot and waiting for the storm to end if that’s an option.
Finally, if you want to replicate the experiment to see if your smartphone can see through heavy rain, you better do it somewhere safe preferably without driving.
The bad weather driving clip that went viral follows below:
