Car Accessories Professional Drivers Love

When driving is your trade, you learn to exist behind the wheel of your car for long hours with the maximum amount of comfort. For this reason, professional drivers, from truckers to taxi drivers, have long been aware of accessories and upgrades that make driving more comfortable. If you’re just starting your career as a driver, these are great items to keep in mind, but if you’re someone who drives a daily commute or the occasional road trip, they can also make your life more comfortable on the road. Here are 9 things professional drivers love.

Plug-in 12v Cooler

If you’re driving across the country on the regular, you know that stopping for food at drive-thrus and gas stations is pretty much always your safest bet for something fast and affordable. But here’s the problem: the selection at these places, which tend to be the same half-dozen or so chains anyway, gets monotonous over time. What do you do when you’re craving something different? That’s where a plugin cooler comes in handy. The 12 Volt models that exist today can plug into your car’s outlet and reach the desired temperature in as little as 15 minutes. This gives you a great way to store something you made yourself or that you couldn’t reliably get down the road. Here’s another tip from the pros: if the meal you’re storing in the cooler needs to be reheated, lots of gas stations and truck stops have microwaves for customers inside. It’s also a great way to keep water and soft drinks cold so that you can bring beverages from home and spend less on the road.

Orthopedic Seat Cushion

If you work a desk job, odds are you or the company you work for shelled out for a comfortable, ergonomic office chair. When the driver’s seat is your office, comfort and posture are just as important. An orthopedic seat cushion can be a great first step to making the experience of driving more comfortable. Whether you’re in the car for hours on end or just making your daily commute, being more comfortable and sitting with better posture is better for your muscles and joints. Being more comfortable is never a bad thing!

Driving Gloves

Speaking of comfort, a trick of the trade many truck drivers learned long ago is that a good pair of driving gloves can make life on the road easier. The gloves you use need not be driving specific—a pair of leather work gloves would be fine, but gloves can help absorb the bumps and dips on the highway, which over time can cause fatigue to your hands. In addition, if sweaty palms cause you discomfort behind the wheel, a pair of gloves can help with that too. Maybe you find them a little odd or maybe they make you feel like James Bond, but either way, a pair of gloves can go a long way toward making life on the road more comfortable.

Polarized Sunglasses

Spending all day on the road under a beaming sun is hard on the eyes, and your ability to see your surroundings clearly is as important as any other skill for a driver. Here’s where a good pair of polarized sunglasses comes in handy. Not only do polarized sunglasses reduce the impact of direct sunlight more than other kinds of sunglasses, they also increase the amount of contrast you perceive, which makes your vision clearer. Sunglasses like these are the rare accessory that do double duty as an item that make you more comfortable and safer at the same time.

Power Inverter

There are a ton of ways to make use of a power inverter in the car. If you need to charge electronics that won’t plug into your car outlets, the power inverter will take care of it. If you have a passenger on a long road trip trying to get some work done on their laptop, it allows them to make sure they’re charged the whole way to your destination. For truckers, these gadgets are a great way to keep the comforts of home when out on the road, but the practical applications for drivers in just about any situation make this one worth adding to your setup.

Dash Cam

If there’s one electronic item that seems ever-present among professional drivers of every sort, it’s the dash cam. For taxi and rideshare drivers, the camera is often angled inward to record what’s going on inside the car, but drivers of every kind also often use dash cams pointed in front of them to record the world outside the car. One simple reason for this is peace of mind. If you happen to be in an accident or any other situation where it helps to have video evidence of what was going on, your dash cam keeps you covered. Aside from practical uses, dashcam footage is responsible for some of the wildest, funniest, and strangest videos on the web. If you capture something astounding enough it might be your ticket to a career as a viral video producer.

Jump Starter

Professional drivers have known since these first became a popular product that it’s always a good idea to carry a jump starter with you in the car. If your battery dies or something goes wrong with your alternator, especially while on the job, you don’t have time to wait for a tow truck or a friend with jumper cables to bail you out. A portable jump starter lets you jump your own battery and gets you back on the road that much quicker.

Good Phone Setup

In modern vehicles your phone is your jukebox, your navigator, and your lifeline if something goes wrong. Needless to say, it’s imperative to have a good setup for your phone if you’re getting paid to be on the road, but everyone can learn from the pros. Many cars allow us to plug right into a display on the center console, increasing screen size and allowing safer access to the phone’s functionality on the road, but if you don’t have a feature like this in your car, a phone holder that keeps the screen where you can see it easily is a good investment. Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but you’re going to want to keep it charged, too.

Blind Spot Mirrors

There is simply no substitute for visibility when driving is your job. It prevents accidents and keeps everyone safer. Modern vehicles often have blind-spot detectors and rear-view cameras which can help us operate the vehicle safely in reverse, but for those without these features, blind spot mirrors can help you see what’s behind you without having to turn your head away from the road in front of you. Even if you do have more modern visibility aids, being able to easily glance at your blind spots never hurts. These are a great upgrade for any driver.