Aquaplaning: When the Tyres Stop Touching the Road

The handbook is precise about this one. Aquaplaning happens when you drive too fast for a wet road: the tyre tread cannot channel away enough water, so the tyre loses contact with the tarmac and the vehicle floats on a wedge of water.

While it's happening you have no steering and no braking — not reduced, absent. The controls are connected to wheels that aren't touching anything.

What raises the risk, all of it already familiar:

• Speed. The dominant factor. On flooded tarmac the risk climbs steeply above roughly 80 km/h — indicative, not a threshold: it moves with everything below.
• Water depth. Standing water and wheel ruts are far worse than a damp surface.
• Tread depth. Tread is the water-evacuation system from Tyres — at 3 mm it's already degraded, at the 1.6 mm legal floor it's poor. The aquaplaning speed drops with the tread.
• Under-inflation, which distorts the contact patch and hurts water clearance.

The recovery — and it contradicts every instinct. The handbook's instruction is to ease off the accelerator and the brakes until speed drops enough for the tyres to touch the road again. So:

• Do not brake. The wheels aren't in contact; braking achieves nothing and locks them for the moment contact returns.
• Do not steer sharply. Steering input while floating does nothing — and then does something violent and unwanted the instant grip comes back.
• Hold the wheel straight, come off the pedals, and wait. It typically lasts seconds.

Prevention is the real answer, and it's two things you already own: appropriate speed for the water, and tyres with genuine tread.