In your own car you know how the brakes feel, roughly how worn the tyres are, and where every switch is without looking. In a rental you know none of that — and in heavy rain, every one of those is something you need in the first second, not after a search. Three things decide how a wet drive goes: the tyres, the gap you leave in front, and how well you can see. Two of them you can settle in the car park before you pull out.
How dangerous are wet roads in Israel, in numbers?
In 2024, 858 people were injured in road accidents on wet or muddy roads in Israel, against 757 the year before — a rise of 13%. 26 of them were killed, and 111 were seriously injured, up 19%. The figures come from the road-safety organisation Or Yarok, drawn from Central Bureau of Statistics data.
Nor is this only a motorway problem. Jerusalem is second on the list of cities, with 36 people injured on wet or muddy roads inside the city in 2024, six of them seriously.
What does Israeli law require in winter?
Two rules that visiting drivers rarely know, and both of them bear directly on driving in rain.
Headlights in daylight, from 1 November to 31 March
Regulation 97(c) of the Traffic Regulations requires headlights and rear lights to be lit in daylight on any non-urban road between 1 November and 31 March. It applies to every motor vehicle except motorcycles. Taxis, buses and commercial vehicles over 14,999 kg must run lights on every road, urban ones included. Driving without them in that window is a traffic offence.
Note how closely those dates track the rainy season. This is not a paperwork rule — it exists for precisely the days when visibility drops.
A minimum tread depth of 2 mm, spare wheel included
Regulation 322 sets the minimum depth of the grooves on a pneumatic tyre in contact with the road at no less than 2 mm, and the requirement covers the spare wheel too.
If you drive in Europe or the UK, note that this is not the number you are used to. Your home limit is 1.6 mm. Israel's is higher, and that difference matters more than it sounds — see the next section.
Why is a legal tyre not automatically a safe one in the wet?
Because the legal floor sits below the point where wet braking starts to fall away.
The British research institute MIRA measured wet braking distances at roughly 80 km/h. On 3 mm of tread the car stopped after 31.7 metres; on 1.6 mm it took 39.5 metres. Nearly eight metres — about two car lengths — in the same car at the same speed.
Continental measured the same thing against a new 8 mm tyre: dropping to 3 mm added just 2.2 metres to the stopping distance, while dropping to 1.6 mm added 6.8 metres. In other words most of the loss arrives in the last third of the tyre's life, when it still looks perfectly serviceable.
The mechanism is simply water. The grooves are what clear it from under the tyre, and a new tyre can move up to 30 litres of water per second at 80 km/h. As the grooves get shallower it clears less, and past a certain point the tyre stops touching the road at all and rides on a film of water.
How do you check the tyres in thirty seconds?
Every tyre has small rubber bars moulded into the bottom of its grooves, repeating at several points around the circumference. They are wear indicators, marked TWI on the sidewall, and they are meant to be read by eye: when the tread surface is level with the bar, the tyre is worn out.
Here is the part worth knowing in Israel: those bars are moulded at 1.6 mm, because that is the legal limit in Europe and the UK. The Israeli limit is 2 mm. So a tyre that has worn down level with its own wear bars is already below the Israeli legal minimum, not sitting on it. If the tread looks flush with the bars inside the groove, that is not a tyre to take out in the rain.
While you are there: run the wipers once and see whether they clear the screen or smear it, check that every light actually comes on, and find the demister button before you need it. Thirty seconds at the branch beats working it out on a wet motorway.
Why is the first rain the dangerous one?
This is the part that catches out drivers from wetter countries. Through the long dry months, oil, rubber and dust build up on the road surface. The first rain does not wash them away — it lifts and mixes them into a thin, slick film that sits on top of the tarmac, and only sustained rain clears it off.
Where it rains most weeks, that film never gets a chance to accumulate. In Israel it does, and the gaps between rain events are long enough that a good share of them behave like a first rain. So the extra caution is not just for the first storm of the season — it applies again in midwinter, after a fortnight of dry weather.
What do you do if the car starts to aquaplane?
The warning is in the steering: it suddenly goes light and empty, and the car stops answering small corrections. The response is to lift off the accelerator, not brake, and not turn the wheel sharply — hold it straight and wait for the tyres to bite again. Once they do, carry on more slowly. The single exception is an imminent collision, where you brake.
You will find advice elsewhere that says to depress the clutch. That is written for a manual car, and it applies to none of ours — our whole fleet is automatic. In an automatic, lifting off is the action; there is no clutch to press.
What clears a misted windscreen fastest?
Misting is moisture you brought into the car condensing on cold glass. Three things together clear it quickest:
- Heater and air conditioning together. The air conditioning dries the air, and that is just as true in winter — its job here is dehumidifying, not cooling.
- Fresh air, not recirculation. On recirculate you are pushing the same damp air round and round. Outside air is drier, even when it is raining.
- Raise the temperature gradually. Warm air holds more moisture, so going straight to full heat can briefly add mist before it starts removing it.
Before you drive off
Three things, and none of them takes longer than the walk to the car: look into the tyre grooves, run the wipers once, and locate the demister and the light switch. Ask us to show you — it is an entirely reasonable thing to ask at the desk, and far easier there than at the roadside.
New drivers will find the conditions that apply to them on our car rental for new drivers page. The full fleet is on our vehicles page, you can check availability and pricing for your dates, and branch details and opening hours are on our branches page.