The dissertation thesis deals mainly with determining of the duration that driver needs to assess the situation behind his vehicle at manoeuvers of turning and overtaking, based on the measurements made in real road traffic. These are common and frequent driving manoeuvers, which the driver performs while driving the vehicle in regular road traffic. For their safe execution the driver needs to have sufficient amount of information about the situation around the vehicle and especially behind the vehicle. This information can driver usually gain from devices for indirect vision, most often rear view mirrors. The time thus defined, suitable e.g for the needs of forensic engineering applications for the analysis of road accidents, has not been studied in detail yet. For the purpose of its determination, therefore, an extensive analysis of the current state of problematics related to the indirect vision from the vehicle was carried out. There were formulated influences on the time duration and with this related characteristics of humans as a part of the driver-vehicle-environment system in the thesis. The characteristics of human perception were investigated and the problematics of reaction time was discussed. Existing research focused on the duration of rear view mirrors glances was analyzed and possible methods of its measurement in detail were presented by author. Based on this, an experiment was designed and realized, the time necessary for rear view mirror glances was defined by the author. The results enable to quantify the time that the driver needs for assessing the situation behind the vehicle in connection of turning, overtaking and other driving manoeuvers when the driver needs to change the driving direction. The conclusions showed that the time needed to evaluate the situation behind the vehicle by means of the rear-view mirrors does not normally exceed duration 1 second.