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The horse's main mechanism for survival is flight; it is a prey animal that runs from any perceived danger. This flight instinct is often triggered by the horse's keen senses of hearing and eyesight. Even though horses have been domesticated for nearly 6000 years, this doesn't override millions of years of instinctive behaviour.
The Horse's Senses
A horse has amazing senses that in many ways outstrip any human's, but they are not the same as ours. When both sight and hearing senses are affected the horse is much more likely to react e.g. a flapping tarp on a trailer is both noisy and fast moving. Like most animal's the horse also has a very good sense of smell, this can also trigger reactions to things that we as humans cannot see or sense.
Eyesight
Horses do actually need to move their heads up and down in order to use their eyesight effectively, when being ridden they are often stopped from doing this and therefore take more cues from their rider (and have to trust them).
Designed for scanning the horizon and detecting predators
A horse's eyesight is designed to scan wide areas for fast moving objects, a horse can see almost 360 degrees!
However, horse eyesight is not very focused. There is only a small area of binocular vision in front of the horse, which starts from about 2m in front of the horse.
One of the places that horses have trouble seeing (with their head up) is their own feet and lower legs
Light conditions matter
A horse has difficulty seeing in bright sunlight (but has very good eyesight in low light and at night).
A horse has difficulty with high-contrast between light and shadow. It cannot tell shadows from a 'real' object. To a horse black and white stripes on a road look the same as a cattle grid or even a bridge with gaps between the steps. This is why a horse may be frightened of an object it has seen many times; changes in light make the object completely different!!
A horse's eyes react slowly to changes in light (moving from shadow to bright light or vice-versa). A human eye adjusts in a few seconds, a horse's eye takes minutes.
Designed to move first and ask questions later
A horse is almost hardwired to react (move its feet) to fast moving objects in it's vision area. It must be trained to not instantly react, but any training is always at odds with the horse's instinct.
Like most animals, a horse is a natural athlete with reaction times faster than a human's (this is where the first point comes in, humans think then react, animals react then think. They don't need the 2 second rule!)
To escape a predator it doesn't matter which way you run or leap, as long as you do it quickly. This is bad news if the oncoming predator is a car or bike, a horse is almost as likely to leap into the traffic as away from it. It is not a human - it doesn't have our intelligence or traffic sense to know that the thing it saw coming at it will stay on the road.
Hearing
A horse has extremely good hearing, and can hear many noises that we cannot.
They hear both in higher and lower pitch ranges than humans, and can swivel each ear independently over 180 degrees to focus on noises in any direction.
Windy conditions often make horses nervous, because they lose the ability to hear well above the wind noise (and everything is moving fast).
Smell
Horses like dogs, have an excellent sense of smell. They can follow a trail or communicate with other horses via the scents in the air, and on objects. When their eyesight is compromised they easily turn to hearing and smell to tell them about their surroundings. While this isn't specifically related to vehicles, things like roadkill and other smells that a horse comes across will affect the horse travelling along a road, to the point where they won't be thinking about the traffic alongside them.
