Is Experience Important?

Many people told me “Kato-san, you are an expert since you experiences a lot in many countries around the world, blah, blah”. Every time I hear that, I used to respond “Experience is nothing. There are hundreds of people in the company I previously worked who cumulated the same level of experiences in abroad. But, are they similar to me as of today?” “If I were different from others, there should be something that developed the differences, but other than the volume or quality of the experiences.”

As an example, let’s think about a car accident happened on a rainy day. If the cause is not a falling asleep at wheel, nor inattentive driving (taking eyes off the road), what was wrong?

There are many causes that are complicatedly related with the results, and an accident happens. Please be patient a while since some technical jargons are used below (moved here)

(1) Excessive speeding, braking performance of the car (there are big differences between models and manufacturers), how often you put the car in good maintenance service such as periodical change of brake pad, steering characteristics including the suspension, quality of tire (especially in wet condition) and its wear level at the time of accident, loading weight such as number of passengers and cargo in the trunk room (more weight makes brake stopping distance longer – a simple rule of physics), etc. are all physical conditions that you can know before meeting any accidents.

(2) To judge the road surface such as feeling the volume of water on the road and pavement quality, depth of curve and slope (uphill, downhill, right-downside, etc.), and view deterioration by rain (by window wipers), etc. are your case-by-case environment assessment ability.

(3) Your DVA (dynamic visual acuity) and reflexes (including the judgment whether you had to steer right or left), delicate steering skill, relative speed recognition, measuring skill of 1 inch gap, etc. are your driving skills and an accident is the result of misjudgment of margin that your skills do not work (this judgment is also a part of your skills).

And very unfortunately, ordinary driving schools never teach you any of the above, and never let you actually experience such driving techniques.

In fact, cumulative experiences may slightly help the above (2) only, but not others. Also, as I mentioned at the top, even he/she would have the experiences, his/her ability to judge the conditions may be far lower than that of other people who experienced the same as he/she did.

Putting aside the periodical maintenance as mandatory we should do, the understanding of physical conditions depends on how much and how keenly we have learned physics and studied catalogues of car and tires before purchasing. In case of me, when the original tire starts to show so-so wear levels, I exchange them with high wet grip tires by checking various tire maker’s brochure, because the slip control on wet road condition is rather difficult than on dry road.