Experience VS Fate

Yeah, I gotta agree with you there Tarheel. I would think that an experienced driver would approach the whole situation entirely different as well, knowing what to expect and what to look out for. Sure, there are always the "oh sh**" situations that anyone can get into in the blink of an eye, but overall experience is gonna trump fate any day.

 

The value of experience is not just that you can recognize and avoid problems/hazards, it is that you can react quickly and decisively to situations. Sometimes fate will rear it's ugly head and take a swipe at you. Experience may tell you to pick a soft spot in the ditch and drive into it, while inexperience in the same situation would have you fighting for ground you just ain't gonna make up. The safer action is to control your accident and mitigate the damage. Knowing when you are good and screwed is valuable information to have, it comes with experience and being screwed doesn't mean that there is nothing you can do to make things better.

 

Like has been said. Experience can keep a situation from becoming a situation and a situation from becoming an accident. And it is also nice to have the ability to read minds. Something that only time behind a wheel can teach. Some of you know what I mean.

Mike

 

I remember about 7 years ago, me and another driver were coming into Georgia South bound on I-75. We stopped at a truck stop at the 318 MM to get something to eat. It was cold and wet and we had witnessed car after car and a few trucks in the ditches.
We ate and were about to head on south when I heard another wreck happen just out on the big road.
I decided even thoough I could be home in and hour and a half or so, that I would bed down there.
My buddy thought I was silly till I reminded him that we had seen at least 20 vehicles in the ditches in about 39 miles.
Found out the next morning that they had patches of black ice all over north Georgia.
I knew something wasn't just right but I couldn't see it.

 

Insurance stats for the trucking industry show, the majority of accidents occur at the 4 & 5 year mark of a drivers career.

I won't bother with the details and reasonings.

 

I am new to the game in regards to truckdriving, but I would have to say that just by doing your pretrip, listening to others and going by instinct would help. Yes expierience is a major plus but the more expierienced drivers also have more common sense at the profession. Fate plays a role in which ever way you think of it. Was it fate that got you another safe mile or did one not get the feeling that fate was telling you. Like I said I'm new to this but one thing I learned was just to listen to everybody and filter it for yourself. I look at this site quite often and filter out the advice or garbel on here. Thats fate isnt it?

 

Experience definitely does have its advantages, and will help a driver know how to respond properly. Nothing outweighs experience in most situations.

There are some incidents (not many but they do happen) that experience alone did not prevent. Call it fate, guardian angels working overtime or whatever.

 

I agree that an exp. driver will react to a situations in a different manner than a rookie. But exp. won't always save your butt. I think everyone will agree that when you lose respect for the road you better think about parking it for good. They call them accidents for a reason.

 

Experience, all the way, but I think Waterloo's point needs to be taken a little further...

When he speaks of 'reading minds' I would say that is the benefit of experience. We tend to react w/o thinking at the first sign of trouble, giving us a few very valuable moments to analyze what is about to happen. Those same moments tend to be wasted by the less experienced in deciding what to do, when a more experienced driver has already instinctively reacted and is planning action #2 (if needed.) I will go so far as to say that many of us can see another vehicle headed for trouble before the driver is even aware that he/she is about to have issues!

It's not 'mind reading' it's just instincts leaving us with a lot more time for analysis.

It's just like the newbie 'little slide, big crash' syndrome. An experienced driver will have already caught and corrected before the newbie will have figured out what was happening, often ending up in a unrecoverable situation before they understand what the truck is doing. With predictable (and expensive) results.

Can Fate still throw you the high, hard one? Of course, but it's much easier to dodge w/o the panic blindfold on!