Let’s say you are a
concerned parent. Your only daughter has just turned old enough to have
her first car. You have shopped around for the right car to meet your
needs and your budget, and you’ve bought something. But, now you need to make sure it’s safe. Not only does the law
require you to meet certain requirements of auto safety, but would you
feel terrible if something bad happened to your only daughter because
you chose poorly? What about all of her friends
who ride with her, and all the other people on the road?
Being fairly independent, you take what measures you can without consulting anyone else. You buy a book about what cars should look like, then you use it to look over
the car you bought without going under the hood. The car has doors and tires. You know the car has
an older engine that might or might not have problems. You aren’t sure,
because you aren’t running the car or looking under the hood, you’re
only eyeballing it. You know the car has some flaws, and that one of the
headlights is shattered. But, while it’s clear
the vehicle has been in at least one accident, there are plenty of cars running just fine
on older engines, even some that have been in accidents before. It’s
not really clear what the impact of any of this would be to your daughter. Besides, you
have a very limited budget, and you can hardly afford to bang out every
ding, paint over every scratch, and replace the
engine with a newer one.
This is your basic vulnerability scan.
Now that you have a general picture, you know you’re
going to have to spend some more money. The question is about where you
should focus your dollars.
Now, you reach out for help. You decide to take the
car to a mechanic, someone who knows a little more about cars than you
do. You want the opinion of someone who deals in practical matters of
automobiles, not just theoretical concepts
of how cars drive. This person sees broken cars every day and helps
people fix them. The mechanic offers you two services: a thorough
once-over of the car, and a test drive. The thorough once over, he
explains, will examine each part of the car individually
and identify each issue where that part is not performing its
individual function, but he won’t make any comments about how safe the
vehicle is for your daughter over-all. The test drive, he explains,
won’t find every flaw with the car, but he’ll set up the
car on a test track that is designed to drive the car to its limits and
he’ll run it through several situations that are all considered unsafe,
and tell you what happens so that you can better understand what your
daughter’s experience might be if she drives
this car.
On the surface, you think the more thorough approach is better. But, he tells you that it
might be wise to have both services done, because even if he goes
through a thorough check and fixes what he finds, there’s no good way to
predict whether he’s gotten it all right unless
he spins up the motor and gives the car a once-through. You see, each
part works independently, but the overall function of the vehicle relies
on those parts working successfully together. And it’s difficult to
understand whether things are working together
as expected without spinning them all up at the same time and using
them in ways that realistically show danger.
What do you do? Explore further in the next post.
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