Every driving course I’ve ever attended—as disparate as Bob Bondurant’s Corvette Z06 School to Bridgestone’s Winter Driving courses—emphasizes getting our eyes ‘up’ and looking way ahead while driving. This critical skill is hardly ever taught in traditional ‘driver’s ed’ courses, and the result is many of the accidents we see on the roads on almost a daily basis.

I’d say that, based on my own experience (including being head instructor at a driving school two decades ago), if there was one thing you could teach drivers that would dramatically lower accident rates, it wouldn’t be threshold braking, or on-the-limit skid correcting, or any other ‘car control’ skill. It would be just looking ahead. Why?

Because a) you see the dumb things other drivers are doing ahead of you in heavy traffic in time to stop or swerve out of the way; b) you get to read the road conditions (ice, snow, etc) early enough to get your own car’s speed down to safely negotiate them; and c) even if you have all the honed skills of a professional racer, they wont do you any good if there’s not time to implement them.

Besides, even if you don’t have those skills, if you read the road far enough ahead, you’ll most likely not need them—or at least not very often. Taking the time to build up such superior vision is easy, though takes a bit of practice. Since most of us aren’t ever taught this, we tend to look just beyond the hood of our own vehicle. They teach the same thing in many sports, such as skiing: look a turn or two ahead, not just in front of your skis.

Instead, raise your eyes to look 5-6 car lengths ahead; if there’s traffic, try to look through the windows or around those in front. It’s pretty satisfying when you see someone three cars ahead jam on their brakes and you respond before those just in front of you—just make sure you then take a quick glance in the rear-view mirror so the person behind (who probably doesn’t have your newfound skill yet) doesn’t rear-end you!

Bondurant teaches ‘scanning’ the road; looking at where you’ll be in ten seconds, then five, then back in front, then back to ten again briefly. This will equate—depending on your speed—to somewhere between an 1/8 to a 1/4 mile down the road. Some added benefits—besides not rearranging your car’s bodywork—would be the chance to exit the highway before getting caught in a traffic jam, and (important to those who like to drive fast) fewer speeding tickets. You’ll see Smokey before he sees you.

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