ABS is part of the safety system in a vehicle. If you alter or change anything with that then your vehicle will not be up to WOF standard. Kiss goodbye to any insurance, and likely to be offside with the Police as well, especially god forbid in a serious crash.
These people living in the dark ages that think they can outbreak a modern ABS system in an emergency are seriously deluded. Unless you have serious skills and training in a real emergency everything will turn to guano, you will do little more than stomp on the pedal as hard and as fast as you can. 'Pumping' or 'feathering' brake techniques work well on the racetrack where you see the corner coming, they mean nothing in a true emergency for 99% of drivers.
Lazy is such an ugly word, I prefer to call it selective participation
joker97: or a slope with wet grass could also be one's demise with traction control
Traction Control is used as a form of limited slip diff by some AWD soft roaders to stop all the torque going to the wheelwith no grip. With a normal diff you are stuffed as soon as 1 wheel just spins.
correct. if the awd is smart enough. this one wasn't . (People think awd all the same. They're not. Every system is different and just because it says at some stage all 4 wheels could get power does not mean that when you need specific amount of torque in specific wheels the system will provide it. Far from it. (Subaru ftw imho)
I think this porcshe had traction control on and he revved it massively and the for some reason the computer stopped torque to his wheels and fried his clutch. I think.
spent quite a bit of time sitting next to people in porsches with various forms of tractions control and abs. ABS does not make a car stop faster, sometimes it's definitely worse, grass/gravel. It masks braking problems and imbalances within the system. But on a wet smooth tarmac road with a driver full of adrenalin I would have to say it's preferable but the real answer is education, education that virtually no one gets unless they attend an advanced driving course. meanwhile we give licences to kids who pass a scratchy test about the speed limit and how far away you can park from a pedestrian crossing /
I remember once with an old toyota work car which had really bad ABS I went into a gravel rest stop at about 80k and it just decided to not let any braking happen at all. ended up almost all the way thru before stopping. Usual car would stop and be able to get a nice sideways flick happening. The crappy corolla just kept on rolling.
New ABS is good tho. Dont tar all ABS with the horrific first ones that came out.
I have raced my car (fitted with ABS) at various racetracks around NZ, in several different disciplines ranging from single-lap timed sprints to 1hr+ endurance races. At Pukekohe (pre-chicane) this involved approaching the hairpin at the end of the back straight at 240+kph and commencing braking 110 meters from the turn. (These numbers will vary from vehicle-to-vehicle, depending on mass & power)
My point is that ABS was never an impediment to stopping quickly. (In fact, there used to be a change in surface right in the braking zone for that corner and as a driver, you would modulate the pedal to accommodate the bump - if your ABS triggered then you knew that you'd got it wrong, and your laptime would suffer slightly.)
On the road, it is a completely different use-case. You almost never get to anticipate the need to stop as quickly as possible, and as a result panic braking is very common. (it still happens to me, even after many years of motorsport) This is when ABS becomes life saving...
When I last went on a bike with ABS onto gravel I had to turn off ABS (simple as stopping the bike, pressing the button and then setting off), otherwise you just do not stop.
I just don't like the idea of something else doing my thinking for me, old fashioned attitude I guess, but I like to be driving the car, no-one to blame except myself if I stuff it up. (it's serious business to drive and it shouldn't be like a computer game).
I'm not a lunatic driver (even though I've owned an assortment of high performance toys) and I've made a habit of practising things like emergency braking (hands up who last practised ? on gravel ?) and of driving on different surfaces.
Mark: When I last went on a bike with ABS onto gravel I had to turn off ABS (simple as stopping the bike, pressing the button and then setting off), otherwise you just do not stop.
I just don't like the idea of something else doing my thinking for me, old fashioned attitude I guess, but I like to be driving the car, no-one to blame except myself if I stuff it up. (it's serious business to drive and it shouldn't be like a computer game).
I'm not a lunatic driver (even though I've owned an assortment of high performance toys) and I've made a habit of practising things like emergency braking (hands up who last practised ? on gravel ?) and of driving on different surfaces.
ABS on gravel is hopeless. It depends a lot on the amount of lockup allowed before the reduction in brake pressure and how much weight is on those wheels. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with a lockup on a wheel that is supporting no weight but an every day car will cause a big reduction in braking force when lifting a rear wheel
I have raced my car (fitted with ABS) at various racetracks around NZ, in several different disciplines ranging from single-lap timed sprints to 1hr+ endurance races. At Pukekohe (pre-chicane) this involved approaching the hairpin at the end of the back straight at 240+kph and commencing braking 110 meters from the turn. (These numbers will vary from vehicle-to-vehicle, depending on mass & power)
My point is that ABS was never an impediment to stopping quickly. (In fact, there used to be a change in surface right in the braking zone for that corner and as a driver, you would modulate the pedal to accommodate the bump - if your ABS triggered then you knew that you'd got it wrong, and your laptime would suffer slightly.)
On the road, it is a completely different use-case. You almost never get to anticipate the need to stop as quickly as possible, and as a result panic braking is very common. (it still happens to me, even after many years of motorsport) This is when ABS becomes life saving...
One of the issues is that the old fashioned pulse braking enabled the driver to return the weight over the front of the car back to the middle when releasing the brake. Even if the wheels locked during each pulse the vast majority of the weight movement was on the parallel plane . With abs the pulses are much faster and smoother but this actually creates a longer diagonal force (assuming our panicing driver is turning) which has the tyre both turning and stopping the car at the same time. Tyres really want to do one thing at a time and this typically results in a reaction force resulting in sudeen oversteer. the real key is education but it isnt in the road code.
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