Mr. Zonar thinks that abs makes it harder to stop on ice.
Hey Zarquil. You said it yourself earlier in the post. The tank Murano has more mass than your old car. I think that’s got a LOT to do with it. Don’t you?
I wish my plasticar Neon had abs…
Never said ABS made it harder to stop on ice. Although I certainly believe that it does.
ABS is bad. Furthermore, anyone who paints ABS in pure black and white terms is an IDIOT and is WRONG.
I’ll put this into a follow up blog some day…
1: ABS usually needs more distance to stop.
ABS will not reduce stopping distances at all unless you’re a piteously bad driver. ABS works by releasing your wheels briefly to prevent you from locking them up. The only scenario it will reduce you stopping distance is when you have your tires locked and you’re skidding along the pavement.
Reality: ABS cannot do any better than conventional brakes for stopping distance so long as you do not lock your wheels and skid along. Furthermore, when ABS releases the braking pressure to prevent your wheels from locking you are losing braking ability - your braking distance can only increase.
2. ABS abstracts road feel
You should never pump the brakes on an ABS-equipped car. Pity, since most Canajuns taught to drive on ice are taught to explicitly pump the brakes to prevent lockup.
Unfortunately, when you press the pedal on an ABS-equipped vehicle, you can have any of a number of strange effects.
Far and away, the most common is a “grinding” sound and / or a pulsation of the brake pedal.
Most people think that something’s wrong when they first experience it. Many, many drivers do not like the pulsation and will actively release the brake pedal to prevent the sensation. (It’s brake pressure being released from the system that causes the pulsation.)
The grinding noise is perfectly normal, and the pulsation on the pedal is part of the brake system doing what it is designed to do. When the driver feels the pulsation, it’s precisely the time to continue strong, steady pressure to the brake pedal to allow ABS to work.
This masks feedback transmitted through your brake pedal.
The abstraction I refer to is that you can no longer feel feedback from the braking system as to whether your wheels are locked or not. ABS is supposed to take care of that for you, but it’s one fewer data points for a good driver to use. If you are an attentive driver and can feel when your wheels are locking, you’ve just lost a critical clue as to your present driving environment. Exceptional drivers can tell precisely which wheel has locked (locked front wheels have different characteristic feel than locked rear wheels - right and left is determined by which direction the car slides.)
If you can’t feel it, you can’t correct for it.
3. Durability and long-term reliability
This is not going to be an issue if you get a new vehicle every three or four years. I drive a 26 year old car. A lot can go wrong with a car after 5 years, let alone 26.
There were plenty of complaints with poorly functioning or outright non-functional ABS systems when they first arrived. My personal anecdotal experience was sliding straight through a four way stop in a GM Blazer or some other SUV that went into the shop three times just to get the ABS working properly.
Put a stone in the sensor, your ABS may have been damaged. Get some corrosion in there, you may have a non-functioning system.
The extra maintenance involved will make your mechanic very happy.
When is the last time you had your brakes examined? The average driver does not have them checked yearly. ABS is one more system that needs to be checked and maintained regularly. You do not want a system that you’re dependent upon to stop you to fail unexpectedly. If you become reliant on ABS to stop you and they aren’t working when you need them, I hope your energy absorption design team was very good.
Never forget that it is possible for a broken ABS system to become TOO sensitive. You may release the braking pressure from your wheels when your tires are not skidding and you have no need to engage your ABS system. This increases your stopping distance at all times and is a severe braking hazard.
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Nothing is all white or all black - unless you’re the New Zealand rugby team.
ABS gives two tremendous advantages:
1++ (double-plus good) You can apply your brakes and steer at the same time.
In conventional brake systems, it’s not realistic to brake and steer together. Your wheels have a finite amount of traction to work with. This traction must be divided between the energy expended on braking and the energy expended on changing direction.
Finding the balance is difficult. If you run out of available traction, your front wheels will lock up. Remember this happens in a turn, so suddenly you’re skidding forward with your front wheels askew. It should go without saying, this is an extremely dangerous scenario to be in. Should you suddenly find traction (hitting a bare patch or slowing down enough that your front wheels suddenly “bite”) you will careen off in the direction your wheels were pointed in. Or suddenly roll the car if you’re driving horribly out of control.
An ABS system means you never have to try to find that balance - if your front tire locks, the ABS system will release it and continue to make maximum traction available to you for steering. With conventional brakes, you have to stay well within the limits of your traction. ABS gives you the ability to drive closer to the maximum limits of your traction.
2+ (only plus good) ABS prevents rear wheels from locking.
This is a marvelous thing, particularly in a vehicle such as a bus or a pickup truck.
It’s safer for the front wheels of a car to lock than the rear wheels. Most of the braking happens at the front brakes. When the front wheels lock up, the vehicle tends to “snowplow” - the nose dives, but the car slides more or less straight without veering left or right.
When the rear wheels lock, the vehicle tends to wildly swing to the left or the right - it wants to “swap ends.”
Buses and trucks are designed to carry varying weights in the back of the vehicle. Brake settings need to be firmer when they carry a full load, and softer when they are empty.
ABS mitigates this. We’re in Albertee, so I’m going with the Oilfield truck example.
Joe Roughneck is hauling a load of oilfield equipment down a gravel road. He can’t actually adjust his brake settings, so he wants a firmer setting to help him stop in case he finds a moose wandering the North 40. He gets up to the site, drops off his drill bits, his pipe, his ATV and his lunchbox and drives back into town for the Dilettante’s Ball. Driving into town he notices a Hyundai Accent that was rear-ended because it’s brake lights weren’t working. He slams on his brakes, but because he’s carrying a lighter load in his truck, his rear-wheels start to lock. With ABS, his wheels are released just enough to bring him to a stop without causing it to veer over to the right and finish wiping out the idiot Hyundai driver.
See? It’s a win-win scenario.
I never said it was harder to stop on ice. I did say it’s not justified to put ABS on a standard passenger vehicle. Better driver education will do much more than a technowizical gadget.
- Mark
Zarquil
November 10th, 2006
Transport Canada talks about ABS. In particular they say you should have winter tires on, that it’s a large factor in decreasing stopping distance in the winter. Problem is, how many people in Calgary bother with winter tires? With the mostly-city-driving people and frequent chinooks drying everything out . . . I think most don’t and you end up with the usual mess the first day it snows again. Takes a day or so for the idjits to figure out not to tailgate etc… and then they forget as soon as it’s dry pavement again.
That’s why I often work from home those days.
Canadian Driver has an article where they talk to Transport Canada about ABS and guess what… Transport Canada is recommending people go out and practice in an empty parking lot under various conditions. I know how my car handles on dry but every winter I go out and fiddle around on the ice a bit as a refresher.
Most people probably don’t do this either.
Frequency of brake inspections? 2-3 times a year for me. I spend a bit extra on every servicing for the n-point inspection. Most would call that a waste of $ but it does give me, among other things, a % of brake life on both front and rear and whether it’s good/may need servicing in a while / needs service now.
I very much doubt most people do this either.
The problem is idiot people. The only thing that can solve that is a Eugenics program. You can help me get started on that. Let’s ditch the modern and pseudo modern vehicles and get rusty old 1970’s pickups with mashed up bush guards dangling off the front. Push the idiots off the road, then back over them a few times just to be sure.
trever
November 12th, 2006