Retired Israeli Air Force ace Giora Epstein flew Mirage, Nesher and F-16 fighter aircraft during his career. When asked by the History Channel which aircraft he preferred, he replied “In the Mirage and the Nesher, the pilot flies the aircraft. In the F-16, the computer flies the aircraft and the pilot is just another input to the computer.” Modern automotive electronics have transferred Epstein’s complaint to millions of cars. We may purchase and maintain our vehicles, but we no longer truly drive them. Increasingly, we’re mere inputs for the computers that do.
This experience may be mostly transparent, but it is real. Press on the ‘gas’ pedal of an electronic-throttle car and it doesn’t open the throttle; it simply tells the engine computer the desired torque output.The brake pedal of a Toyota Prius doesn’t activate the brakes; it tells the ABS computer how much braking to supply. Turn the steering wheel in an Active Steering-equipped BMW and the direction change ranges from barely-noticeable to “Holy s***!”, depending upon what the Active Steering system decides is appropriate.
Under most circumstances, drivers don’t know or care that computers are intermediating their driving. But sometimes it does matter. Lift off an electronic throttle pedal and the computer may ignore it, holding the throttle open to reduce smog emissions. Panic brake in deep snow and ABS may threshold-brake the car into an intersection, when locked brakes might have stopped it much sooner. Try to ‘rock’ a vehicle out of slush and the traction control system may steadfastly thwart the effort.
This lack of control particularly frustrates driving enthusiasts. They want engine braking at lift-throttle, not when the computer decides they can have it. They want to take their favorite corner in a lurid tail-out slide, not electronic nannies telling them that they can’t. It’s a real killjoy when the HAL 9000 controlling the transmission rejects a downshift with an “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Or when the simple act of simultaneously pushing the brake and accelerator pedals sets off an electronic hissy-fit.
Even when the pocket-protector set tries to apply their dark arts for enthusiasts, they usually end up spoiling the fun. At the extreme end, Formula 1 banned electronic driver aids in the early 1990s (the ban has since been modified) because winning became more a function of software engineering than driver skill. Lower down the food chain, automakers have no qualms whatsoever about rendering their sports-oriented customers’ driving skills irrelevant.
Several high end automakers now offer transmission ‘launch control’ modes, where a driver simply selects the mode and floors the accelerator. Maximum acceleration is provided; no clutch modulation skills required. The new F430 Scuderia is equipped with F1-Trac traction control, which Ferrari test drivers admit allows ordinary drivers to nearly match their lap times around Fiorano.
Where is the pride in mastering driving skills when any Tom, Dick or Harriet can duplicate them by pushing a button? The piss-ant paradigm now extends to off-roading, where Land Rovers offer Fisher-Price type buttons that configure a vehicle’s various e-Nannies for various terrains. Hill Descent Control allows feet free operation. No muss. No fuss. No skill. No fun.
Ordinary drivers have a different interaction with all this automotive electronic wizardry. It makes them worse drivers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that about 25 percent of all American automobile accidents are caused by distracted drivers. That’s plain to see. Cruise the freeways in any U.S. urban area. Clock how many drivers are talking on their cell phones, fiddling with their iPods, checking their navigation screens, playing with their iDrive/COMAND/MMI interfaces, or looking for the Teletubbies disc for the onboard DVD player. Their focus is everywhere but their driving.
ABS, panic brake assist and stability control can help prevent an accident, but they can’t make the car brake or steer. Only an attentive driver can do that.
Automotive electronics are also dumbing down drivers through the subtle action of moral hazard. The old anti-driver’s aids shibboleth says that cars should be equipped with sharp spikes instead of airbags, to encourage drivers to drive very carefully. Perhaps. Meanwhile, manufacturers give them an electronically expanded safety envelope. Drivers respond to this safety net by driving more aggressively. As a result, the safety benefits of technology are cancelled out by dumber driving.
Studies indicate that ABS-equipped cars have about the same accident rate as their non-ABS equivalents. Similarly, automotive forums bristle with stories about highway medians filled with flipped-over SUVs whose drivers thought 4WD was synonymous with “invincibility.”
History indicates that as drivers adapt to these new technologies, many of the problems associated with them will decline. But there are other ticking time bombs in the automotive electronic world. In our next installment, we’ll look at the long-term implications of these high-tech wonders.
This is the best series of editorials on TTAC in a while. Excellent points! Manufacturers are always touting how smart and safe their vehicles are. I always thought it was a kind way of saying that we need smart and safe cars to offset stupid and reckless drivers. It is another symptom of a postwar culture that wants perfection without effort.
Another point: we now have 1-2 generations of drivers raised on simulated driving via joystick and game controllers, how long before we’re met with a Playstation interface in lieu of a steering wheel, acclerator and brake pedal?
I assume part 3 (the Ugly) will be about when all those gizmos start to break.
My Miata has been in the shop for TWO MONTHS now because of a simple wiring harness that controls everything the engine does.
Without that one wiring harness, the car doesn’t even start.
Not sure which versions of the F-16 Giora flew, but the first incarnation of fly-by-wire integrated into that platform neglected to have a ‘stick’ that even moved (measuring force instead of movement) – prompting the pilots to over-react and make huge mistakes. This was corrected very early in the development of the plane, but movement is still very small.
In short, it seems that so much re-invention of the wheel really need not be done. A little less thinking in the laboratory, and a little more thinking while ‘piloting’ your vehicle makes more sense.
Bring on the sharp spikes!
Excellent editorial!
Last weekend I got the chance to drive my friend’s BMW 335i. Almost twenty years ago the same friend had a 325i that I used to love to play chauffeur for him in. Needless to say cars have come a very long way in a relatively short period of time!
IIRC the 1987 325i had ZERO electronic driver aids with the expection of ABS, it had all of 168hp to move it around, and weighed in at about 3000lbs. Back than this was a pretty fast car (for what it was). It was also a blast to drive. On the other hand I could not imagine that car with 300hp. With its semi-trailing arm rear suspension and no traction control that 1987 325i would have been downright dangerous.
Today’s 335i is an EXTREMELY fast car! 20 years ago its performance would have been considered super-car level. With its 255 rear tires, 50/50 weight distribution, RWD and relatively light weight for its power it would be one hell of a beast on the road without the driver aides.
20 years ago a Accord was a 120hp car, today an V6 powered Accord has a whopping 270hp! There is a major difference here! 270hp going through the front wheels does require a bit of “intervention” for most folks that will buy that car.
Reading the majority of reviews of the new Prosche GT2, most of the writers claim that this car is so powerful it does need all of the “aides” to keep the drivers safe.
Look if we are talking about Miatas then I will accept the idea that the car should be left as “pure” as possible. But when we start to DISS the nannies that are keeping most drivers safe in EVERYDAY situations than we need to think about it some more.
BTW, the F-16 analogy is not the best one to make. The F-16 flight controls are handled by computer because the design of the airplane makes it impossible to fly naturally. My understanding is that the F-16 has zero glide properties and would instantly spin and stall if one tried to fly in with unassisted hyduralic controls.
IIRC the F-16 was the first airplane designed completely using a computer. It is it’s radical design and computer controls that do allow it to out-turn just about every other contempory aircraft of it day. The stick is not mechanically connected to any control surfaces because it cant be. It is simply a tool to give commands and directional control/ orientation. The computer is actually moving the control surfaces several hundred times a minute to keep the plane in level flight.
One more point. I think people drive more aggressively today simply because cars drive so much better today than they did even ten years ago.
Compare today’s minivan to that those the past. 130 to 150hp engines have been replaced by 250hp units. SUVs and 4WD vehicles that all used to be damn slow on the road can hit 60 in under 7 seconds today. The average bread and butter passanger cars can easily pull .80gs today.
Today most of the cars I pick up at the rental agency can out-perform that majority of the sports cars I drove in the mid to late 1980s.
A Yaris class vehicle used to have about 60hp today these types of cars have over 100hp and can easily do a solid “buck” on the highway.
Driving a one of todays cars at 50mph feels like driving a late 80s or early 90s car at 30mph.
Car are more aggressive today!
The airplane analogy is a good one. Epstein may have preferred flying the other planes, but I’d be interested to hear which plane he’d like to be in while under enemy fire. I’m betting the F-16. The F-16 is faster and more suited to extreme flying because the computer works so much faster than a human can. Think of it this way — airplane has lifting surfaces and control surfaces. They are mutually exclusive. The control surface add drag (by definition), slow the plane down, and don’t increase lift. BUT the fewer control surfaces you have, the more unstable it is. The solution is make the control surfaces small to reduce drag, and offload the difficulty of flying such an unstable aircraft to a computer.
Now apply that principle to an automobile. We have made great strides in efficiency and safety by acknowledging that a computer does certaing things better than a human, such as pulsing brakes or metering airflow. Sure, it may be more fun and satisfying to drive that ’87 325i (I have one), but for the average person who doesn’t care, it’s better to have a computer do what its good at, and let the person do what its good at.
I do wish people would pay more attention to the road though. :-)
whatdoiknow1:
I’ve heard much the same bout the F-16. It could almost be comparable to the idea of the rear engined Porsches. The reason it handles so amazingly well is because it is inherintly unstable. And I agree. There are some placed where the electro nannies really interfere and get annoying, but many other places where they really do help out.
whatdoiknow1 summed it up pretty nicely. The F-16 was the first fighter aircraft designed to be inherently unstable in flight. While it allowed the pilot to perform insanely quick and agile maneuvers, the electronic nannies are an absolutely necessity to keep it in flight. Another example is the machine gun which is mounted off of the center line running from the nose to tail. When the pilot fires the gun, a yaw force is generated. To counter it, the computer moves the flight surfaces without the pilot ever needing to worry about it.
Studies indicate that ABS-equipped cars have about the same accident rate as their non-ABS equivalents.
If I recall correctly, the ESC studies with Mercedes and Toyota give the tech between a 10% – 30% reduction rate in single car accidents.
Great editorial. This is why I come to TTAC.
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Boy do I remember that classic line. Sure was a forerunner of what was to come.
As far back as the late 40s, fighters were starting to move away from direct control of the flight surfaces. In the F-86D that I flew, designed in the very late 40s, elevator feel was through bungee cords at the base of the stick and the elevators were driven with hydraulic rams.
By a neat leverage arrangement, the bungees were adjusted based on the nose up attitude of the plane to reflect the airspeed; very much like the active steering of today. Often, if a turbine wheel shattered, the hydraulics to the elevator were lost, the stick locked up solid, and it was time to get out, quick!
If I recall correctly, the ESC studies with Mercedes and Toyota give the tech between a 10% – 30% reduction rate in single car accidents.
When the driver remembers to steer the vehicle out of harms way with his foot on the brake, while the vehicle is ABS’ing.
Electronic Stability works well if either the front or the back lets go, especially with huge tired SUV’s and snow. If a vehicle starts sliding sideways electronic statibility will not sense a difference in speed between the wheels. How many drivers will know to crank the steering to create a difference in speed and activate the ESC.
Great article – as mentioned above – I hope there is a third part.
I probably don’t have to tell many of you that the failure of an electric window in the down position is at very best, awkward and in the worst case, as in a forty below snow storm or a torrential summer storm, immobilising.
The car has to be parked somewhere warm and dry until the weather will allow it to be moved for repair.
At this point. I’d like to enter a plea to the car companies to include in their designs a small access port in at least the drivers door,
if not all the doors, so that the windows can be wound down, or up, manually when necessary with a crank handle included in the tool kit,
or preferably clipped into the back of the glove box.
Now we get to a more disturbing trend which is the substitution of mechanical manual door locks with all electric systems.
I will agree that more and more of my clients hand us the keys and say “the key doesn’t work, use the remote”.
What they mean is, that they have never ever opened the doors with the key and now the door locks have seized solid.
This is about intelligent as never using your handbrake on an automatic transmission – until the day you HAVE to use it,such as at a roadside safety check and you are left with a completely seized brake system that won’t unlock as the cops drive away.
These “driver identification” systems, whereby a driver steps up to his vehicle and it recognises him/her and unlocks the doors are fraught with possible failures.
I really don’t know what to suggest if manual door locks go the way of the Dodo bird, but if you have no manual locks and no window winders, pray you don’t end up under water, having slid off the road into a river, or, like me with my rally car, end up upside down in a ditch. I don’t know for certain but I’m reasonably sure that these latest ideas to hand over ordinary manual operations to fully automated electric actuators is going to increase my profitability in the long run by quite a nice margin.
Because the solenoids, electric motors, remote controllers and their attendant batteries all fail more frequently than you can imagine.
The tow truck drivers are also going to love this latest trend.
I’m not enough of a Luddite to do a King Canute and try to hold back this technology.
My only plea is for manual emergency back up systems wherever possible, just like the slot that releases the shifter if the interlock between the shifter and the brake pedal fails. And they do, often.
Or maybe after the warranty expires, nobody in the manufacturing industry gives a toss anymore?
Risk Homeostasis. I drive my 3-series more aggressively than I drive the Miata. The BMW has ABS, traction control, stability control, air bags, and it is easily visible to other drivers. The Miata hides below most SUV drivers mirrors, has no ABS, TCS, or ESP.
I’m comfortable with a certain level of risk, and subconsciously I make decisions differently depending on the car I drive.
Eric – the problem is that the vast majority of driving is no longer ‘fun’ driving (open winding roads) but tedious and dangerous commuting on congested roads that we share with an ever increasing amount of distracted and unpredictable drivers. Unfortunately most of my fellow commuters are not auto enthusiasts and clearly don’t approach the task driving with the required attention, care and temprament. I for one can’t wait to see the day when cars can drive themselves and I can rasd the paper on my way to work.
However, as an enthusiast driver I totally agree that the electronic nanny kills the fun but I would disagree that the advances in electronics have not saved lives. While ABS may not have made a dent in the crash statistics (as most drivers don’t know how to use it), stability control certainly has and so will intelligent cruise control once it becomes a common feature.
As much as I like throttle induced understeer, the staggering 45,000 road deaths every year (the equivalent of two 747s crashing every week) mean we need to find answers to reduce the carnage. Right now a combination of better driver training, better impact absorbing cars and electronic driver aids are our best hope.
My own personal solution to my conflicted feelings for driving and safety? – a safe boring car for commuting and a fun (nanny free) car for weekend hoonage.
RE: Giora and the F-16 — My recollection of the History Channel interview is that Giora acknowledged that the F-16 was a far superior aircraft to the Mirage and the Nesher (Nesher = slightly modified Mirage built by the Israelis).
BUT — and this is the crucial point — he didn’t like flying it as much because the computer disconnected him from direct control of the aircraft.
That’s what computerized controls are doing to our cars as well and those controls may not have the same agenda as the driver.
If I’m approaching a corner and I need to slow down, I want engine braking NOW, not when the computer decides I can have it.
Sure, I’ll probably get around the corner OK anyway because the car is a technological marvel and has higher performance limits than I can reasonably explore. But I’ll probably need to change my underwear and will be cursing the ECM programmers all the way home.
Cheers to Philbailey, he said it very well.
My friend has a Volvo S70. Periodically, the Electronic Throttle System light comes on. The car has died once on her as a result in the mountains of NC and refused to restart. Now it has to be brought back into the dealer occasionally for a “software upgrade,” as did the Catera I had. Mechanics can point to a broken head gasket and fix that, but not all of this keyless go and driver identification electronic crap. We’ve all had instances in which a battery or alternator died but those are cheap and easy to repair and not life-threatening. If people make it, it will eventually break and as the software gets more integrated instead of being an adjunct to mechanical systems- watch out.
Car companies have, will, and honestly, need to cater to the 99% of the driving public that doesn’t care a hoot about the intricacies of driving dynamics. Else they’d all be out of business.
As a husband, parent, and an occasional hoon, I value the stability control, ABS, and other nanies in my TSX when my wife has to drive it in the snow, rain, or really, any time because you’ll never know when an accident can strike. She doesn’t care about driving as long as it’s slow and safe; can’t threshold brake, and doesn’t know what over steer means, let alone be able to control it. If it didn’t have those nannies, it would rule the car out for me because my wife will necessarily drive it some of the time and I wouldn’t want her driving w/o them here in the NE. So nowadays, I drive her 1996 4Runner RWD most of the time, and if I can overlook the fact that it’s a old, tall, POS, it’s actually quite fun to drive in the snow.
Cars catering only to enthusiasts are sadly, a very small niche market now. The lotus Elise and the Atom can pull it off in very small numbers. Porsche and BMW can’t anymore. The general population won’t care about the finer details of driving, and the car companies will have to cater to that to sell cars.
Von, carguy and markala — The problem with the ‘risk homeostasis’ and ‘average driver’ arguments is that that you are assuming that drivers will retain the same driving habits while the capability of their vehicles increases. They don’t.
Instead, it becomes an ‘arms race’ between the makers of the electronic safety nannies and the drivers who are taking ever greater risks because their vehicles are both more capable and are providing less feedback about the riskiness.
Who would you rather be hit by: a driver who slides into the intersection after locking up his brakes at 15 mph, or someone whose ABS-equipped car is threshold braking into the intersection at 35 mph?
The average driver has no clue what to do with ABS, has no clue what to do with ESC, although they will feel safer for whatever reason.
The concerned average driver wanting to know the volume of the side air bags in the rear doors, in case the child is sleeping with their head close to the door and the air bag deploys!
The traction systems on 4 wheels drive SUV’s are so seemless that the average driver gets himself in impossible situations and has no clue how they got there in the first place.
Traction control in snow is supposed to make up for lack of driving ability and common sense. People call tow trucks to be towed since they are trying to operate car with high performance 18 summer tires in snow.
Recently, my car was obviously misfiring. Totally missing at least one cylinder, but no engine codes were thrown so it was assumed nothing was wrong with the car inspite of the engine shutting itself off while on the highway. It took 4 months before somebody finally decided to look for, and fix the issue.
Seems the service people are now totally trusting in what the computer tells them regardless if anything is really wrong or not.
I miss the old days when I could diagnose and fix the car myself just by listening to the engine and knowing what to do to fix the thing.
Eric_Stepans – safety acronym induced over confidence may be a factor for some drivers but not for the majority. Statistics bear out that stability control reduces you chance of death in an auomobile crash significantly. As a matter of fact the most dangerous vehicle on the road with over 300 deaths for every 100,000 owners is the old two door Chevy blazer. Nearly half of those acidents were single vehicle – i.e. it rolled over, ran off the road and/or into an stationary object. I doubt it was over confidence that caused these collisions and would conclude that maybe this vehicle and its drivers would benefit from stability control.
And who repairs them when they break? Bubba, at the shop, hooks up a computer system to your car and it tells him what to replace. Then Bubba goes to the back room pulls he appropriate electronic module off the shelf. He/she goes to your car, opens the hood and unplugs the old module. Plugs in the new module. Starts your car and it runs again
And yet you will get a minimum $75.00 diagnostic fee. and a $120 bill for labor and $1000 for the module (which has $50 max worth of electronics in it). It has nothing to do with my safety it has to do with bilking the public out of more money.
I am now thoroughly familiar with what ABS can and cannot do.
Can someone educate me on what the “handling nanny” of electronic stability control is like? I am thinking I would like to have so I don’t spin out into a ditch when I have to drive an icy road, but I have not idea of what it is like to drive a car with one of those things.
I know when ABS is active because I get the “foot massage”, and I know what it does — keeps the car rolling when I want it to lock the wheels, and I know what I should be doing when I am standing on the brakes — steering the car around the obstacle, but I am too distracted by the car not stopping that I just focus on standing on the brakes, but at least I am not pumping the brakes like they tell you not to.
How do you know when the ESC cuts in? What happens when it cuts in, do you revert to a “plow straight ahead FWD understeer” or what? Does the system confound handling expectations in some situations? What does a driver need to know?
For those interested – here is a link to the NHTSA study of electronic stability control.
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/regrev/evaluate/809790.html
SUV drivers take note.
I don’t think that the fighter pilot analogy is appropriate. The jet fighters he flew were owned by the taxpayers, and designed, built, and purchased for combat. They are not there for his personal joy-flying thrills. He may have been an exceptionally skilled pilot. But the plane was built so that an average pilot can both fulfill and survive combat missions.
Same thing for cars. Cars, to most people, are tools. A transportation appliance. Not toys. Hence, any electronic controls that allow such tool to do its job better is good. They are designed so that average (and less than average) drivers can survive the commute to work, the trip to the store, etc.
If someone has the skills and wants the thrills, then they can buy themselves a dumbed-down toy that gives them the raw feedback they want. But don’t expect the rest of us to do with less.
Paul Milenkovic – good question. ESC kicks in when it senses that the car is no longer going in the direction that you have pointed it in. At this time ESC selectively applies the break to the appropriate wheel and a light usually lights up up on the dash to inform the driver of the intervention. Nothing special is required – don’t panic and keep on pointing the car in the direction you want to go without any wild over corrections.
More on how it works here
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/esc/esc_explained.html
and here (complete with Australian accent)
http://www.howsafeisyourcar.com.au/electronic-stability-control.php
Thre are also a number of good driving schools that can get you valuable hands on experience to recover from such situations.
Not all vehicles with ABS give you the foot massage, some will only show the flashing triangle in the dash when ABS is working.
ESC will maintain or try to maintain the direction of the vehicle by ABS’ing respective wheels to stay on the direction. If you enter a trun at a reasonable speed and the front or rear of the vehicle loses traction (understeer or oversteer) ESC will bring the vehicle back to its original direction. It usually feels like braking ABS coming on without applying the brakes. ESC works very well when doing 90 degree turns.
If the vehicle enters a turn ( a bend in the road) too fast and initiates a gentle 4 wheel skid sideways, ESC does not sense enough of a speed difference to engage. In such a situation crank the steering wheel to generate a larger speed difference to engage ESC.
When ESC cuts in, you will know very quickly, and be prepared to steer very quickly.
The Range Rover 4×4 controls pictured seem much more complicated than a simple four-position selector lever as found on the transfer case of a Jeep Wrangler. There is an art to maneuvering a 4×4 and Land Rover, a once-proud four wheel drive manufacturer has been reduced to this? A Jeep Rubicon also offers feed-on-the-floor descents because the 4:1 transfer case in 4-lo provides such low gearing, not any down-hill assist computers.
Nice aviation tie-in. I like stick-and-rudder fundamentals, whether it’s a vintage taildraggers or a Jeep.
Carguy – Thanks for the links to ESC study. I would say in that round, the electronic nannies are winning the ‘arms race’ over the stupid aggressive drivers.
If I may speculate, I think the reason that ESC appears to be helpful while ABS is a wash has to do with driver behavior.
ESC enables drivers to steer their way out of trouble, so accidents are prevented. Steering is a natural control reaction and drivers don’t have to think about it.
In contrast, ABS demands that drivers know how to use it. Back in the 1990s when ABS was first becoming widespread, I recall reading reports of drivers who would lift off of the brake pedal when the ABS vibration kicked in. That tends to appreciably lengthen stopping distances.
Also, the reason many cars now come with panic braking assist is that drivers don’t hit the pedal hard enough in a panic stop. So the engineers decided to have ABS apply maximum braking if the pedal behavior indicates a panic stop.
These systems are neither all good or all bad. That’s why I wrote more than one editorial.
Eric_Stepans, I completely agree with you that as electronic driving aids increase driver confidence to unhealthy levels, and that on average, drivers have gotten more reckless and aggressive.
My point however, is that the general population will still opt to buy the driving aids if they can afford it. Put it on marketing, perception, or guilt, or whatever, but they will buy it and car manufacturers will have to offer it to be competitive.
The solution is to have more thorough driver ed (police academy style) and tougher testing. But you and I know that US pols will never have the balls to put that in action, it’s much easier to demand “safer” cars, slower speed limits, and higher fines than to stick their necks out for the long term good of the American people.
My Mazda3 would be a much better car to drive with a cable-operated throttle. You eventually get used to the throttle not doing exactly what you tell it to, but you only need to spend a little time driving an older car to realize how much better it could be.
I like ABS on dry, wet, and icy pavement, but I’d really like an “ABS off” button for those snowy days. Pulling the fuse is such a hassle!
I think many of the people that are crticizing the electronic driving aides are missing the point. If you find yourself in trouble on the road in a car equiped with these feature, YOU HAVE ALREADY FUCKED UP in a way that they will NOT help you.
These feature are NOT designed to save a driver from his/her own unsafe driving practicies. They are designed to help out drivers in everyday situations. No, they are not necessary on most smaller cars with limited engine power, they are most useful on powerful RWD cars equiped with high performance tires and limited-slip diffs.
Traction control and ESC really come in handy for folk with inclined driveways and winter weather. They work very well when your are driving appropiately in the existing weather conditions. TC and ESC will keep the safe driver on the wet curvy road if he has the sense to keep the speed down. TC and ESC work wonders for RWD accelerating from a standing stop in wet conditions.
Electronic aides will not help out the speeder or wreckless driver that finds himself in trouble because physics are physics! Once a car loses all grip on the road there is nothing left to control!
A couple of points:
* Why in the world does the accord have 270 horsepower? It’s a people moving device. For 99.999862% of the people buying it, that’s 150 more horsepower than is needed. My wife, for example, I don’t think has ever had the accelerator in her old Outback depressed more than 1/4 of its travel. You could give her a new Aston and it would never be driven more than the speed limit, and take some time getting there. My wife would rather have an underpowered car which got good mileage than a high-powered car which didn’t.
* I drive ye olde cars in my daily travels, and I have a hard time driving with people who drive new stuff, just because of their braking habits. They routinely pull up to intersections leaving braking to the very last minute–well beyond the point where my car would be sitting in the middle of the intersection. Yeah, pretty nice that modern brakes are amazing but people drive without any margin of error.
I always found my old 1987 BMW 325e was a blast to drive. It did have ABS and power steering… but that’s about it (and I complained about the ABS- even though it once helped me avoid an accident). It had great handling, I felt safe in it because I always knew how it would respond to my input. More modern cars feel too disconnected from the road.
You’re being ‘insulated by electronics’ which theoretically will help protect you- if they’re in working condition. And now, with paddle shifters and CVT’s, you don’t even have to ‘drive’. You can just sit there and steer, the car does almost everything else for you!
Try to ‘rock’ a vehicle out of slush and the traction control system may steadfastly thwart the effort.
Owners on 4×4 sites are cursing their newer traction control-equipped rigs when they get stuck in mud. When you’re axles deep in thick gooey gunk, you need spin your wheels to throw the mud out of the treads before you can regain traction. Traction control systems inhibit the driver’s ability to do this.
whatdoiknow1, ABS, traction control, ESC can assist any vehicle and any driver irrelevant of the power or FWD/RWD.
Depending on the climate, these nannies can be very helpful, snow, ice, black ice they can assist a reasonable driver to stay out of trouble, and out of ditches or guardrails.
Especially people with 4 wheel drive vehicles that often lose sense of how slippery the actual conditions are until they come to stop or turn. These folks want all the features plus 4 wheel drive on top, in slippery conditions the acceleration of a 4 wheel drive car can easely fool the driver to the point where stopping becomes a real challenge.
ABS was standard on my old Frontier, so quite a few owners wired in override switches. In effect, these switches simply pulled the fuse for the ABS. This in turn triggered a warning light on the dash so there wasn’t much concern about forgetting to turn it back on. The reason for the override was that drivers found ABS made the trucks difficult to stop on loose sand and gravel. Locking up the tires resulted in shorter stopping distances. I think ABS was also a hindrance in soft snow (NOT ice) but I’m not positive about that.
whatdoIknow – that’s exactly the point of Moral Hazard. It raises the point at which negative consequences occur. The safety nannies help drivers stay in control, but they also raise the threshold at which control is lost. So cars crash at 50mph instead of 25mph.
WCMonty – That’s one instance. Also, Prius drivers are finding that even minor slippage will cause the traction control to shut down the powertrain.
Chaser – Audi and others have done experiments confirming that in deep snow or gravel stopping distances are better with the wheels locked. I think Audi even added a snow/gravel mode switch to some of their cars to account for this situation.
@beken
My job occasionally involves diagnosing aerospace electronics. I’ve encountered serious frustration with service departments who only read out the fault codes from the computer – if there aren’t any, then nothing’s wrong, according to them. I had an intermittent problem (the worst) with a sensor, and after getting blank looks and useless computer printouts at several dealerships, I eventually found an independent shop that was willing to let me onto the floor and basically ran the troubleshooting myself. Problem solved, but only because I’ve got experience in these things that most don’t.
The introduction of computers to this degree has some great advantages, but also leads to some weird problems. The faith in the computer diagnostics is one place that I can see causing trouble, with the accompanying eventual loss of the ability to diagnose problems by sound and the like. Sad, but the general public seems content to treat cars (or at least major sub-systems of the cars) as disposable commodities, and just run it until it breaks and replace it…
-S5
Carguy, the illustrations in the following link that you provided:
http://www.iihs.org/ratings/esc/esc_explained.html are excellent.
It really does a good job of showing how ESC works. I still think it is unnecessary in most cars, but probably worthwhile in high center-of-gravity SUVs, pickup trucks and vans.
Maxwelton: Why in the world does the accord have 270 horsepower? It’s a people moving device. For 99.999862% of the people buying it, that’s 150 more horsepower than is needed.
Honda resisted putting a V-6 in the Accord for quite some time, before caving into to dealer demand for such an engine. Even so, traditionally something like 75% of Accords have been sold with the practical standard 4-cylinder engine. The statistics I’ve seen for the Camry and Altima are similar with the vast majority of them sold with the standard 4-cylinder engine.
Clearly there is customer demand for ever more powerful V-6 engines and higher levels of horsepower give manufacturers braggin’ rights. Since Honda is in the business of making money, it only makes sense for them to pander cater to customer demand for powerful V-6 engines.
It will be interesting to see which version of the new Accord’s 4-cylinder engine will be the most popular, the 177-hp version or the 190-hp version. I suppose it will be the 190-hp version.
“Where is the pride in mastering driving skills when any Tom, Dick or Harriet can duplicate them by pushing a button?”
Just soup up your crew cab dually diesel truck and smoke their ferrari driving azz at the stoplight. That’s the ultimate. Dusting quick cars in a heavy diesel truck. It doesn’t get any better then that.. Well, maybe smoking a stretched and lowered Busa that runs high 8’s in a car.. I like that too. If it’s stock, it ain’t shite.
You only need to look at the accident and fatality data to know that improvements in automotive technology and highway design save lives.
We can go much faster and move more vehicles on our roads than before, while crashing less and killing fewer people per mile traveled than we ever did.
Most accidents are caused by human error. If you want to reduce accidents, you’re better off focusing on dealing with the humans who create the errors.
Im just an unreconstructed old fart. My favorite vehicle of all time had a 3 speed transmission and a manually choked carburator. I could keep it running myself with about 10$ worth of open end wrenches. Nowadays I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the 1980s. Hopefully, Ive amassed enough spare parts to keep my 88 528e alive until I can no longer drive.
ABS is is fine, but I drove 30 yrs without it. 4wd drive exercises the Darwin factor by weeding out those too ignorant of their SUVs to realize that 4wd does very little for handling in snow and nothing for braking. My brother lives in VT. He judges the severity of the weather by the numbers of SUVs greasy side up on the median of I 89 as he drives past them in his 2wd pickup.
Geez, what a bunch of Luddites.
I’m sure gramps lamented the fact that any old pencil-necked college boy could start a car with a starter motor, and only real men still hand-cranked them up front.
And I’m sure that them newfangled drum brakes didn’t give him half the feel of a good solid oak handle that rubbed against the wheel when he pulled it.
It’s called “progress”, for Christ sake.
Seems like we’ve established here that cars today are more powerful, faster, better handling, safer, cleaner, more fuel efficient, and more reliable than the ‘good old days’. But everyone is bitching because they ‘feel different’ or ‘don’t respond like I’m used to’. Maybe you’re just so invested in your old skills that you don’t realize that it’s time you tried learning some new ones!
dkulmacz :
Maybe you’re just so invested in your old skills that you don’t realize that it’s time you tried learning some new ones!you don’t need any anymore!
fixed :p
and get off my lawn.
As much as I like throttle induced understeer, the staggering 45,000 road deaths every year (the equivalent of two 747s crashing every week) mean we need to find answers to reduce the carnage. Right now a combination of better driver training, better impact absorbing cars and electronic driver aids are our best hope.
Then again maybe having steel dashboards, solid steering columns that don’t collapse in an accident, and no firewall between the passenger compartment and the gas tank would result in fewer accidents in two ways: natural selection, big spike in road deaths initially, and self preservation, because you know what will happen if you get in an accident will be very very bad for your health.;-)
Really, though, I believe that as long as the cars continue to get bigger and faster, safety devices such as airbags and engineered crumple zones become more and more necessary. There will always be risk takers and as the cars get bigger and faster, the results of their risk taking will become deadlier without increased protection.
dkulmacz: What we’re griping about is that modern cars are in the grey area between allowing drivers to drive them and cutting out the driver completely…
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/editorials/diy-rip/
So we end up with the worst of both worlds. For drivers who are engaged in the process, the cars don’t respond to the drivers’ wishes.
For those who are yakking on their cell phones, the electronic nannies give them the illusion that all will be taken care of regardless of how stupidly or distractedly they drive.
I’d rather have our roads filled with Michael Schumachers in ’63 Dodge Darts than Buffy the Cheerleader and all her friends in 2007 Mercedes-Benzes.
All the modern safety gizmos can be defeated by 1 mistake. If you you read accounts of traffic fatalities, most refer to to occupants being ejected from the vehicle.
To an extent the Luddite quip is apt, I am wary of black boxes that are essential to vehicle operation. Black boxes, whose failure, strands me on the roadside. Only because Ive been burned. Also I heard stories from owners of later model drive by wire cars. A 400$ box with the only moving part being a cable that is permantly attached to the electronics. Guess what breaks? That is just piss poor engineering.
Many of the article complaints sound petty relative to the advantages of theses systems. I’m absolutely with the person who spoke of luddites earlier.
I wouldn’t buy a car today that wasn’t equipped with ESC. ABS, perhaps, but ESC? No way. The less conservative iterations can actually make the car more enjoyable to drive, and tame some of the more twitchy handling characteristics. More importantly, for the vast majority of the time when you’re not in a hooning mood, or it starts to rain, ESC can save your ass.
I think the F-16 analogy is perfectly apt. The performance threshold of cars today has risen to such an extent that few people, if any, are qualified to drive them at speed. It’s only natural to let the computers handle what we can’t.
Fancy computers and electronic gizmos are no match for a stupid driver, kid…
The F-16 flight control system system (computers) is necessary due to the limitations of the pilot and the built in instability of the bird. Current fighter design is working to further reduce the limitations of the pilot by removing him/her entirely. Humans cannot think fast enough, have relatively poor senses, cannot stand much more than 8 Gs, require all sorts of heavy expensive life support equipment, and cannot be counted on to do the right thing consistently. Elimination of the driver as the limiting factor seems to be the way car design is going as well. No driver, just passengers.
I couldn’t agree more about badly done safety systems. My V6 Camaro nearly killed me more than once when I tried to whistle up oversteer and the traction control computer denied it by fiddling with the front brakes, leading to the car pushing instead of rotating, and me headed into a wall. If I’d just driven it like the idiot GM assumed I was, I’d have turned the wheel and let the traction control pull the front end around for me, which actually worked the few times it snuck up on me.
However, I learned to drive in farm trucks, and rear-wheel handling is in my blood. I can feel the rear end snap out on me and fix it. With the traction control computer ‘helping’, the job gets a lot harder, as we fight each other and the rather coarse rear end.
The killer, though, was that the alternator on that Camaro was not powerful enough to handle the traction control system for an extended period, so a session doing donuts in a parking lot burned up my alternator in the dead of winter. How’s that for an unintended consequence?