Mark Jurras wrote:
> >
> You were going 35MPH on BLACK ICE and you blame ABS for your
> accident?? I live in southern New England and we have our share of
> black ice, ice storms and snow. When you are on ice or black ice all
> the brakes in the world aren't going to stop you. Had you not had ABS I
> suppose that you would have locked up your wheels and slid into the
> stopped vehicle.
>
> - -Mark
Mark,
This is the last I'll have to say on the matter because I doubt the entire list
care to hear any
more. I am the one who knows what the conditions were when the accident
occurred. You are
expressing a lot of opinion and judging my competence as a driver on a lot of
partial
information and assumptions. If you were as experienced with black ice in rain
as you profess
to be, you would realize that this sort of condition occurs just as the
temperature drops below
freezing where there is suddenly a thin layer of invisible ice forming on the
road in spite of
the fact that rain is falling from the sky. At such times, the driver's first
indication that
the ice exists is often when the brakes are applied. When this sort of hidden
road hazard is
suddenly revealed, you do what you can to adjust your driving to suit
conditions, which in this
case would mean that you attempt to slow down.
Your statement that "when you are on ice or black ice all the brakes in the
world aren't going
to stop you" is clearly not true and denies the laws of physics, as well. My
common sense
assumption is that a skidding tire might break through a very thin layer of ice
due to simple
scraping action or due to the heat of whatever friction might be generated by
the skidding tire.
I am saying that under these specific conditions, I might have been able to
slow down more by
manually applying the brakes than I did by having the ABS allow the wheels to
continue turning.
With traditional brakes, you still retain the option of pumping or lifting off
of the brake
pedal to regain some lost directional control. I don't have any scientific
data to prove all
this is true, but I think it makes sense based on twenty-five years of driving
experience in
Wisconsin, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
I am not, as you said, blaming ABS for my accident. I presented the example of
this incident as
essentially a "worst-case scenario" for the type of ABS I have on my car. I
accept
responsibility as the operator of the vehicle, but all the same, road
conditions sometimes
change rapidly and there's only so much a driver can do to compensate. This is
real life. It
is also real life that any automatic system like ABS cannot be optimized for
every possible set
of road conditions. What you gain in steerability or the ability to
automatically keep the car
straight in a panic stop may be offset by a loss of absolute stopping power
where the rubber
meets the road. This is not necessarily a trade-off you'll always want to
make. The braking
characteristics generated by this automated system may be perfect in most
conditions and yet be
inappropriate in others. At a minimum, ABS removes some of the driver's
traditional options
under certain specific conditions.
In short, I'd still like to be able to stop the rotation of my wheels by
intelligently applying
pressure to the brake pedal, and I'm not altogether pleased that the car has an
automatic
subsystem which allows it to override my control inputs.
Glen
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