Safe Speed Forums

No, this was a more sudden stop than one would expect but at the same time (and you wouldn't probably appreciate this unless you drove ABS and NON ABS back to back) the braking force needed on older ABS cars/vans is or used to be, a bit harder to achieve the same results in a non ABS vehicle...and lets face it all vehicles have different braking responses (as a girlfriend of mine commented the other day when she drove my car for the first time). What my concerns are that an inexperienced driver who is used to braking on ABS vehicles would, if they had to make a sudden stop in a non abs car that they had never driven before , lock the wheels with potentially serious results. ABS doesn't stop as well on snow either.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

I'm quite lucky to have two vehicles which I drive on a week by week( or back to back daily) basis and one is ABS and the other non ABS...after about twenty years of ABS driving and 36 of non ABS driving....I'm with Botach on this...you can keep your ABS, as far as I'm concerned.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

I'm quite a fan of it - at least in its more recent incarnations, when accompanied by Electronic Brake Force Distribution and even Electronic Stability Control. A great deal of my driving is on single track roads where you encounter the occasional "muppet" who puts you in the situation where you end up braking with two wheels on grass. I've not yet met the driver who can apply useful braking force to the right hand wheels whilst preventing the left hand ones locking up!

I'm sure I saw a bit of research (some time ago - and I'd be hard put to lay hands on it again) where they studied drivers who knew they had it and didn't know how it worked, drivers who didn't know they had it or how it worked, and drivers who knew they had it AND knew how it worked. I can't remember the conclusion, but I THINK it provided a net benefit to those who didn't know they had it or how it worked, and those who knew they had it AND knew how it worked, but not the first group. HOWEVER, I'm not at all sure - it has definitely been studied though!

Certainly, pretty much every technological advance (hydraulic dampers, hydraulic brakes, discs ,radials and so on) have always resulted in increased speeds. There's definitely SOMETHING in this "risk compensation" theory, I just don't knowif we've got the whole picture yet.

Is this really any more likely than a driver moving from a vehicle requiring significant brake pressure to one requiring very little? I've gone from driving an old British car, with the brake-pedal travel of a tractor, into an 09 Corsa (pool car) and found the brakes to be incredibly "twitchy"! I think it is wrong to blame this phenomenon on a potentially useful safety feature.

Of course ABS does not stop well in the snow, it does not stop well on any surface compared to optimum braking (when taken in isolation of other systems that may augment it in newer, more expensive vehicles). Its purpose is not to stop the car quicker, but to retain control of the vehicle in a situation where the wheels would otherwise lose traction altogether, and depart from their normal direction of travel; basically to brake hard and be able to remain going in the direction you want, even steering.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

No, probably not but at least in older cars with no ABS, you knew that if the wheels started to lock, what to do through the experience of every day driving but these days someone could drive an ABS car for several years and then one day find themselves in a car without it and witout the experienced knowledge of what to do in a braking lock up.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Sorry, should have said, the amount of pedal effort required to produce a given deceleration has nothing to do with the ABS system. HOWEVER, pedal efforts have been falling steadily for many years now, and it's just statistically mroe likely that newer cars (with lighter pedals) wil lalso have ABS. My 20+ year old car has ABS and the pedal is remarkably heavy by modern standards. To be honest, I prefer it that way. I find most modern "ordinary" cars have fantastic initial "bite" as you first touch the pedal, but the retardation is FAR from linear - in fact, I've been surprised on a few occasions just how much harder you have to press once you've given tham a decent bit of work to do!

They're not THAT bad!!! To be honest, I think curent ABS cars tend to stop a bit better, if anything, that their older non-ABS counterparts (or as close an equivalent car as you can find)! It's true that the first generation ABS systems weren't that great for overall stopping ability. This is because they tended to mimic the older non-ABS systems. These had a pretty crude valve that limited the pressure to the rear brakes to a level that would preclude ever locking them up before the front wheels had locked (to preserve straight line stabiity). It wasn't long (maybe 15 years or so ago) that they started getting much smarter and allowing as much pressure to the rear brakes as they could (in fact, each individual rear brake), therby leting them do more work than they could have done on a non-ABS car. I accept that pure, new snow (and deep gravel) are anomalies because the locked wheel pushes it up into a "dam" in front of the tyre that helps stop the car, but in all other situations and ESPECIALLY split-friction surfaces, I reckon ABS cars are now probably at least as good, or even better.

Yes, I'd agree that a lot of modern cars have poor brake pedal feel with too much "grab" at very light pedal pressures. That's one good thing about BMWs - they haven't succumbed to this "light controls" issue on either brakes or steering and therefore retain road feel quite well even with power assistance.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.