61–70 of 74 posts
Toyota has clearly never considered the parable where one is required to run over 1 pedestrian in order to stop another car that is about to take the lives of 5 other pedestrians.
Volvo has this feature -- dubbed City Safety -- already on the road. It may seem snobbish to some, but I'd never let myself, my wife, and my future children drive anything but a Mercedes or Volvo. Between the two of them, they've been behind nearly every safety system developed in the last 40 years. I feel good about knowing that our hard work has let us put my wife in a car, for her 30 minute commute, that has 12 ai…
That's interesting, because Mercedes's Traction Control system almost killed me one night. Apparently it's possible to accidentally induce a very slight but controllable oversteer slide by overshooting the exit to a fast curve and touching a rumble strip with the outside tires. No surprise there. In a normal car, you keep your front wheels on the line you want to follow, release power, then smoothly add power to "shi…
I'm happy for you that you've found a car you like. For me, I don't feel BMW has the same track record of safety innovation, but even before I grew to value that, what disuaded me most from owning a BMW is the fact that they use runflats only. And even if you've got a salesman willing to swap them out with conventional tires, there is no place in the trunk for a spare without it just sitting in there rolling around, taking up space. But I respect that BMW makes some fine cars and they feel very different on the road than does a Mercedes.
The criticisms you have about making drivers "lazy" is the same thing some people said about antilock brakes. And in fact, I have an uncle who swears as you do that if he had full control over the brakes, he'd have avoided an accident.
For me, knowing that these safety systems -- able to react in fractions of a second -- are there to help save my life and keep safe the woman I love, is invaluable. And I believe that for every one of your stories, there's dozens or hundreds of stories where these things led to a person walking away from an accident than they may not otherwise have survived.
I think the average person would agree. A system that beeps if you fall asleep at the wheel? Yes. A system that nudges your steering wheel fi you drift over the centerline? Yes. None of these things even augment your driving, they just direct yoru attention to the road.
In fact, the only thing I mentioned that does intervene in your driving is the blind spot intervention.
Anyhow, glad you didn't have any serious issues. And I hope we both know how fortunate we are to be able to sit here and debate the relative merits of one German sports sedan vs another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you should keep in mind that you appear to be an intelligent, skilled and avid driver. For you driving is an experience you take seriously and also seem to enjoy. I'm not worried about what you do on the road, but I am worried about the millions of less intelligent and skilled drivers that are pushing 3000lbs of metal around at lethal speeds. I think you are justified in wanting and buying a machine that suit…
Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration. Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW ? The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy…
I think that maybe you're wrong about a few things here. First and foremost, that your slide was recoverable.
I'm a car guy myself. Like you, I insist on manual transmissions with rear wheel drive. I've been to driving schools, read extensively about how suspension affects handling dynamics, and turned a few wrenches in my time. Even with all that, I try to remain humble about my own driving abilities and the fact that while I enjoy it, I don't drive professionally, so I shouldn't expect professional results.
Your comments about skid recovery apply to the input controls that are available to you as the driver. They don't apply to the input controls available to the traction control systems in your car. For every subtle detail that you learned about handling using the steering wheel, brake, and clutch, there are equivalents for the systems available to the traction control system, such as individual wheel braking.
Stopping a slide is about controlling rotation. You cannot use the brake to directly rotate the vehicle because you only get one brake pedal. The best use of that brake pedal, as a driver, is in controlling the speed and weight distribution of the automobile. That is the most you can hope for.
"My issue with Mercedes's Traction Control in particular isn't even that it makes drivers lazy. It's that in at least that situation, it can't tell the difference between power-induced oversteer and breaking-induced oversteer. In that situation, it reacted EXACTLY WRONG. It doesn't matter whether the driver is competent or not if the system makes the opposite changes that it should."
The stability program in a Mercedes absolutely knows the difference between power-induced oversteer and braking-induced oversteer. It uses accelerometers, yaw sensors, throttle position sensors, and individual wheel speed sensors to infer your intended direction of travel. Braking the outside rear wheel does transfer weight forward, but it has a far more significant positive effect on correcting rotation because of the asymmetrical application of braking force. Your slide was simply unrecoverable. You think that it was recoverable, but you'll never know for sure. Based on the physics involved, I think you're wrong.
I've tested the limits of these systems myself. My 2006 GTI had ESP. I took it out to a dirt road and explored the limits under slalom conditions and hard turns. These systems are amazing at recovering slides that can be recovered. If I pushed hard enough, I could "break through" to an uncontrollable slide, however. When you "overshoot" your mark, brake, turn, then hit a rumble strip (which significantly reduces available traction) you end up in an unrecoverable slide.
The irony here is that your Mercedes' ESP system didn't almost kill you, you did.
I don't get it. Why is there a giant "Lexus" on the side of the car if Toyota is making this technology?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration. Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW ? The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy…
I'm not sure I'll be able to change your mind about this, but I'd like to express my opinion on your sentiment and leave it at that. I think that maybe you're wrong about a few things here. First and foremost, that your slide was recoverable. I'm a car guy myself. Like you, I insist on manual transmissions with rear wheel drive. I've been to driving schools, read extensively about how suspension affects handling dyna…
^1 Not to say I don't have my issues with the cars -- stuff like a crappy Chinese made iPod interface.
Edit: That video is stunning. Thanks for the share.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration. Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW ? The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy…
I'm not sure I'll be able to change your mind about this, but I'd like to express my opinion on your sentiment and leave it at that. I think that maybe you're wrong about a few things here. First and foremost, that your slide was recoverable. I'm a car guy myself. Like you, I insist on manual transmissions with rear wheel drive. I've been to driving schools, read extensively about how suspension affects handling dyna…
This 6:21 start point shows both (with/without) tests:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I'll be able to change your mind about this, but I'd like to express my opinion on your sentiment and leave it at that. I think that maybe you're wrong about a few things here. First and foremost, that your slide was recoverable. I'm a car guy myself. Like you, I insist on manual transmissions with rear wheel drive. I've been to driving schools, read extensively about how suspension affects handling dyna…
Thanks for offering your opinion. While I want to respect the GP's personal experience, your comments echo my feelings. My favorite part of a Mercedes (and this is surely true for other premier makes) is that everything seems to have been thought out and engineered ^1. And with my own personal experience of the cars TCS, I felt it very hard to believe that the Mercedes TCS would be so simplistic. ^1 Not to say I don'…
Alerting driver of potential pedestrian = good Automatically making a decision (that the human is better at making) and potentially causing an accident due to a random sudden stop = bad
Are you saying it's worse to potentially cause an accident due to the sudden stop than to certainly have an accident as you run someone/thing over? I'm not sure I agree with you there.