But I honed my non-ABS driving in my teenage years, pre-ABS (for most cars at the time), on rural dirt roads, and on roads with constant snow and ice, and driving on frozen lakes.
Of course, if you disable ABS, you may end up without any form of real differential, as many cars use ediff tech, which is horrible, so I now have to also vet for a true hardware, non-open diff.
Sad.
For skilled drivers, ABS extends braking distance.
What ABS does, is let a driver mash the pedal on full, and still steer around obstacles. Something a skilled driver can still do.
One problem with these tests, is that if you disable ABS on some cars, the proportioning valve is still set to 50/50, front/rear, meaning you start to lose traction on the rear wheels, and skid. This causes a loss of control, and reduced braking power.
Cars prior to ABS has the capability to adjust rear brake pressure by weight, a typical default of 70/30.
Some card have ABS controllers which you can disable ABS functionality, but still retain proportioning control. Cars with proper diffs are often like this.
Check out https://youtu.be/ERE9EtOWZMU if you’re interested.
ABS is about steering when people slam the brake pedal down, it is not about improving braking distance.
Outside of how it doesn't help on pavement, it is a absolute disaster on gravel, and deep snow.
For example, on gravel if you lock up the brakes, you dig in. Gravel builds in front of the tire, and your tire sinks. ABS won't allow this, and so on gravel I can stop from high speed fast, while ABS actively works to deny my ability to stop.
On snow, if you briefly lock up the brakes, snow builds in front of the wheel. You can then spin the wheels to turn, let up, and the car will instantly take off in a new direction. ABS actively prevents this.
ABS was never, ever designed to reduce braking distance. It was designed to allow people to steer while braking.
Gravel and snow I understand - but at least for me are pretty big exceptions.
If I take a corner in the rain at speed in my 280hp FWD hot hatch, will be fine cuz the back is pretty easy to "feel."
In a FWD ford taurus though that would be terrifying.
It's not by any means a fast car. Heavy, FWD, and four cylinders. Yet, it's a bit of an art to get up to speed well with it.
I'm talking about the laughably slow 0-60 time (~7s) in the rain, especially on an incline!
That's only around 175 HP...
My 460 HP Mustang will easily spin when it's warm and dry; it doesn't take much. Most tires/surfaces aren't that good
The traction control in my car is more than happy to let me toss the car around any which way as long as I'm not giving it some sort of input that I want it to be doing something else. It seems to respond not to "the car is doing something potentially bad" but "there's a mismatch between what the driver is commanding and what the car is doing".
Steer into a spin and I can keep the car spinning, steer a bit against it and I can skid it sideways, little-left-little-brake-no-brake-snap-right and I'm tossing the car around 180 degrees. The only point it will cut in is if, during one of these, I point the wheel some direction and hit the gas indicating I want to be going that way now--it will correct the skid/slid/spin and get the car going that direction.
I have a display up during the winter that shows TCS activation and individual wheel slippage so I know when I'm driving beyond the limits of my actual traction. In 6 or 7 years of driving it in Canadian winters really the only time I ever see it cutting in is getting the car moving from stopped on ice.
A while ago I was considering replacing my 2004, but I see it's worthwhile to hold on
> turn off the forward collision warning so it doesn't scare the shit out of me when I'm going through the drive through
See, now we're talking. Every time I have a rental car it's like a waiting game to see if there's some sensor that's going to scream at me while I'm on a highway and concentrating. 100% agree that this paradigm could (and should) be rethought.
And this is why I'll never own a car newer than 2012 or so (give or take a few years depending on brand).
> And this is why I'll never own a car newer than 2012 or so (give or take a few years depending on brand).
Non sequitur.
I was driving a 2018(?) Golf GTI with automatic braking on an extremely hilly road. The car handled fantastically, and was an absolute joy to drive on twisty roads... until the automatic braking kicked in because it detected the sudden sharp rise of the road in front of me as a vehicle I was about to collide with due to my speed.
It only happened for about a second, but it scared the daylights out of me.
I sold it back to the dealership a few months into lockdowns due to car prices going nuts, but that episode of random braking was a factor for me as well (not to say it was all bad; it saved me from a few fender benders too).
I always wondered why my neighbor's car always start at high revs (it's loud!) before dropping down after a minute (very quiet). Always startled me in the morning.