Stability control in SUV's

You can always tell around here who got their first 4x4, first snowfall and they are gone, in the ditch into parked cars, on top of snowbanks. Why? the

I was on a trail run with a porsche. That thing was amazing. He build up jeeps with very experienced drivers were hard pressed to better it on some of the obsticles Pat

Mercedes makes a pretty decent one too:

Rule #35 "That which does not kill you, has made a huge tactical error"

it still does for some companies. i get it on 3 of my vehicles which have abs, but not the oldest which doesn't have abs.

And the new technology allows them to do more kinds of stupid things, and get deeper into each kind of stupidity, without getting hurt.

Jim

Honestly I'm suprised it isn't happening already. Computers are sophisticated enough, and the rf technology is commercially avaialable now.

Cops will be able to either disable a vehicle on the fly by pinging it, or will be able to govern maximum speed for all vehicles in some region of roadway. Once they can do this, it will become of of those 'luxury once tasted becomes a necessity' for them.

They'd *have* to make con-controllable vehicles illegal.

This is sort of like the flap that happened when the phone company went to packet transmission. The cops could no longer do analog taps so they had to scramble to get the free backdoor available again.

Jim

...right away. Like when we bought our 4WD "brush truck" (firetruck built onto a pickup truck), the arguments were long and tedious about tires. We finally bought pretty aggressive mud tires, and of course, the first spring fire we had, it got buried pretty deep.

You can get stuck a LOT further in with a 4WD and good tires, which just means you need a longer cable on the winch to get you out.

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:02:53 GMT, the inscrutable "Peter Grey" spake:

Let's be realistic. Can we acknowledge that most people can't drive, and that they can hardly -steer- the darned things, even at -low- rates of speed. I used to wrench at a body shop, and the insurance agents (and our clients) came up with some doozies.

The trend at one time was to make a monster big CPU that did all of the car jobs. Now the trend is to have

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:10:54 -0500, Gene Kearns vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

But the SUVs are beong sold as if they are Porsches...

I missed some of these stories, but they usually are variations of the person with the two wheel drive vehicle getting into and out of the places the four wheeler got stuck. Like my friend who drove up Market Street, going from Ballard to the U (in Seattle) and getting to the top of the hill and noticing _then_, the sign "road closed due to snow." Not 4x4, just a reliable Toyota truck and a driver who knew how to drive in snow.

Or the time the early morning bible study met at the local diner. The guys who made it were the old guys driving sedans, except for the one guy with his ex-postal truck with it's skinny tires. :)

tschus

I know for a fact that as soon as I put chains on my little POS toyota truck, it really can go pretty much anywhere during a storm.

I keep telling myself to put snow tires on it some fall, but I never do.

Jim

Exactly. People feel empowered by techonology beyond it's merits and don't understand it's limitations.

I never stated that the end user needs to understand the physics of ABS, but they do still need to understand the ABS will not enable one to stop on a sheet of ice. Proper speeds and following distances are still required.

In general, I think that the majority of the people who have their license should probably have it revoked. The attentiveness, and just general regard, that most drives display will on the road is appalling. There are plenty of fine drivers on the road, but there are twice as many that are passable or just plain bad.

OK, stop! Stationary vehicles are not unsafe, and any vehicle in motion is unsafe under certain conditions. The conditions that define an unsafe region include the skill of the operator.

Some vehicles are more capable than others, but it's possible to get in trouble with any vehicle, be it a forklift, bicycle, sedan or SUV.

TV ads do encourage unsafe operation, faintly discouraged in transient fine print, because it sells. The vehicles aren't unsafe, it's the drivers that expect the vehicle to safely accomodate being operated by an unskilled and rambunctious fool. Driving off-road in mud, slick, ice, snow and whatever is not rocket science, skill is gained with experience that can't be instantly bought on credit.

Stabiility control is a neat technological improvement. There will be adverts that further encourage fools to think they can drive beyond their ability under any condx, but the yaw sensor stability control looks like a good thing to me.

The problem IS NOT THE VEHICLE. It is the idiot behind the wheel who thinks that you should be able to drive an OFF-ROAD equipped vehicle like you drive a Porsche. 99.9% of rollovers are caused by people who try to corner or turn at an unsafe speed. Most of then think that a 3 ton Suburban with a higher center of gravity should be able to corner like an Indy car, even with all the warning stickers telling them it won't. I have owned a LOT of 4x4s and other high COG vehicles and NEVER had a problem with them being unstable, simply because I know that they are not designed to do a 90 degree turn at 60 mph.

Q: How do you tell if an SUV has stability control?

A: If it's upside down in the pucker brush it doesn't have stability control. If it's right side up in the pucker brush it does.

I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show jim rozen wrote back on 19 Feb 2005 14:03:30 -0800 in rec.crafts.metalworking :

The friend in question was a very good driver, whom I trusted explicitly, even when their medical condition trashed their depth perception and vision to the right side. Heck, I'd rather ride with them under those conditions [they've gotten better since then], than with some of my "bi-optically perceptive" friends.

tschus pyotr