Variant TDI said:
Are you saying that any form of magic would have prevented that moose from mating with that pole?
Because I seriously doubt it.
Traction Control can only control the traction that's there.
All those doohickeys do is raise the confidence level, which raises the speed, which puts you just as close to the edge of safety as you were when you knew that car control was your responsibility.
The only difference will be how fast you're going when the computer fails to save you.
Hear hear. I hold a lot of opinions in a similar vein, that vein being "Technology is great, but as tech distances us from our responsibilities we're going to get more lax and therefore no net increase in safety."
ABS, Traction Control, Stability Control; basically, anything that "does it for you" with regards to keeping your driving safe is a thing to be wary of, in my opinion. I can and have even extended this out to such things as limited slip differentials and, yes, even the automatic transmission. Driving requires attention, skill and both hands. If you start lowering the skill and attention requirements, you're automatically making the entire act much more unsafe.
Now, I am not saying that any of these are necessarily "bad" things. All of them are quite the opposite, they are very good things when applied without a loss of responsibility in the driver's hands. Used properly in the hands of an experienced driver who is paying attention, traction control practically guarantees that you will never get stuck again, and that your chances of recovering from the beginnings of a spin out will increase several times over. Likewise, used properly by a skilled, attentive driver, ABS will prevent or severely lessen "quick response" accidents. But too many people have come to rely absolutely on the fact that they have the all-powerful "ABS brakes" to keep them out of an accident; they don't follow proper rules for following distances behind another vehicle, they drive more aggressively, they react more slowly and punch the brakes harder because they won't lock up and lose control like they would have before. Same for the traction control, people have come to treat it like some kind of magical charm against loss of traction, and therefore will drive more aggressively than the situation demands.
Making all this equipment standard on all new cars won't make the roads any safer.
Now, why does this not apply to such things as seat belts, air bags (Though I am kinda leery of filling the blasted things with airbags for every reason), or disc brakes?
Disc brakes are the easiest to handle: They address a design flaw that, while not fatal under any but extreme circumstances, is significant. Namely, that of brake overheating. While this may or may not have been the original intention behind their creation, it nonetheless makes them completely worthy of being standard. Drum brakes are fairly easy to overheat even in fairly "normal" usage, especially in warmer climates or very compact vehicles (which tends to place them in close proximity to either the engine or the exhaust system). The large amount of metal involved in a drum and the face that the actual braking surface is never applied to cooling air makes them inherently more prone to retaining the heat generated by braking friction. This heating is made even more pronounced by the fact that the braking surface of a drum is used in common by both friction pads. Overheated drums will crack, warp, and have on occasion even outright shattered without forewarning. Enter the disc brake. Less metal, easier to ventilate, braking surfaces are directly exposed to cooling air, and the two friction pads do not share a common braking face/surface. These improvements don't take any responsibility away from the common driver with regards to his own safety, but they do give the driver much more repeatability and reliability with regards to safety performance. The driver can now drive with more peace of mind, knowing that when he or she needs the brakes they
will perform as expected.
It's an interesting thing to note that for a given vehicle weight, properly sized drum brakes will actually stop the car more quickly than disc brakes, due to the much, much larger surface area to which friction can be applied. This would be the primary reason why heavy vehicles persist in using drum brakes on all four (six, eight, whatever) wheels, though there is a trend toward fitting them with discs to prevent the overheating issues mentioned above.
Seat belts, air bags? Grey area. In an ideal world, they wouldn't be necessary. However, there are things that are out of the realm of any reasonable claim of driver responsibility: that tree that just happened to come crashing down right in front of you, the other driver who out of nowhere slammed into your car, runaway vehicles, and other such things. None of these cases are instances where the driver in question could really do much of anything to prevent the accident, even with proper attention and skill. Sometimes things just stack up too far against someone. In these instances, it's good to have something else "watching out for you." With seatbelts or airbags (Or crumple zones, or any other "last ditch" safety system) you aren't giving up your responsibility as a driver, you're covering bases on the times when those responsibilities just aren't enough. If they were marketed as such, I wouldn't have any problem with them at all. Instead they are generally tagged as being designed to keep you comfortable and safe no matter what happened, no thought required on your part.
Yikes that's a soapbox rant, I'll be slinking off now...
