First, I don’t think the government should be blamed for a car maker doing a poor implementation of a safety feature.
Haven’t Mercedes and other car makers been doing this stuff for many years before it was required?
I haven’t seen any complaints of them being a driving hazard.
I definitely wouldn’t want a system that can throttle the engine down to idle, that’s too aggressive.
A system that gives a limited helping hand and reacts faster than the driver can to take a step back from the cliff makes more sense.
Some systems inactivate a cylinder or two, but no more.
I plan to hang on to my non VSC-ABS-TPMS etc. car as long as I can.
“Studies have shown that stability control reduces accidents, so I’m not complaining about it, unlike many of you. If I’m going around a curve on a snowy road and I see a car driven a little too fast by a teenager coming from the other direction, I’m very much in favor of that car having stability control.”
+1
Although some forum members have an automatic knee-jerk reaction that anything mandated by the federal government has to be inherently wrong-headed, the private Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that ESC reduces the risk of fatal single-vehicle wrecks by 56% and fatal multiple-vehicle crashes by 32%.
The IIHS supports anything that can reduce payouts for their member insurance companies, so if they are in favor of it, I believe that this is evidence that properly-implemented electronic safety aids are effective in reducing the accident rate. Just because Kia and–possibly–a few other mfrs have done a poor job of implementing it, that does not make the concept of ESC invalid.
VDCdriver Exactly! I have driven other vehicles with TC/ESC where I could barely tell it had engaged. I agree that apparently KIA dropped the ball on their version.
ok4450 I have considered a throttle by wire glitch. Possibly the TBW and TC/ESC were engaged in a pi**ing contest.
VDCDriver:
Stability control, et. al are band-aids applied to compensate for lack of driving skill. While they show short-run benefits–they “stem the bleeding”–they have the long-run consequence of dumbing down the 50th percentile driver yet further, so that, eventually, there is a learned dependency, and Mr 50% simply cannot drive with an acceptable level of safety without.
The smart thing to do is to train drivers with the bare minimum of overrides…and once skill is developed, THEN add in aides to driving (for convenience). That avoids the dumbing-down effect.