Just come on up north in a few months and go practice on a frozen lake. You’ll get the hang of it pretty fast. You can’t be thinking about this stuff in a skid, it has to be instinct, so practice.
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If they still have drivers ed In the schools that should be included.
Mostly summer school because the teachers are free. Don’t go driving on the lakes in July. I took my test in a January blizzard in our good ole 61 Merc. After the parking part on a hill, I had to get out and clear the rear window of snow so I could see. Still got a 94.
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If you have snow and a 93 Lumina that isn’t all rusted you’re doing well! The Lumina was one of the safest cars tested in terms of front crash structure strength in the mid 90s by IIHS. A Monte Carlo was crashed in to a Ford Windstar at 45MPH in a test and the Windstar didn’t hold up well despite being much heavier.
Then let off on the brakes. Full brakes takes less than 1/2 a second. Full steering to one side takes over about 1 second. Let off once the steering wheel is turned.
Ford had in on their trucks until 1996. It was a release only system. If your drum brakes locked up as they often can, the RABS could release them and prevent a roll over disaster. In 1997 and the 10th gen F series they had 4 wheel ABS and they lowered the front end frame so it wouldn’t override a car in a front end collision. It made it much safer for others but possibly less safe than the original 9th gen for the person in the truck. The 10th gen has one of the worst ratings for 40 MPH moderate overlap by the IIHS. But hey it has ABS that makes it safer right?
The auto industry and the insurance industries probably have different goals. The auto industry wants to make vehicles safer, but they want to have a lot of accidents and have the vehicles expensive to repair so that people have to buy new ones. The insurance industry wants to reduce the number of accidents to not have to pay for repairing so many cars. Rear ABS seems like an auto industry thing to reduce roll over accidents and save lives. Full ABS seems like an insurance industry mandate to reduce crashes even if it makes trucks more likely to roll over and kill someone.
Yes it it has to be instinct!
Any vehicle with properly adjusted brakes and matching tires will lockup the front wheels first. Then the back lock up with a bit more pressure. This difference has to be enough that the front will still lock up first on dry asphalt when the shift in weight from the rear to the front during hard braking is at its most. On snow when there is more weight on the rear wheels the front should always lock up first. This is why you can’t test brakes for this problem on snow. You can go on the Internet and see Russian dashcam crash videos of real wheels locking up from badly maintained brakes or incorrect tires. In those videos when there is a highway crash every once in a while there will be a hard braking incident and then you’ll see a car suddenly go sideways and crash.
What I don’t know is if in 4 wheel ABS vehicles if they reduced the difference in braking between the front and rear because they’re expecting the ABS to ensure that the real wheels don’t skid. So pulling the fuse on the ABS to turn it off may not have the same effect as actually driving a pre front wheel ABS vehicle.
You never go full steering lock in an accident. Plus it does not matter how fast you spin the wheel, the time to spin the wheel about 700 degrees plus the reaction of the polar rotational inertial of the vehicle plus the tractive delay of the tire adds up to far more than a second. Releasing the brake in 1/2 less time won’t help that problem.
Not allowing wheel lock at all means the steering inputs you do apply, far smaller than 700 degrees, need to adjust the direction of the vehicle far less.
Front wheel lock first in a skid is mandated by federal standard, FMVSS135 and has been in prior specs for 50 years. ABS has been mandated since 2001 and vehicle stability control since 2012.
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You truly live in an alternate reality, to put it nicely.
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Agree 100%. :
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Can we agree that the damage caused in a small collision and/or the cost to repair it has gone up immensely?
The argument from the auto makers is somewhat along the lines of the vehicle is designed to be destroyed to protect you. The auto makers had the 5 MPH no damage or limited damage federal standard from the 80s repealed. Now it is only 2.5 MPH in to a solid barrier must not cause damage beyond the bumper mounts. There is no requirement to have anything behind the plastic bumper on the front sides of vehicles. Anything other than a car is exempt from the 2.5 MPH standard.
If you post on a discussion forum about small collision damage in modern vehicles, a bunch of people will respond saying that the vehicle is designed to protect you and destroy itself. Then they’ll reference how bad safety was in the 60s to back up their argument.
The 5 mph standard was rolled back because the Insurance Institute found it actually cost more than it saved which was the original criteria for the passing of the regulation. The occurrence of 5 mph accidents was so low as to be insignificant to the overall cost of insuring the cars.
The GM division I worked for that made those bumper shocks was quite unhappy the standard was rolled back to 2.5 mph. Our division made a TON of money on bumper shocks.
Regulation of emissions from paint booths (we all breathe the same air!) and inflation are prime contributors as are the many (expensive) airbags that deploy to prevent injury in a collision and the more expensive to produce load-limiting seatbelt assemblies (see what I did there??)
And they would be correct.
Finally… Interesting how you deflected the discussion away from skids…
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You changed the topic to safety instead of what to do in a skid like I did? I doubt that load limiting seat belts are significantly more expensive to produce though.
Since we’re already off topic, why did your division lose money when the standard was rolled back to 2.5 mph? GM was still free to continue to use the 5 mph standard.
Changing the topic to why I’m a troll seems to be perfectly acceptable. Bringing up how dangerous driving can be and how modern cars (or up to 2012 at least) may not be safer at highway speeds seems to have upset things.
Anyway I’m perfectly happy to talk about skids. We just lost an adult driver and 3 high school students here recently when a Chrysler Pacifica went across the grass divider on the Interstate in the rain and hit a semi, which then also went across the divider and rolled over causing injury to the semi’s passenger. I suspect that they had tires with less tread on the rear that caused a real wheel hydroplane. They raised the speed limit to 70 even on sections of Interstate that do not have vehicle barriers in the middle. Someone I know got new front tires put on at Walmart and the half worn out rear tires were not rotated to the front. It’s really no surprise that these kinds of accidents happen if a tire shop doesn’t even recommend rotating the tires. If a rear wheels only hydroplane happens there isn’t really anything you can do. If the car has ESC* that may save the day. You can’t turn the steering wheel fast enough at highway speeds to correct it. If your foot is already on the brake and you don’t have front ABS then you can lock up the front wheels and at least keep the car going mostly straight ahead even if it rotates sideways.
Is talking about having the correct tires to prevent a skid in the first place off topic?
Here watch some hydroplane crash videos. They should show these in drivers ed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwH_Y_C9ePQ I would never have been aware of what a rear wheel hydroplane is if I hadn’t researched things on my own! Jump ahead to 1:54 to see what likely killed the 4 people from my area.
-* ESC is electronic stability control for those who may not know. If the vehicle makes an uncommanded turn left or right, the the ESC equipped ABS will apply the brake on the opposite wheel to help straighten the car out.
Yeah, I did. Did you not get the joke?
Extra stitching costs money, extra webbing costs money, break-away clutches cost money, none of which are present in the old-style belts so I’m sure your doubts are incorrect.
We stopped producing a profitable product because the bumper shocks were no longer needed to meet 2.5 mph. GM did not continue the 5 mph standard for the same reason the regs were rolled back… It did not save their customers any money. The lighter weight 2.5 mpg crash protection reduced the cars’ weight, reduced polar moment of inertia and thus improved handling and EPA mpgs.
Conjecture on your part. No facts in evidence. You could have just as easily attributed it to worn tires on a 4 corners, old tires, or driver error…again without evidence.
More than a few posters here have complained about tire shops refusing to put new tires on the rear instead of the front of their FWD cars so your single example is just that…one single example.
You would, again, be wrong. Race drivers do this all the time at much higher speeds in the dry and in the rain. Typical drivers (not racing or test drivers) can turn the wheel at over 500 degrees per second which is plenty fast enough to catch a skid IF they feel it and react early enough. ESC can easily beat the average driver, if installed.
Tires are serious business. Cheap tires are no bargain. Those 4 little black spots on the ground are the only things between you and death. If the wear bars are flush with the tread or if the tires are more than 6 years old (in hot climates) or 10 years old (in cooler climates) they should be replaced no matter HOW much tread depth they have left. Tires get harder and harder the longer they are out of the mold and the more heat cycles they receive. If you can’t make a dent in the tread rubber with your fingernail the tires need to be replaced. If in doubt, change 'em out.
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Death rates have dropped constantly during that period, you have yet to supply one fact to support your claims.
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I will probably get flagged again but if the Invisible Snowman. provided any facts they are like the first half of his user name. 
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Can we agree that even if one fact is true, that does not mean your conspiracy theory is true?
Because we generally don’t appreciate wild conspiracy theories backed up by, well, nothing. You have, in a very short time, gained a reputation for spouting nonsensical conclusions that you have made based, apparently, on nothing more than discovering a fact and then deciding what that means based on nothing more than your own intuition. You’ve cast yourself as somehow being smarter and more knowledgeable than the experts, some of whom post on this forum, without giving us any indication that you have any sort of education or training to back your false facts up.
And the biggest problem is that the nonsense you’re peddling involves matters of safety that can kill people. You shouldn’t be surprised to receive a chilly response when you give false, baseless information that can cause wrecks to anyone reading this forum.
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+1
Having an opinion is fine. However, when that opinion includes the posting of misinformation that has the potential to harm others, most of us don’t think that it’s okay.
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I tried to make a new topic for discussing this things that are off topic in thread like this but they didn’t want it. Why not post something like this in my seat belt load limiter thread instead of bringing this off topic? At least I started that topic. Are you disagreeing with what I said about locking up the brakes in a non ABS vehicle, or referencing the other things? If you disagree with something why not reference what it was? This is just a personal attack since you’re not even referencing what it is you’re referring to. It’s just you saying that I claim to know more than the experts and due to some other things I have said everything else I say must be wrong.
Anyway trying to stay on topic: Does anyone have experience with trying to lock up the brakes with ABS? I assume it would somewhat reduce how much the vehicle moves forward when sliding. In some of those hydroplane incident videos I linked to above it looks like some cars or drivers were able to recover without going off the road, despite rotating more than 90 degrees.
I have only experienced ABS in snow, double edge sword, though I usually leave plenty of stopping room so it has not been adverse for me, and is probably great for many drivers, thus the mandate.
“The advantage of ABS
In braking situations where the wheels on a non-ABS
equipped vehicle would lock up, ABS will generally provide
shorter controlled stopping distance. On some surfaces
such as gravel or a skim of snow, ABS braking distance can
be longer, but drivers retain the ABS advantage: steering
control”
Yes, I have. They don’t lock.
If ABS brakes lock they are broken. Period. ABS by design, reduces brake pressure at each individual wheel and then reapplies pressure 8 to 20 times a second to keep the wheels rotating.
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Well I’m just glad I got four new tires last week in preparation for winter, even though I don’t plan to go anywhere. I’m not a big fan of ABS but I know some people need it. We’ve also had the discussion of front versus rear before and it usually ends in a draw, but I give up and just get four new tires.
I think we can probably do without the parent-child lectures though or at least reduce the insults. Like we did in journalism, go back and edit out all the extraneous stuff and you can reduce a page to a few lines. Still when I look back, stuff that we never would have dared to believe in the 60’s, we find how naïve we were. Evil people exist, and wild claims or not we best not pretend they don’t.
I’ve experienced the ABS activating on hard packed, basically melted and re-frozen snow. I had enough time to let off the brakes and apply them more gently, as the ABS wasn’t doing a real fantastic job of slowing the vehicle….lots of grinding sounds and brake pedal pulsation. In that instance, I preferred no ABS to the vehicle being equipped with it. However, I wasn’t trying to turn at all and I actually had enough time to stop, I was just braking too hard for the situation. The vehicle had way less braking traction than acceleration traction in that case. Conditions really caught me off guard. Have never experienced ABS in a turn.
If it has snowed recently, I usually brake and accelerate a little harder than normal in the driveway and side roads to test the traction. On that day, I discovered the traction was waaaay less on the more travelled, hard packed roads. Lesson learned!
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