Yes I remember in college succinct is the best, one professor said take out every other word then rewrite it before you turn it in!
Well, in truth, nobody needs ABS, as long as they are capable of applying and releasing the brake 20 times per second, and doing it on individual wheels, as needed. I humbly admit that I am not capable of that type of fancy footwork, but I am in absolute awe of the folks who can do it.
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Yeah I do that too. That’s what the State Patrol suggests. Sometimes it is really hard to know how slick the surface is. I don’t try to replicate 20,000 pulses of ABS but I do like to have the control to take evasive action that sometimes ABS does not provide. I always have an alternate maneuver in mind if braking fails.
We have a hill with a stop sign at the bottom. The portion by the stop sign is usually highly polished ice. ABS seldom works as well as creeping down the hill, and if you can’t stop, you simply put the car into a sideways skid to avoid traffic on the cross road. Just sitting there with you foot on the brake with the ABS going nuts as you continue to move to and through the stop sign is really not a fantastic option for collision avoidance. Lots of situations are different though.
As far as new tires on front or rear, like I said I gave up and just get four at a time. But sometimes in snow, it is more important to go than to stop. If you don’t keep going you will be stuck in the road. Stopping or sliding is not an issue especially with FWD.
huh, what? please explain.
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Folks talk about ABS as being so important to stopping, and good rear tires being so important for avoiding losing traction and sliding. My point was in winter driving, if you are driving on a snow covered road, keeping going is more of an issue than being able to stop. In fact if you don’t continue down the road at a 30-40 mph clip, you will be stuck in the middle of the highway. Driving in the city is different than out in the country.
Guess you had to be there. If you once get going, keep going, don’t stop, and be glad for good tires on the drive wheels.
I thought you were saying that if you had FWD you would not have a problem stopping on snow and ice.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who think when the pedal gets hard while ABS is activated, the wheels are locked up. They equate lack of pedal travel with lack of wheel rotation for some reason.
Well, I’d take a WRC driver over ABS any day of the week, but those guys don’t usually drive for Uber. 
Back in the pre-ABS days you could threshold brake. Took some practice and education to understand how to do it, but once you learned you could brake a lot better than most people. No, you couldn’t do it for all 4 brakes (although I remember the original WRX STi had a brake bias switch that you could shift forward and back), but you could still manually get out of the skid.
Haven’t had to threshold brake in a couple of decades now, so I’m sure those skills have atrophied.
Ah, yes, but you can’t get differential braking from side to side! 
ABS can handle the right side on sand and the left on dry pavement without spinning the car better than even a WRC driver could. In the early days of ABS it could be matched and even bested by very good drivers but has been a long time since that was true.
Many road racing series now use ABS in the cars. The WRC has used ABS in their cars since 2004…I was surprised by that myself. The drivers have learned to ride the ABS all the way into the apex. Makes them faster and doesn’t flat spot the tires.
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100% to Mustangman’s replies.
I had the opportunity to drive Sheriff’s department cars on a closed course, the last maneuver was to drive into a spot marked by cones at speed then stand on the brakes and let the ABS take over.
Straight, fully controlled stop, no lockup.
Front wheel lockup=loss of steering.
Rear wheel lockup=rear end swings one way or the other.
I have experienced both with pre-ABS systems.
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While I agree, the WRC driver is also less likely to get into a situation where only ABS/TCS can save you. I’m all in on assist technology that works well, as ABS does, but I am not so enthusiastic about the idea of just assuming the car will rescue you from any stupid decisions you might make.
In other words, just because you have ABS/TCS/4WD/etc does not mean that it’s perfectly fine to bomb down an ice covered highway at 70mph on bald, mismatched tires and expect the car to save you from your own stupidity.
And that’s not just old-man-newfangled-hatin’. I read a book years ago which covered experiments that showed that as people perceive something to be safer, they alter their behavior to up the risk. People have a baseline of risk they’re comfortable with, and if they start to feel that the situation is safer, they think that means they can be more risky without consequence.
For instance, nice, wide, open roads with easy visibility, even through urban centers, led to people driving faster along them, putting pedestrians and others at risk. But if you constrict the roads by having the sidewalks jut out at intervals, or put vegetation close to the pavement, so that everything feels more closed in, they feel the inherent risk is higher, and slow down as a result.
In other words, yeah, ABS is absolutely better than a human at braking without locking up the wheels, but if that leads to the human figuring he can up his speed by 20mph on ice because the machine will save him, we end up not actually getting safer and possibly going backwards on the safety scale.
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Maybe it is better to maintain the ignorance that surrounds ABS/TCS/ESC systems? Keeps this increased risky behavior to a minimum, maybe? The argument could apply to safety belts and airbags, too.
I don’t know the answer. I generally tend towards the “knowledge is power” side.
My anecdotal experience is that kids (and adults, too!) that we’ve taught to autocross and drive track days seem to have fewer or more minor accidents once they understand how the car reacts with these systems at the limits of the car’s abilities. What would be an overwhelming emergency event to an un-practiced driver becomes mostly a non-event to someone who has learned proper car control with and without the “nannies.”
The video posted a while back in this thread of people losing control… how many overcorrected and made the problem worse?
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I have 2 similar small cars that I regularly drive, a 2004 front wheel drive automatic w/o ABS and a 2005 stick shift rear wheel drive with ABS, traction control and all the bells and whistles.
In snow, the 2005 front wheel drive is significantly better to “get going”, the 2005 with ABS is significantly better when stopping w/o a skid but each requires very different techniques to avoid and pull out of a skid.
However, since neither car can be relied on to hold traction in slippery conditions, my bottom line is to stay warm and dry and keep the cars and my butt parked for an hour or two until the plow boys can clear the roads or the water receeds.
No muss, no fuss and more important, no insurance claims. 
Well I do, which is why I should be running the world.
Nah, I don’t. But I do suspect that better driver training and better enforcement of driver behavior would help. I 100% agree about autocross. I’ve said for probably 20 years now that autocross should be part of driver’s ed. And part of the on the road test. We should require our drivers to be able to do more than parallel park and not run stop signs on the tests.
They’re going to be driving a 2,000+ pound death machine inches away from other cars and pedestrians. They should absolutely have to prove that they can handle it.
And then once they prove it and get their license there should be retests every X-years (5 seems reasonable), and cops should be watching for more dangerous driving behavior than simply doing 10 over. Tailgating, red light running, weaving in and out of traffic - all of which I’ve seen an astonishing amount of especially since the pandemic shutdowns started - should all be prioritized over simple speeding, for one.
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I think that a lot of people think that way and trust the car a lot more than they should.
Yeah. We’re especially seeing that with Tesla’s “full self driving autopilot” BS. People are buying into the marketing hype and missing the part where they explain that “full self driving” isn’t, and you still need to pay attention to the car at all times. There have even been some stupidity overachievers who do things like read books or take naps in the back seat while the car drives.
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Yep I blame most of it on the sales hype not only for tesla but others like the high mileage lubricants gauges to tell when to add oil or how many miles to empty ETC far to many people trust the car to be right and never bother to check anything till it is to late.
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If ABS has been mandated since 2001 how did we have two 2004 PT Cruisers and one 2005 in the family, all without ABS?
Despiteothers experience my 2004 as one of the most reliable cars Iver owned with only one repair, a drivers side heel bearing, in the 7 and one half years I owned it before an idiot totaled it while talking on a cell phone and turning left and looking right.
ABS became mandatory in the USA in 2013, I think. It was a rare case of a beneficial safety system becoming mandatory after it was already being installed universally, as the last car that didn’t come with ABS was a few years before that. I lack the time to do the research, but I’d not be surprised if the IIHS got involved before it became legally required, maybe refusing to give a good safety score to any car without ABS.
Europe made it mandatory many years before we did, and I’m fuzzy on this but I think it was mandatory on commercial trucks long before it was required on private cars.
I doubt most drivers even know if their car has ABS or not. Some of the newer, more obvious (maybe you could say intrusive, even) tech (lane departure, blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise), I can see people learning to depend on that to keep them out of trouble.
I dunno, I fail to see the fixation on ABS. It should be activated rarely. If you come to a stop sign or traffic light and need ABS, you didn’t anticipate the stop. If you are on the highway and your tires break, you are going too fast for the road surface. If you need it to stop in an emergency, you likely are following too close.
I very rarely have my ABS activated. Sometimes I’ll do it at a stop sign just to test if it still works or not. I’ve driven a lot on rural roads and in the big city and small city. Rarely does it activate. Once on the freeway in the big city there was a patch of black ice and cars in front came to an abrupt stop. I hit the brakes on my non-ABS car, slid straight a little, let up, re-applied, etc. No problem thanks to being awake and 4 wheel disc brakes.
What are some of these situations you found yourself in where ABS provided that cushion of safety? Searching my memory banks, I’m coming up with few situations myself.
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