I used to think the same way, physics is physics and ABS doesn't add grip. But then a newspaper put a kid from our F1600 series to the test (meaning he is in the 99th percentile in terms of driving ability) and he couldn't outbrake an identical car with ABS in a straight line on dry pavement. In fact ABS did better every time.

So that's the reality, and there's no point in being ideologically attached to a notion based purely on theory when reality says something else entirely. So we have to ask ourselves what's wrong with the theory of ABS being no better than a skilled driver. I have some ideas, but I'll let you ponder it for yourself first.

Having played with this an AU Ford with and without ABS is at least 3 metres shorter without ABS than with from 100kmh. And some older models that the pedal disapears with ABS a lot further.
And one less thing to go wrong. Having raced against a then brand new Porsche with 'racing' ABS it almost took both of us out when it failed and swapped ends along side me at about 200kmh.Or Terry Bosanjak when the ABS failed and sent him into the wall at Amaroo when it failed giving him a dead rock hard pedal.
The other thing with ABS is that some drivers use it as the ultimate braking and when they get in something without ABS they end up off the road as they lock brakes.
As for steering with the ABS it makes no difference with or without and the pedal chattering scares the hell out of the inexperienced.

Fair enough, but does anyone have an explanation?

Additionally, this seems like an unintended consequence ... wheels locked by brakes don't steer very well.

Unfortunatly, that is rarely the case.



True, gravel is one of the few conditions where an ABS equipped car stop slower since a locked wheel actually reduce stopping distance. The locked wheel digs itself down in the gravel or other loose surfaces.



To get the highest deceleration, you want a certain amount of 'brake slip', that is (car speed - wheel speed)/car speed. The coefficient of friction increase up to brake slip values of around 20%, after that it drops off. What the ABS can do better than a driver, is to keep the brake slip close to what is ideal for braking performance. Much like traction control, but in reverse.



Bosch sells such a system to several manufacturers. The system will probably be mandated by EU in a few years, there have been discussions about that already.



I had the ABS activate several times just today, obviously it's a lot dependant on the road condition, and currently, the roads around here are very slippery because of ice.

Modern cars usually have redundancies for most sensors. Also, most if not all sensors are checked for faults during use. For instance, the output of a pressure sensor is checked against the output of another pressure sensors at a specific condition (ignition on, engine off for instance), and during use the output is checked so that it's signal is within a certain limit. No signal from the airmass meter? Well, switch to speed-density based control. No signal from the camshaft sensors, well, switch to non sequential operating mode. No signal from the coolant temperature sensor, well, replace it by a temperature model that uses the air temperature as a starting point. Inconsistent readings from the two throttle position sensors, well, switch to limp home mode where the throttle plate is held in a slightly open position by mechanical springs while the output of the engine is controlled by cylinder deactivation and ignition advance.



Around here everyone has to try braking with and without ABS on a slippery surface before they can get their drivers license, of course, older people that got their drivers license many years ago doesn't have that experience.

I can think of a couple of reasons. First, computers are more precise than humans, and have access to better sensors. Secondly, each of the four wheels is controlled separately, which is something the driver just can't do with one pedal.

I love a good challenge.

Me too, I'll start the van...

My testosterone insists I can outbrake a machine. Any damn machine!

I have never have invoked ABS on a non-snowy/icy road, but then again I only brake hard maybe a couple of times per year total. If one uses sensible following distances and generally drives non-aggressively and defensively hard braking should be extremely infrequent.

More useless aviation stuff - I did the Airbus A330 course a while back and one of the things I really didn't like about Mr Airbus's product was that (the way it was explained at least) they tended to rely too heavily on the reliability & fidelity of the sensors. There didn't seem to be a lot of redundancy in a lot of cases.
It may not be the case, but that's the way the course explained the engineering of the Bus.

This thread is about cars that are so called smarter than their operators. That is why thousands of Toyotas [and other makes also] are being recalled because the electronic gadgetry is faulty or less than satisfactory.

It's already been said, but, in order to brake optimally all 4 wheels need to be at the optimum slip velocity for the individual circumstances of that wheel. You cannot do that with a single control input to all 4 wheels. So the question is can a human control for maximum retardation better using one control than an ABS computer can try and hold each of the 4 wheels at optimum slip?

What makes it trickier is of course that the ABS doesn't actually know what the optimum slip is for a given wheel at any particular time, that is the skill in writing the software and calibrating it.

It turns out that even relatively simple algorithms (eg no wheel shall turn at less than half the speed of any other) can be amazingly effective, although they do have blindspots that need to be worked around. That example in particular is great at high speed but tends to allow you to slide into things with all 4 wheels frantically locking and unlocking at low speed. You add a clause to say if the speed is less than 10 mph then lockups are allowed, and a bit of physics to say that the car can't decelerate at more than x g, so you can see if a wheel has hit a slippy patch, and so on and so forth.

I would think that with ABS an human can outbrake an one channel ABS but a four channel ABS can outbrake an human.

Bjørn

Quote JMA "one channel ABS"

What car has one channel ABS?

Pat

Anti-lock braking is easy. FBW throttle is somewhat harder. FBW steering and brakes, lots harder. None can ever be any better than their design and programming. If the condition wasn't foreseen in the engineering process, the vehicle can't respond to it in a foreseeable manner. Meanwhile, corny adage: It is impossible to know what you don't know.

An automated system on an automobile is no different than any automated system; say, a beer-bottling line. If a rat climbs up on the conveyor, he will have a label pasted on him and a cap stuck on top. That's what's wrong with the SUA cars: whatever they are doing, they are probably only doing only what they were built to do. Which is all any machine can ever do.

In average machines does it better than we do.

thats why we make em.

These days the ABS system usually goes in and control the brake force distribution even before the ABS system activate.

LOL, you make it sound like ABS systems have grown sentient!

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=903109&a...e%257c1%26N%3D0

This is the sort of thing we now do to qualify the ESC in the car. Feed it rubbish inputs and check that the car is still safe. We use a simple stripped down dynamic model of the car to decide if it is still behaving sensibly, roughly as complex as the Car Sim model.

Toyota Deathwish Presentation

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/ap_on_...s_toyota_recall

It doesn't matter what the context is, this isn't going to be good for Toyota.

There's no way out for them. They have to be seen to do everything for safety's sake, but there's no way they can actually do it. Business is compromise.

Their only way out is to get out of the headlines for as long as possible but they can't do that either.

Oh well, at least they weren't making any desireable cars.

Do the Obamunists destroy Honda or Nissan next in their efforts to make GM cars less inferior?

They do it all by themselves.




Ford Pinto - Safety problems and scandal

The model became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcement)[citation needed] allegedly made the car less safe than its contemporaries.
Ford allegedly was aware of this design flaw but refused to pay for a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the monetary value of a human life, in what became known as the Ford Pinto memo.[10][11][12] The characterization of Ford's design decision as gross disregard for human lives in favor of profits led to significant lawsuits. While Ford was acquitted of criminal charges, it lost several million dollars and gained a reputation for manufacturing "the barbecue that seats four."[13]
The NHTSA put pressure on Ford to recall the Pinto, motivated by public outcry and pressure from groups such as Ralph Nader's Center for Auto Safety. Initially the NHTSA did not feel there was sufficient evidence to demand a recall due to incidents of fire. The 27 deaths attributed to Pinto fires is the same number of deaths attributed to a transmission problem in the Pinto, which resulted in 180 total deaths in all Ford vehicles, and in 1974 the NHTSA ruled that the Pinto had no "recallable" problem.[14]
Nevertheless, in 1978 Ford initiated a recall providing a dealer installable "safety kit" that installed plastic protective material over the offending sharp objects, negating the risk of tank puncture.[15]
In 1981, an automobile accident that killed Lilly Gray and badly burned 13-year old Richard Grimshaw resulted in the court case Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.,[16] in which the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million and punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford, partially because Ford had been aware of the design defects before production but had decided against changing the design.
Due to the alleged engineering, safety, and reliability problems, Time magazine included the Pinto on its list of the fifty worst cars of all time.[12]
However, a 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz[17] claimed the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. The number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires, according to Schwartz, was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability.

Knowing that this is a real problem, not an imaginary one, I'm surprised that you should ask that...

Toymotor Australia are still denying it's possible that any of these issues affect Australian cars.

Here's the letter they just got from my sister:

Great stuff, thanks. Two things:

First, this shows the utter fallacy of cost-benefit analysis in automotive safety design. Profit is weighed against human life and limb, with the potential profiteer defining the value of the human life in terms of lawsuit judgements, etc. In other words, not an objective cost-benefit analysis at all. Rational people find this morally repulsive, naturally.

Second, this is a fairly interesting episode in automotive history that doesn't get the attention it deserves, I don't think. Ford had an internal whistile-blower in the form of Harley Copp, a very sharp technical guy who became VP of engineering with supervision over Ford's racing programs, etc. At some point in the '60s he took up safety as his personal crusade, immediately becoming a major PITA to the corporation. He was demoted and eventually forced to retire. When the Orange County Pinto fuel tank lawsuit came along, he was fired up and ready to speak.

Thanks for sharing that, Ray. Fascinating. This goes to what I observed earlier: at some point in time within the organization, the floor mat scenario became its operational reality. People stopped thinking, seeing, and acting independently and objectively, using their own faculties, and adopted this group-think. A corporation has a collective conciousness, a brain if you will -- but a very primitive one, like an ant hill. Consensus is required for any organization to operate effectively, obviously, but here the individuals in the collective stopped acting at anything close to human capability and took on the mentality of the hive, which has no sapience or humanity at all (the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision notwithstanding).

Here is your sister, a sensible and intelligent woman as we can plainly see, telling them in clear and understandable terms that her car has a problem and it is not the floor mats, and they are totally unable to process this information. Instead, and with total irony, they tell her that up is down, east is west, etc. I would surmise that these are all people of normal intelligence, but they sure aren't using it. Obviously, the hive mentality seriously harmed if not effectively blocked the company's ability to recognize and correct the problem.

I simply don't see it that way...

I believe that they know there's a real problem and they are trying to hide it, stoically resting their defence on the floor mats.

When she first got the car, after Dad's death, there were no floor mats. The mats were purchased and then they were not in the car. Dad bought those mats to protect the carpets, he did that with every car he had, so why weren't they in place?

I contend that he's had the problem himself, immediately recognised it, then gone to the dealer and got the 'it's the floor mats' line. So he's taken them out of the car and been driving it around hoping to have the problem so he can go back to them and say, "Bullshit! The mats aren't even in the car! You bastards had better fix this car, it's dangerous!" That was the way he was.

It's only very recently that they invited me to get my sister to put this together. Perhaps they want to continue to sweep it under the carpet, perhaps they have found the answer and want to personally contact the new owner (all car ID details were requested) and take them aside while the car's 'locked down' at the dealers for 'inspection' and they can secretly change whatever's wrong with it.

Time alone will tell. They say they'll get back to me once the matter's investigated.

I couldn't fault you a bit for being suspicious, and either way it amounts to the same thing: the company has refused to address the problem, while in effect blaming the problem on the customers. I can only imagine what it is like to have a company representative look you straight in the face and say you don't grasp the technical intricacies of floor mats. As your sister related in her case, they moved the floor mat into the suspect position and then took a photograph of it for their records. That fairly boggles the mind.

Actually the mother earth article is incorrect. The CBA memo was not applied to the Pinto fuel tank. That memo was written independently and the"document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability." CBA is routinely applied to safety in many spheres, why should it not apply to cars?


The point about the Toyota article is not that they worked with the safety people, all companies do that (eg getting dispensation to delay introducing a mandatory feature so that it ties up better with model cycle plans), the point is the congratulatory air indicates that they were happy to game the system, and proud of it.

I empathise strongly with you and you sister. Added to all the barriers mentioned by yourself and McGuire is the perpetual chestnut of "stupid woman vs automotive repair expert male".

CBA is entirely appropriate in auto safety engineering, but not by automakers because by definition, they are not human beings who experience rational moral judgement. They are amoral corporations, restricted in liability and without ethical bearings. In their version of CBA, the benefit side of their equation is in their bottom line, while the cost is in lives other than their own. What this means is that they can then arrive at the stunning conclusion that sparing human lives are not worth an $11 fuel tank shield. Which is exactly no shit what happened. The company decided it was cheaper to fight the victims in court than to fix the cars.

Unless the competition stands up in defense of Toyota to say what you just said, the pubic will look at it as a behaviour unique to Toyota and a callous disregard for human life.

Back on planet earth somebody in the soulless corporation has to decide whether or not to fit the $11 shield. What methodology do you propose they use?

FWIW, I see very similar, though not nearly in the same vein, corporate communication where I work now. Gaming the system" is a perfect definition and at the end of the day, it all comes down to the public's perception of who they are. I'm clearly not a true capitalist entrepreneur I've learned here. While I'm not able to give the exact details or scenarios, during a training course, one module was specifically about holding the customer over a barrell where you could - obviously not in those words. If the client must have it and can't get it anywhere else, price it accordingly. In the example the selling price was more than doubled. I was rather astounded.

Have no fear, the corporations will look after us and really, they'll do what's in our interest. Honest.

Mitsubishi had a problem a few years back with the wheels studs on their heavy trucks, they were losing front wheels. The company did the sums and decided to do nothing and when a wheel came off and killed a pedestrian the poo hit the fan. A whistle blower released some documents showing what the management decided, the president of Mitsubishi Trucks fell on his sword (or jumped out a window, either way he killed himself ) and Mitsubishi Trucks quickly gained a poor reputation that was only cured by a name change (to Fuso) and an ownership change.

So how long till the first Toyota ritual suicide?

The rational moral judgement of its officers and shareholders, who should be held responsible accordingly for the corporation's actions.

Please don't misunderstand: When I say corporations are amoral, I don't mean immoral, necessarily, or to pass moral judgement. We hold that animals are not capable of good or evil as, lacking that value system, they don't know the difference. The same for a corporation. While we can assume its officers do, a corporation does not know good or evil, right or wrong. It knows only legal vs. illegal, profitable vs. unprofitable. When these constraints on its behavior converge with common ethical standards, a corporation is capable of doing apparent good, but that is not its purpose in doing so. A corporation exists only to obtain a legal profit. It does not exist to provide employment, nor to protect the physical environment or to conserve natural resourses, nor to provide a product or service of any particular value to the public. These are only second-order outcomes resultant to the primary mission. A corporation exists only to make a profit within the limits of the law. There are no other rules. So we need not be surprised when corporations operate in exactly that way.

This is why corporations often act so strangely when caught behaving unethically -- they seem surprised, as if the rules have suddenly been changed without their notification. In effect, they have.

I'm told that Toymotor's technical people will be responding to the letter from my sister tomorrow...

I told them today that "It's the floor mats!" will not be a part of their response.

Would having automatic serious penalties on board members/company owners in the event of a product or service causing death or serious injury make such things less likely to happen?
Due to bad design the original VW TT killed a few people, was VW or anyone in the company penalised?

I seriously doubt you could do that...

They don't design cars with the intent to kill people. Nor with the intent that they should even be easy to crash. Flaws simply turn up in designs too late for them to be rectified for production, so there will always be problems.

Let's face it, there are problems with perfectly good cars, cars without flaws. Mostly, of course, because you add in another unknown element... the driver.

I couldn't agree more! ...but with two tiny distinctions - amorality is the road to immorality. And, good business necessarily must protect the better health and well being of society since not doing so reflects badly upon any business. In Toyota's case...perhaps their pre and post risk programs require a tune up...amorality cannot be tolerated since it inevitably leads a loss of profit.

But seemingly noone is adtressing the problem with cars with stupid ignition switches that are too hard to turn off and gear changes that are too hard to select nuetral. That is what killed the highway cop,[ and probably many others] not the initial cause of a jammed throttle.
As I have said before all this electronic bullshit is rubbish and cars should have standardised basic controls, eg ign switch, gear lever operation, turn signal and wiper operation.
On more than one occasion I have had to consult the owners manual as how to use rear wipers and even hi beam switch.
I had a customer who drove around the city for a week on hi beam as she could not work out how to drop them, it was entirely different to her other car.

In addition to McGuires response.
- History records many corporations (or should I say leaders of) who took the morally correct route wherever possible. In most cases those corporations were successful - largely because they were correctly percieved as "customer focused"
- The methodology should naturally weigh all the cost/benefit factors (including perhaps a dollar value for human life), but also a "corporate image" factor based on the perception of being ethically motivated.

Yes, I think that is more the way it operates now. For example after the Firestone/Explorer fiasco suddenly my job became a lot more safety focussed, and you can be pretty sure that you have to try a lot harder to roll an SUV or light truck than before, and we now test tires from each factory, and don't take the supplier's word for it.

Oversimplified, what was the story behind the Firestone/Ford thing? My from-the-couch view was that the problems seemed linked to a specific vehicle rather than a specific tire.

Some ridiculous proportion of the rollovers featured tires made at Decatur.

http://www.safetyforum.com/tag/faq.html for alist of the recalled tires, almost all coded VD
http://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/announce/press/...onesummary.html

The development work and signoff had been done on tires from Joliette. Decatur was brought online when the car went into production. When the federal judge saw that he threw Firestone's case out of court. Explorer wasn't especially roll-prone compared with other SUVs at the time (hmm, can't actually find any good data on that, the CGZ/track calculation is the one to look for, it is a remarkably good predictor considering it is only schoolboy physics), but the combination of the Decatur tire and low recommended tire pressures meant that if the tire was running at too low a pressure (I don't know what) it tended to overheat and fail catastrophically.

Fight the Good Fight,Ray.There is the old chestnut that" Bad Things happen when Good People do nothing". A new car dealer is over the proverbial barrel,if he stirs the
possum he won't get supplied with cars to sell.He hates lying to customers,but he loves his lifestyle ,and hopefully his family ,so he goes on pretending he is a good
man.But in the end he is not. He has begun to lie to himself.

I can imagine the Emperor of Toyota is surrounded and cushioned by acolytes and yes-men and may have no idea what ghosts are in their machinery.Hopefully we
will see a new process to protect consumers from inscrutible mechano-electronic interface mysteries.

I see Mr Toyoda's view, expressed to the enquiry, is that it is caused by (a) floor mats or (b) sticky throttle pedals; but not © electronics.

I've had sticky loud pedals, not many but enough to recognise the symptoms. I've always been able to hook 'em back with the edge of my shoe, although once it was caused by a broken return spring. Got home that time using a octopus strap attached to some handy part of the engine bay infrastructure.

The symptoms described by various victims seem to be sufficiently varied that a simple sticky throttle can't be it. As for floor mats, I hate them, they're patently dangerous; any car I bought with loose mats has seen the loose mats go straight in the bin. My old Rolls has sheepskin rugs as a floor option. I have them in the back, but no way in the front. Totally loony.

I don't know what I would do if my car ran away like these cars and wouldn't stop no matter what: deliberately crash it into the freeway barrier, or deliberately induce a rollover maybe, but that is psychologically very difficult if you have family on board. I once had a similar sort of choice: crash into a car in front on a wet slippery road when not wearing a seatbelt, or try a sharp right turn off the road across oncoming traffic into a side street (in a VW beetle!); went for option 2, and didn't hit anything, spin or roll. But I was lucky. Also alone. And young.

Young and alone helps. With greater experience, which can help, comes greater awareness of the potential outcome of any action, which can hinder. Personally, I would rather stay upright if at all possible, but there is so much luck involved. I've had a throttle stick open - which is when I learned to corner a Mini on full power rather than using trailing-throttle oversteer - an iced-up carburetter when I needed power, a snapped-off gearlever at a very awkward moment, and, twice, a failure of a LF brake. Each time I was lucky.

Two more days have gone by...

Still no more word from Toymotor. Will have to give the man a call tomorrow.

A lot if not all later model Toyotas with genuine mats actually clip to the floor and are quite a good set up.
If the throttle jammed on me I would simply knock it out of gear and turn the motor off, but in some circumstances it seems all the hi tec bullshit makes that very hard.And fly by wire seems to be most of the problem in conjunction with the ECU and possibly the pedal too. As I keep harping, standardised controls and gear levers that you do not have to be a contortionist to use without looking at it.
Interestingly enough has this happened on manual trans cars? A manual is easy hit the clutch pedal
Though it still depends on the circumstances, a throttle sticks in dense freeway traffic is going to give you a fright, or coming into a slow corner at highway speed