what the about the menu option found in options / player / brake help ?
the one that can be toggled on/off...
it seems to be a really slow abs, or better yet one of the first versions of the abs system as it only works on all four wheels at once.
LMAO
i subscribe to the test patch section of the forums, eagerly waiting for the next LFS update (so i dont get too obsessed and check every day)... and this is all i get... a thumbs up
bought my first car during last winter! an 01 civic with no abs (crappy brakes in general) and average winter tyres. Let me tell you that without abs I have way more control over braking/handling in snow/ice condition then I had in my mom's civic(with abs). Now that the snow is gone i've been able to check for a difference between abs and non abs on a dry road : pretty unexistant =/ --> about the same braking distance, I can brake in a curve in both cars without any problems. My opignion stays the same, abs is an useless piece of technology for anyone who really knows how to drive which, in quebec atleast, means... about 15% of the population .
P.S. ABS do work in reverse on a civic, I've tried it during last winter
ABS is one of those things that you think are useles until they save you from a huge crash. Even in most emergency brakings it doesn't make a difference, but in one it does...
Plus, ABS is the basis of the ESP (in cars with ESP xD).
I guess you are right whiskey, with one exception : ice --> abs does not give you any more control then non abs in any situation simply because there just not enough control/grip to begin with rendering pretty much everything useless (when you hit an ice pad and the tyres looses all their grip theres not much to do but wait until you they regain some)
Yes, in ice it does not make any difference. And in snow/gravel it could be better block a bit the tires to "sink" a bit in the terrain and stop earlier, but thats not probably in a normal road to happen.
A skilled driver can stop faster without ABS than with in most cases...most ABS triggers are very sensitive (Like the Toyota Prius) which means that the ABS is going off before the actual limit of the tyres grip....
I read a test in one of my bike mags where a bike without ABS was able to stop quicker at the hands of a skilled rider (not me) than with ABS. However a regular average Joe stopped more quickly with the ABS.
On a wet surface, ABS was quicker across the board. However as it's a similar sort of though, the same would very likely be true about cars.
As a technology, ABS should beat an ordinary driver.
ABS for a start, can control all 4 wheels independently which *no* driver can, and it can also keep recalculating 500 times a second.
You can't use "bad" ABS (single channel or just over-active) as an example unless you also compare a bad driver to good ABS.
Bikes are quite different - you've got more roll (up front) that you can get away with, and also there's only two wheels which the rider can independently modulate. You don't get this in a car.
My ABS is actually fairly good in terms of activation (at least, on tarmac - on gravel it's useless), but theres no way I can stop quicker without it.
If you read what I wrote you'd see it's basically wha you've written.
And the braking tests were performed with the front brake only. The rear brake adds extremely little to the overall stopping of the motorcycle, I hardly used mine unless I wanted to help keep the rear from spinning while exiting a very fast corner, or trailed it throughout to keep the nose pointing where I want it to.
reminds me of funny things that not all drivers will experience... ...ever
ABS as it started out was a system to help keeping the wheels from locking-up through independently triggered automatic brake-pressure-interrupts. Earlier systems like I am driving up to this day and age don't have the benefit of the contemporary-fast computing capacity found in today's systems. So they will behave a little worse at times. For example on uneven, loose surfaces like freshly fallen snow residing on a thicker conditioned layer of snow with a few holes in there where tarmac and icy-tarmac shines through. In Germany where spikes are prohibited from actual use (destroys the road surfaces that get built here) these systems will probably get tuned for maximum safety through consistency. Not for maximum stopping-power under all circumstances and road-conditions. Naturally this means such systems will interfere at a very early stage in the "drama of loosing grip".
I just returned from test-driving my next car (yes it was on Friday 13th...) and I did the compulsory braking tests that every good driver knows they should be included into the process of test-driving a car. And I didn't trigger the ABS. Since a '2006 model could not possibly have left it's Japanese factory withouth it (call me an anti-patriot, if you so will, for having driven our old Family's Mercedes E220 auto-sedan for more than 10 years without crash, even though the seating and positioning are clearly not made for my hight which is 186cm) I came back to the dealer and asked the inevitable question:
Does it really have ABS? I made the tyres squeel, I felt the stopping power and evaluated it more than average and more than enough for German country roads where I will be using it most of the time. That said, I was amazed that the pedal had this much feel and that I didn't trigger the ABS (i.e. didn't lock the wheels at all) on all of the 4-5 tries where I had the chance to put my foot down. Funnily the dealer's spokes-woman didn't know what to answer me and instead explained to me (thoroughly and rather without fail) what the ABS is really for and so forth. I listened whole-heartedly and remembered this thread...
Well - for racing bikes I guess this is a useless debate. For road-bikes this might be a helpful tool for less-experienced riders. But why no ABS-off switch for those that want to play with their bikes - and some of those, that even want to play with their lifes at stake (and that of other people)?
To cut a long story short: People who say, it was not originally planned to make a car (/bike / boat) stop in less of a distance, are absolutely and spot-on on the right track.
But what was originally planned 25 years ago, is yesterday's news, anyway!
I think you need to be an expert bike driver to say you dont need ABS. You can know the braking limits but if you get to abnormal situation with a oil/sand on ground you can press front brake a little more than its traction limit and you are a death man. Instead in a car you will just feel the locked tyre / understeer. I also thought how easy it is as I know the limits but little sand in turn and I was lying on the ground.
Anyway. Im pretty sure that in some today cars is ABS shortening the braking lenght. Some can 15 times a second mechanically open valves. Braking the every single wheel with different torque at the traction limit.
I hate to bump a several year old thread, but I was leafing through some MG Rover documentation and came accross this regarding the EBD (electronic brake distribution) component of the ABS system.