Norm Peterson
corner barstool sitter
In the old days, there's at least some chance that any given driver would have encountered a little sliding or 'looseness', and for sure we would not have developed any reliance whatsoever on TC or ESC to save us from any carelessness or lapses in smooth control input.True, but they would have crashed anyway in the old days without it. I have ESC help me out a few times when hitting standing water on a bend in the dark. The car simply tightened it's line rather than drifting wide. I would like to think I would have caught it anyway but the ESC did a very good job and for those mythical bad drivers it would certainly have saved them. Probably why ESC is mandated in Europe.
But you know that drivers today, especially those with only TC- and ESC-assisted driving on their resume, are unwittingly doing exactly that - placing reliance on those systems. Yeah, they'd pretty much be hung out to dry if you could teleport them back to the 1960s.
The driver who panics is the driver who scares me regardless of whether he's getting any electronic assistance. Panic makes for poor decisions, which I don't think can be predicted and fully covered for by computer programming.
Norm
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