As this example of yours shows, a key benefit of ABS (if you're not a professional driver) is that it allows you to steer as well as brake, by preventing the wheels from locking). IIRC studies have shown that the majority of accidents cannot be avoided by braking alone even with an optimal stopping distance; you need to be able to steer as well.

In advanced driving lessons, in both dry and snowy conditions, goodn driving instructors not only acknowledged but demonstrated, it is POSSIBLE to break better than ABS. But in an uncontrolled, unanticipated emergency (where you don't necessarily get to pick your breaking point and posture etc), ABS gives you steering control. It takes practice to utilize that ability, mostly people just focus and fixate in the obstacle ahead of them they are trying to not hit. But the miraculous, magical ability to steer with ABS is an absolute life saver.

Indeed! Forgot all about my takeaway #2 of the course, thanks for reminding me. People tend to focus wrong in an emergency. Look further ahead, get the bigger picture otherwise you actually steer toward the collision as a self fulfilling prophecy.

I think full braking should be part of driver training. A lot of people I know are very hesitant to brake full force and I think a lot of accidents happen because people don't really brake all out when needed.

As far as driver training goers, a little training in sliding would also be very helpful so people know what to do when the car has understeering or oversteering.

Agreed on the lowering of consumerism.

Doesn't need to be anything serious but it can bring oil/etc to the surface and it's good habit to be feeling what you're driving.

I thought it was. I distinctly remember my Dad telling me to slam on the brakes while teaching me to drive. I pushed them hard, but nothing crazy. He said to get up to speed and kick the pedal through the floor and hold it there.

Older car, full lockup and skid for a good distance. We did that more than once.

Now 25 years later, I do exactly the same thing every year at the first snowfall , and a few times during the winter to get the feel of everything going extremely vague.

Though they also checked the car I was using had ABS first, they might have had a slightly different process otherwise? Though in the UK it's common to have a professional driving instructor with their own car you'd use for learning and borrow for the test, so there was likely an expected minimum age and spec of car people were doing their tests in.

And having done the California driving test a few years back as well, comparatively the US one was pretty trivial in comparison. And I've heard the CA test is one of the harder ones in the states.

Test instructors are told they should carry out the emergency stop on one third of tests at random, and that was the guidance at least as far back as 13 years ago ( https://www.adicpd.co.uk/dsa-dt1-standard-operating-procedur... has a copy from 10 years ago, see page 40). A FOIA response I saw showed numbers that align with that, so unless some instructors are doing the emergency stop and then falsely reporting they didn't...

Same when my mother taught me to drive. She even took advantage of rainy days to take me out to a large empty parking lot and we practiced how to deal with hydroplaning.

So now they've created brake-assist options that try to determine when such a case is occurring, and slam on the brakes as hard as the car is able.

As incredulous as that sounds, it's apparently improved overall safety.

From what I've read the tech has been around since the 90's but has become much more standard.

I did the Mini Stunt Driving Course the other week in Palm Springs. One of the first things they cover is emergency braking. Even in that situation — not an emergency; the whole point is to stop the car as fast as possible — I had trouble overcoming the urge to NOT brake as hard as I could. It took a few runs for me to get myself to stand on the brakes properly.

When I get in a car and need to adjust the seat, I slide my butt to the back of the seat and push the brake pedal all the way to the floor. What I’m looking for is being able to have it on the floor slightly before my knee locks and without my foot needing to leave the floor (i.e., not lifting my foot up and pushing with the tip of my toes or something).

I know that I can apply 100% braking force. If I were much further back I could not.

I often get in the cars of people 6”+ shorter than me and… don’t need to slide the seat back. I get in cars driven by people around the same height as me and need to pull the seat forward. My wife is one example—she’s around 4” shorter than me and when I drive her car I keep the seat in the same position she does.

It’s a pet theory that the majority of people driving on the road day to day have their seat positioned so they’re actually physically incapable of braking with full strength.

I figured the amount of pressure required to lock the wheels was fairly minimal.

For instance, a lot of drivers prefer to swerve rather than brake ... because they're afraid of getting hit from behind, because everyone is tail-gating.

An added bonus is that most of time the impatient drivers will just go around me and I don't need to worry too much about tailgaters.

I so wish this were more true; I've been tailgated for 10s of miles in the right lane on a freeway with light traffic that was never fewer than 3 lanes for the entirety of that distance.

Honestly I would love for tailgating to have automated enforcement with each ticket doubling in fines. In a few weeks we'd weed most of the bad drivers off the road, and at least in my imagined scenario road safety would increase dramatically.

It works most times I've tried it.

Perhaps being required to actually use 100% braking power to pass is enough :)

In this respect, motorcycle training courses are MUCH better, and have numerous braking and swerving drills, but they have to be, because motorcycles require a higher-level of attention and are significantly more dangerous to operate than a car.

For the driver. Cars are more dangerous than motorcycles for everybody but the people inside/on it, which means that swerving and braking exercises are actually much more necessary for car drivers than for motorcycle riders

This said, I prefer my mode of transportation to have a hard crunchy outside to protect my soft gooey insides.

Then why does almost every motorcyclist I see ride dangerously? They all follow too close. Many will spill over into the oncoming traffic lane to overtake something in their own lane, just expecting you to move to the shoulder so they can go the wrong way in your lane.

Later I see them stopped for fuel or food and it's all grey haired dudes.

You can also find an empty parking lot after a snow storm and do donuts for "education". Just avoid light poles ;)

I like to think we became safer winter drivers as a result.

Me and my friends did this for hours after each snowfall. Great training. One of my friends hadn’t heard of your light pole advice and mangled his Golf GTI pretty good.

Braking harder may have also applied maximum braking sooner, or you may have been able to get tread marks on all wheels instead of only some wheels.

Also, as a more experienced driver, I definitely have fewer expectations that other vehicles will stop when they're supposed to. If you had visibility of the vehicle before it blew the stop sign, you may have been able to predict and slow down sooner or take evasive action.

Also if you lose brake assist. I've read a handful of "out of control car" stories where the driver reported the brakes didn't work. Well yes, without power brakes it feels like stepping on a piece of wood. You need to apply a LOT of force to stop a modern car without power brakes, "putting both feet on the pedal and pushing with everything you've got" a lot. Bending the brake pedal is better than crossing into oncoming traffic.

Couldn't agree more. It's beyond negligent that with the current state of drivers ed the first time a driver will need to emergency brake, or even feel abs activate will be in a potentially life or deal situation.

My bike definitely pulses the brakes in a way that you feel on the controls, but they are directly connected to the hydraulics.

I also learnt that teslas (at least the 3 and y) don't do steer by wire so when you play the games using your steering wheel you so turn the wheels a little bit.

Under hard braking conditions? Yeah. Especially since we have quite a lot of snow and ice here every year, you do sorta get used to the ABS feel and crunching sound.

I once had a close encounter on snow where some idiot came way too fast a downhill and slid onto my lane. Pretty sure I kept my foot planted on the brake while going as far right as there was road there.

In the past, this was likely true when ABS systems weren't able to control individual wheels. They can do that today, can check for wheel lock-ups and react dozens of times a second, and can therefore compensate for changing grip at different parts of the road during the entire stopping process.

In formula 1, where ABS has been banned, drivers have the capability to manually adjust brake balance (front/back and left/right) which they can do for each corner - so in this scenario it is true but only because they are given an advanced control, practice it over and over for the specific corner, and aren't allowed to use ABS to begin with.

There is an old SAE paper published by Chrysler that I can't find at the moment. IIRC, it was published in 1968 or 1969, and evaluated their new all-wheel[1] ABS system (later to be sold on the 1969-1973 Imperial).

The gist of it is that on most surfaces relevant passenger cars, ABS gives somewhat ~shorter~ [Edit: longer ] stopping distances but the difference is minimal compared to a trained professional driver, and both are significantly shorter than locking the wheels (what a non-pro is likely to do in a panic situation)

On ice, locking the wheels produces stopping distances that are several times greater than threshold braking. Wet pavement (especially asphalt) is better for ABS, too, though not as extreme as ICE. Importantly, threshold braking also enables the driver to maintain directional control on all surfaces, especially when the left and right wheels have different amounts of traction. ABS enables the driver to concentrate on steering while the computer adjusts the brakes.

However, on dry concrete, as well as gravel or snow, locking the wheels does produce somewhat shorter stopping distances. (Concrete tends to be aggressively textured, almost like sandpaper; gravel and snow can build up a "ramp" ahead of a locked wheel)

The only problem with locking for emergency stops is that 1) you wear the tires down to the cords after about 10 such emergency stops from 60 mph on dry concrete; and 2) the vehicle tends to spin. If the driver should happen to back off the brake pressure while partially spun, the vehicle will depart the road before they can react... so if you're going to lock the wheels, you have to really commit to it.

[1] Chrysler had 4-wheel ABS 10 years before Mercedes' "first car in the world with 4-wheel ABS", but Chrysler had computer logic to release brake pressure on both rear wheels if either one slipped (it had sensors in both rear wheels), which is how Mercedes was able to claim a "first" with their system that simply treated both rear wheels independently.

Hm. This [edit: the "shorter", which has now been corrected] doesn't fit my experience when I took advanced driver training years ago (I was a GM employee at the time). The training vehicles could have ABS enabled or disabled by a switch on the dashboard. The instructor first disabled ABS and had me practice threshold braking, until I reached the point where I could negotiate a setup with cones where you had to swerve left, then swerve back right, all while braking enough to not overshoot. I was able to do that several times with threshold braking after some practice.

Then the instructor turned the ABS on and had me try the cones again. I overshot every time.

Of course this was some 20 years ago, and more recent ABS systems might do better. But the SAE paper you refer to was even earlier.

Yup, that was a typo, see edit.

I'm a little surprised there's no "pro ABS" for motorcycles which allows you to do a stoppie if you enable an option, and/or are keeping the bike perfectly straight.

people that lack the ability to lock the wheels on their vehicle on-demand shouldn't be driving it without aids.

it's exclusionary, but even as a paralyzed person who is mandated to use hand controls for throttle and brake it was expected of me to demonstrate that I could leverage enough force on the brake pedal to initiate lock-up in a timely manner -- and modern cars with power-assist brakes should have little problem doing so.

In a similar vein, a family member had a hardware issue in their laptop where some keys would not register some of the time (moisture). Their understanding was that they did not press hard enough for the device to register the press. This confusion between the boundaries of electronic and mechanical problems led to some mocking.

If your anecdote can be taken at face value - they could find some respite in the fact that by pressing the keys too hard they could damage some peripheral electronic parts.

That same strategy doesn't work as well on a motorcycle equipped with ABS as you still need to preload the front tire before applying full braking power. As the video shows, this minimizes your stopping distance. Like a car, once you're fully on the brake then stay on it - the ABS system will take care to prevent wheel lockup and skid.

I'd imagine even then, this only applied 20 years ago when ABS was still relatively primitive. I've had only triggered the ABS on my ~2015 car a couple of times but I don't think I could have done significantly better than it even in a non-panic situation.

Assuming you have exceeded the limit of grip of the tires with the initial brake bite and the tires have started to lock up, by releasing and reapplying pressure you allow the tire to spin up again to regain grip and then apply more brake to help stop the car. I assume this was to kinda emulate what ABS is meant to do (albeit much slower?) but I never knew this was a thing until recently.

You do not need to pump the brakes if you can threshold brake, though I understand the fact that the vast majority of drivers on the road cannot do this and ABS is a life-saving fallback.

Also to add to your comment about everyone taking some time to practice. I would also 100% recommend a good racing simulator if you or a friend you know has one. Specifically a setup that has a load cell braking pedal. Most entry-level sim pedals are potentiometers which measure the distance your foot travels as opposed to a load cell which measures the force applied on the pedal. This is how my younger self learned to threshold brake (among other things) and I was surprised at how it all transferred to the real world when I finally hit the track later in life.

Source: I was a loadcell technician in a previous life.

And yeah, pumping the brakes was essentially the "manual" version of ABS. Depressing and releasing as rapidly as possible.

I always understood the term was cadence braking; that might be UK terminology though.