Hacker News Reader

I've done a significant amount of track driving and rally driving, which is to say that I appreciate turning off traction control at points. Your immediate need to turn it off by default, for general road driving, is very strange to me. It should in no way be a blocker to you driving in the rain or in an intersection. What on earth are you driving...?

> turn off the forward collision warning so it doesn't scare the shit out of me when I'm going through the drive through

See, now we're talking. Every time I have a rental car it's like a waiting game to see if there's some sensor that's going to scream at me while I'm on a highway and concentrating. 100% agree that this paradigm could (and should) be rethought.

How does turning off TC keep your car from killing you in the rain? just out of curiosity. In my experience, TC has been very helpful, as it means I don't have to worry about feathering the gas pedal in heavy rain.

Some implementations of TC/ESC will abruptly brake one or more of the wheels in on/off pulses, using the ABS pump, disrupting an otherwise balanced cornering car.

Yes. I won't buy a car I cannot disable ABS on, because it extends braking distances, plus by doing so, all traction control is off.

But I honed my non-ABS driving in my teenage years, pre-ABS (for most cars at the time), on rural dirt roads, and on roads with constant snow and ice, and driving on frozen lakes.

Of course, if you disable ABS, you may end up without any form of real differential, as many cars use ediff tech, which is horrible, so I now have to also vet for a true hardware, non-open diff.

Sad.

Even a racing driver can't beat ABS on asphalt in a controlled setting.[1] On dirt roads or ice the story might be different.

[1] https://youtu.be/ERE9EtOWZMU?si=s35N-IzuyPLuEoKD

ABS has nothing to do with improving braking distance. Any skilled driver, who knows their car, can do far better.

For skilled drivers, ABS extends braking distance.

What ABS does, is let a driver mash the pedal on full, and still steer around obstacles. Something a skilled driver can still do.

One problem with these tests, is that if you disable ABS on some cars, the proportioning valve is still set to 50/50, front/rear, meaning you start to lose traction on the rear wheels, and skid. This causes a loss of control, and reduced braking power.

Cars prior to ABS has the capability to adjust rear brake pressure by weight, a typical default of 70/30.

Some card have ABS controllers which you can disable ABS functionality, but still retain proportioning control. Cars with proper diffs are often like this.

Is this true with a modern abs, and have you tested your own capabilities vs abs? It can act on individual wheels which no human can do with a regular brake pedal.

Check out https://youtu.be/ERE9EtOWZMU if you’re interested.

I know of ABS capabilities, and extensively tested ABS on/off on every car I own.

ABS is about steering when people slam the brake pedal down, it is not about improving braking distance.

Outside of how it doesn't help on pavement, it is a absolute disaster on gravel, and deep snow.

For example, on gravel if you lock up the brakes, you dig in. Gravel builds in front of the tire, and your tire sinks. ABS won't allow this, and so on gravel I can stop from high speed fast, while ABS actively works to deny my ability to stop.

On snow, if you briefly lock up the brakes, snow builds in front of the wheel. You can then spin the wheels to turn, let up, and the car will instantly take off in a new direction. ABS actively prevents this.

ABS was never, ever designed to reduce braking distance. It was designed to allow people to steer while braking.

The video I linked shows drivers (one professional, one not) achieved stopping distance in a straight line with and without abs in a fairly recent car.

Gravel and snow I understand - but at least for me are pretty big exceptions.

What kind of cars do you people drive where "feathering the gas pedal in heavy rain" is a necessity? My 90HP FWD car with very little weight on the front can still accelerate faster in rain without wheelspin than I'd ever need when driving normally.

It's not the wheelspin, it's the vague connectivity to the road. some FWD cars are more "Disconnected" from the back than others, all else equal.

If I take a corner in the rain at speed in my 280hp FWD hot hatch, will be fine cuz the back is pretty easy to "feel."

In a FWD ford taurus though that would be terrifying.

Even with fresh tires, my former Nissan Altima coupe would spin in the rain without feathering

It's not by any means a fast car. Heavy, FWD, and four cylinders. Yet, it's a bit of an art to get up to speed well with it.

I'm talking about the laughably slow 0-60 time (~7s) in the rain, especially on an incline!

That's only around 175 HP...

My 460 HP Mustang will easily spin when it's warm and dry; it doesn't take much. Most tires/surfaces aren't that good

This is far more of a thing for RWD cars than FWD cars, since you'll wind up spinning the car if you're an idiot about it.

My car is front-biased AWD and is very predictable in the heavy rains we have here during winter that can leave an inch or more of standing water on the roads. Plus I grew up driving older cars that didn't even have ABS, let alone TCS. That means my habit is inducing oversteer to save myself, against the tendency of TCS to induce understeer that most drivers feel more comfortable with. I'd much rather spin out than slide off the road. When TCS activates in the rain that can be dangerous, because I hit the brakes to dip the nose before steering in, only for TCS to detect I'm slipping and jerk the car in the opposite direction (IE, towards the thing I'm avoiding). After having that happen two or three times it became habit to turn off TCS, and I haven't had a scare like that since.

Fwiw, I don't think that's a fundamental issue with the technology or anything... it could be the implementation in your car is just kind of bad.

The traction control in my car is more than happy to let me toss the car around any which way as long as I'm not giving it some sort of input that I want it to be doing something else. It seems to respond not to "the car is doing something potentially bad" but "there's a mismatch between what the driver is commanding and what the car is doing".

Steer into a spin and I can keep the car spinning, steer a bit against it and I can skid it sideways, little-left-little-brake-no-brake-snap-right and I'm tossing the car around 180 degrees. The only point it will cut in is if, during one of these, I point the wheel some direction and hit the gas indicating I want to be going that way now--it will correct the skid/slid/spin and get the car going that direction.

I have a display up during the winter that shows TCS activation and individual wheel slippage so I know when I'm driving beyond the limits of my actual traction. In 6 or 7 years of driving it in Canadian winters really the only time I ever see it cutting in is getting the car moving from stopped on ice.

Try getting off train/tram tracks in snow and ice with traction control off. In many situations you absolutely need to let the wheels slip (but not too much) in order to get around instead of cutting off most of the traction.

> Starting my current car is always a pain in the ass that takes at least a minute.

And this is why I'll never own a car newer than 2012 or so (give or take a few years depending on brand).

> > Starting my current car is always a pain in the ass that takes at least a minute.

> And this is why I'll never own a car newer than 2012 or so (give or take a few years depending on brand).

Non sequitur.

> turn off the forward collision warning so it doesn't scare the shit out of me

I was driving a 2018(?) Golf GTI with automatic braking on an extremely hilly road. The car handled fantastically, and was an absolute joy to drive on twisty roads... until the automatic braking kicked in because it detected the sudden sharp rise of the road in front of me as a vehicle I was about to collide with due to my speed.

It only happened for about a second, but it scared the daylights out of me.

I sold it back to the dealership a few months into lockdowns due to car prices going nuts, but that episode of random braking was a factor for me as well (not to say it was all bad; it saved me from a few fender benders too).

Wow, I turned most of those features off in my car for similar reasons but at least they stay off. I'm sure they'll end up breaking someday preventing an inspection even though I don't use them however.

Wow, that is actually insane. God forbid you stall the car on a busy road "sorry! Turning off parking sensor takes a few seconds.." lol

A while ago I was considering replacing my 2004, but I see it's worthwhile to hold on

> and then wait for another minute for the idle revs to drop to 900RPM before I even think of shifting out of park because the engineers thought putting zero weight oil in a highly stressed inline four with less displacement than my childhood lunchbox was a good idea.

I always wondered why my neighbor's car always start at high revs (it's loud!) before dropping down after a minute (very quiet). Always startled me in the morning.

Well, to be fair, the oil weight is a result of CAFE standards. Squeezing out another .5mpg at the expense of an engine needing to be replaced at 115K miles (outside of warranty, of course) is the cost. There are other costs to improve fuel economy, like being stranded on the side of the road with no spare tire when you have a flat.

OMG. What kind of car is this?

VW for sure

Lexus ES. I traded a family member my Rogue for a couple of weeks until they finish moving.

Which car is that?