Out-braking the ABS myth [video]
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The latter stuck. This instructor logic was, only if you are a pro driver you actually can outperform ABS. In emergency situations I break with full force without hesitation. This has lead to multiple avoided crashes and TBH two back collisions. Once I pushed so hard the break light sensor had to be replaced. In that case I saw a SUV struggling to stop in my rear view mirror. I had enough control to move to the right and have that SUV crash into the vehicle in front of me.
In this line of thought, it can be life saving to be overweight. I was about 120 kg back then and therefor had quite strong legs.
You can definitely get close to the performance of ABS with practice. Used to practice in the snow, in empty parking lots. (ABS or no ABS, everybody should safely practice recovering from spins and slides in empty parking lots! It's also really fun...)
The idea that a pro could outperform ABS is surprising to hear. I guess one area where a pro could outperform ABS is if you are trying to slow, not stop. All the ABS systems I've used seem to assume you're trying for a full stop.
Anyway, I'm really glad we have ABS now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
You can also find an empty parking lot after a snow storm and do donuts for "education". Just avoid light poles ;)
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.
I like to think we became safer winter drivers as a result.
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.
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.
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 figured the amount of pressure required to lock the wheels was fairly minimal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
I love it when two different aspects of my life collide!
For the HNers who don't know much about motorcycles, in the motorcycling world there's a big argument whether ABS is a net good or not. The old-timers tend to say "learn to ride your bike, you can beat ABS." Manufacturers site statistics saying ABS saves lives. This video is good in that it shows old-timer braking + ABS gives the best of both worlds. Somewhat paradoxically, in the world of motorcycles, even with ABS, just slamming on the brakes isn't the best strategy for emergency stopping. You'll stop faster with two-phase braking. That's why it's critical motorcycle riders practice emergency braking. You have to practice it enough to make it muscle memory.
It seems like there is no technical reason why phased braking couldn't be added to a more advanced ABS system. Early car ABS systems were also much worse for stopping distance than threshold braking, but more advanced systems have made up much of the difference.
It seems to me that both of these things can be true at the same time.
Indeed threshold braking (which is what this is) is a very important skill to practice for a motorcycle rider.
However, that said, while folks can practice the maneuver, what is very difficult to practice is the situation. It’s one thing to practice on a dry parking lot in front of a cone or tennis ball.
It’s quite another to practice on the street in a crummy intersection with an F-150 turning left in front of you.
It’s always important to have data like this, talking about limits of systems, our role and impact as riders with such systems. This is a good video (all of Ryan’s stuff is excellent).
But I have seen others actually advocate switching ABS off, and I think that’s a bit irresponsible. Off road is a different problem, and a complicated environment for an ABS system. The track is another controlled space where folks can test limitations. Many bikes offer the ability to disable ABS systems (as a first class concept) just for these reasons.
But neither of those are the street. There are a lot of situations where straight line stopping is not necessarily the correct response. ABS is a boon in more cases than it’s not when it comes to emergency maneuvers.
The street is complex and unforgiving. Anyone who’s been in the community for any length of time knows about very skilled, even professional, riders that the street has taken from their families.
I love motorcycles and riding. I have for a very long time. And my simple rule is I don’t recommend it to anyone. It’s very dangerous. As riders, these systems are excellent, and get better every year.
Practice threshold breaking, by all means. Practice everything. But on the street, you need every edge. Leave your ABS on.
Never disable ABS when riding on the street. You never know what you're going to do in an actual emergency situation (most riders only use the rear brake in such scenarios?!) so it's good to have ABS to back up your lizard brain.
First, in a car without ABS, I put on the brakes (I was probably going a little too fast) to avoid hitting the car stopped ahead of me. I started to slow down, but also to slip to the right towards the curb; it was scary, and I barely slowed down in time to avoid either collision.
Second, in a car with ABS, I slowed down to turn into a parking lot, and the ABS kicked in; the car went absolutely straight (without slowing down enough to make the turn), but I wasn't sliding at all, so I didn't have to worry about sliding into the curb. Big win.
Instead, it's all too happy to drift into oncoming traffic at a glacial pace. It could be specific to the various Toyotas I have owned...
Sorry to hear you had that experience! I've lived places where the "sink into the snow" was the right thing, but where I live now, there's very likely ice under the snow, so it's not clear if that would help.
Tangential query - is the difference between ABS and no ABS greater or lesser than bad tires and top of the line summers?
Getting very expensive tires has quite a huge impact on stopping distance from what I’ve experienced. Having 255s up front also helps ;)
I've read about police receiving the opposite instruction: a reminder during training that they should keep their foot on the brake when they feel the ABS coming on. Apparently too many police were crashing because they'd lift, and attempt threshold braking as they'd been trained back in the day, when they felt the ABS coming on. They were interpreting the feel of ABS as a loss in traction.
The ABS does allow better control if you break traction, but lenthens your stopping distance. They want their drivers to not break traction, and keep the stopping distance short. Big difference between a Subaru slamming into you because it couldn't stop fast enough, and a firetruck loaded with 1500 gallons of water, etc, slamming into you.
If this is a modern ABS system I'd be shocked if they could beat it. See this short video comparing a 20 year old (at the time) vs modern semi-trailer weighing 38.5 metric tons (84,000 lbs). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo6C3HEpfsQ
Interesting stuff.
Not much of a myth, there.
Spoiler: without ABS, you'll just spin into the moose. With ABS you maybe wont stop, but the main thing is not being crushed by the moose.
Not joking about the moose. They put up cones and say this is the moose. Without ABS everyone spins like a carnival ride, and hits the moose.
When the 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee was released, it was an early release in mid-2013.
And, yes, it was an early release. The first month or so of models had all sorts of problems. And one of them was that the stability control system was not dialed in.
You can hunt down early video of the vehicle not doing well in the moose test. It does the swerve, but practically loses control. It’s rather horrific.
Later, they updated the systems and it performs the same test much, much better.
Most of these systems and what they do for day to day drivers is invisible. Watching the Jeep fail, and then later succeed, just shows how capable those systems really are.
I'm actually kind of surprised a motorcycle ABS controller apparently doesn't include include sensors for the deceleration vector, bike rotation, the compression of the front shock, the weight on the rear wheel, etc. I'd think that a computer could reliably beat a human, given the right sensors.
>But maybe the calculus changes with motorcycles' higher speed, as maintaining steerability becomes that much more important?
It's just a panic response. Everybody on a motorcycle (hopefully) knows that you should be using front brake to slow down as quickly as possible, unless you need to swerve of course :)
there are a lot of old fogeys who think if you touch the front brake you'll flip over the bars. the MSF class specifically teaches that the front is 80% of your braking and to use both brakes, but a lot of motorcyclists never get a permit/license and learn from a family member or something, so myths persist
As described in the video, motorcycles perform funny under braking. If you slam the brakes too fast, you have very little grip. ABS kicks in and you’re not stopping. If you progressively brake correctly, you transfer load to the front tyre and increase grip. ABS kicks in, but you’re stopping effectively.
Same is true in a car just way way less observable because you have more tyres, better grip, and your foot doesn’t slam the brakes as fast as your hand does. But you can play with this on gravel or on snow.
Now here’s the really fun part. Most motorcycle riders most of the time never brake with more than like 60% of theoretical threshold. Here’s a tkacs talk explaining this problem: https://youtu.be/CpaFeZ4xS8g?si=xI_29sLDY82UZziV
tldr: If you ride motorcycles, go out and practice. It may save your life.
For example, I once almost painted my pants brown braking from 80mph to 60mph because a car spooked me and the ABS kicked in in the middle of the freeway. I was nowhere near actual threshold, but the car made my lizard brain kick in and squeeze the lever too fast.
It’s like saying “Doing the perfect thing every time is best”. Which is true but not useful.
And they teach you about progressive braking in the first hour of learning to ride. Then they keep repeating it all the time. Every rider on the road knows that they should do this. It’s the execution that is hard.
More surface contact != More traction.
Grip in a motorcycle is only really limited by gravity. That's still far better than most cars. The average motorcycle (or bicycle, for that matter) will have little problem hitting 35 degrees lean and therefore produce lateral G forces exceeding that of a typical car.
Same is true for deceleration, the average bike is going to be able to slow down as fast or faster than the average car, even if you just let ABS takeover.
Motorcycles don't have any disadvantage in grip unless you're comparing them to the supercars that have significant downforce.
It really does come down to practice. The machine itself is more than capable. Even a cheap entry level motorcycle is eminently more capable in terms of braking and corner than many sports cars. The cool thing about have two tires, is that you don't need a super fancy suspension setup to be able to corner fast, you just need good tires.
You brake hard, rear grip goes to zero, and you fishtail. Then you have to reduce braking force or you crash. This doesn’t happen in a car because unloading 2 independent tires is very hard.
You touch loose gravel going through a corner, front loses grip, you crash. Hitting the same gravel patch with 2+ car tires is unlikely.
They had a bike that was equipped with a roll-cage, like an exoskeleton that prevented it from actually flipping but did allow it to lay over enough such that it would. Then they sent the bike through excessive lean angles across slippery surfaces.
The riders who adjusted for the slippage wrecked, the ones who just allowed the bike to fish a little didn't.
Of course that's assuming you aren't too close to the threshold, etc.
But it was eye opening to learn to just kind of hang on and trust the machine a bit.
Luckily insurance paid for bike damage and new gear. I only got a bruise where my elbow missed the elbow pads. Bike stopped maybe 50ft down the road.
And cars don't lock up a single wheel without ABD. When they do lock up you generally lock everything up.
The question is, do cars have more grip? No, not really. Do they have better braking performance? Not really, either. Are they easier to use? Sure. The reason you can have a harder time on a bike isn't because of any fundamental limitation, it's just poor training - the video is correct. And car drivers also don't break anywhere near the theoretical potential of their car, either.
I don’t claim to be able to out brake ABS on the varied conditions of the street though. I would NEVER turn off ABS outside a controlled environment. Honestly it should be a legal requirement for bikes just like cars and it’s pretty silly that manufacturers like to charge $500-1000 extra for this feature.
The only other place I'd turn off ABS is driving offroad, tho I hear that has improved a lot over the years as well.
My first day out with my bike, i was staring at my foot trying to figure out why i was in the wrong gear. I looked up and was heading for the median. grabbed fistful of front brake to massive stoppie. I got luck and didn't lay the bike now. but front brake was drilled into me by the safety course i took. i didn't even think
Got curious, tried at low speeds & surprised how much the brake force modulation reduces the stoping distance. It has become a habit now and when the speed drops like maybe to 40mph or less instinctively modulate the braking.
"not even the soap operas from F1 could outbrake the ABS system, but on a motorcycle ..."
So this video starts with a lie to justify its clickbait title.
And if you aren't covering how much speed was lost at the end of the stopping period your analysis is kind of worthless. Yes, you can stop faster with clean road and good execution of old stopping technique. Ignoring that the analysis is that that just isn't happening, but focusing on the extra 20 feet you travel with ABS ignores just how much slower you are already going for that last 20 feet. Even assuming you'd still be in a wreck, if you can reduce the brain to the panic of "slam brakes" and get a massive reduction in speed, that is still almost certainly good, no?