off topic / traction control

[Eric Bryant]

> From: justin ivan [mailto:vlkslvr at hotmail.com]
> Subject: Re: off topic / traction control
> 
> 
> ahh maybe you are right C&D it was. Either way, yeah the test 
> could have had 
> more scenarios but it is interesting. I wonder what some 
> people are doing 
> out there on the road? I had a tread separation on a full 
> size conversion 
> van and I had no trouble controling it, yet just the other 
> week I saw a full 
> size van upside down on it's roof, and a couple of miles 
> later, a jeep 
> cherokee on it's side. What the hell are these people doing?

I've had tires go on my full-size van (including a tread seperation of a
Firestone), and it hasn't been a problem to control it.  Then again, I
wasn't traveling in excess of 80 MPH with an overloaded vehicle.  I've also
blown a *front* tire on our company's Accord at about 80 MPH, and it was
completely uneventful.  Tire failure doesn't have to result in an accident -
hell, tires fail less nowadays than ever before. 

I think that people don't realize that big SUVs are trucks, and need to be
driven as such.  I can get away with a lot of stupidity in my cars that I
can't in my van.  If you blow a tire on a car and do something dumb (like a
sudden steering or brake input), you might spin out and go off the road.
You do something like that in a van, SUV, or pick-up, and you can launch the
thing onto the roof pretty quickly (I know, since my friends and I have done
some "experiments" in this field).  Big, top-heavy vehicles just aren't as
error-tolerant as cars, and obviously there's a lot of people producing
error that's in excessive of tolerances.

In the Firestone/Ford case, there's a lot of blame to be assigned.  You've
got the afforementioned driver error, compounded by a vehicle platform
design that was marginal at best.  Then, you throw a cheap OEM tire at it,
and recommend an inflation setting that was set for passenger comfort (since
when are *trucks* supposed to ride well?).  In engineering, you perform a
"worst-case analysis" or "tolerance stack-up" where you take each component
in it's worst-case situation and determine the effect on the system.  The
whole Explorer thing was a great example of a worst-case situation. 

Eric Bryant
mailto:bryante at ghsp.com
http://www.novagate.com/~bryante 



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