off topic / traction control

[Shirley, Mark R]

IMHO, the American public is for the most part idiotic to want
the hugest truck they can get, expect it to drive just like a 
Cadillac, and have all the creature comforts of a Cadillac.
They are TRUCKS.  Period.  You can't throw that much mass around
and not expect it to have problems with high speed emergency 
maneuvers. 
And it's not that the Explorer was poorly designed, it's a truck,
designed to drive like a truck.  Where they got into trouble was
changing tire specs to get it to ride nice.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Bryant [mailto:BRYANTE at ghsp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 9:12 AM
To: 'diy_efi at diy-efi.org'
Subject: RE: off topic / traction control



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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