On a separate note, from my personal experience I’d say the ESP is a must for high powered rear wheel vehicles. If you drive on an old freeway or toll road like you’re in the track, that is as agressive and fast as you possibly can, you can see it kicked in at least every 15 minutes. The benefit for me is clear though I understand that normal sane drivers may need the stuff maybe once in their lifetime.

What does ESP have to do with active suspension? Corvette offers ESP without the magnaride stuff.

“My questioning the definition of what a stability system is simply to state that there is no definition”

Um, what? Not a car person are you? You had a hard time differentiating ‘Active engine control’, ‘Suspension control’, and ‘Brake control’ with ESP. Or do you think ‘stability system’ just a marking jumbo? It’s pretty common knowledge that when refer to the term ‘stability system’ it means a system that works in similer menthed of the ESP develop by Bosch and introduced on MBs in the late 90′s.

“How about a cheap one, say $500. That’s still $500 on the sticker, and if it’s an econobox, that’s a pretty deep gouge pretty much making the car just a “—box”.”

That’t why ESP mandate is a good thing, it will reduce the price of the system because of the implement scale. And even the poorest can aford the protection that was once only avaliable to the richs.

“where do you stop with the engineering??”

When the cost outwights the benefit.

ESP reduced single vehicle crash rate by 40%. Tell me what kind of safety device/masure with cost of only couple $100s per car can do that? ESP is the single most importent safety feature introducd since the safety belt and airbag. And IT WORKS.

Secondly, if you are going to engineer the vehicle to death and try to eliminate every last possibility of harm to the driver, good luck. Shit happens on the highway, plain and simple. The problem is, where do you stop with the engineering?? People like to throw stuff off the overpass. Trucks kick up road debris. Does that mean all cars are required to have bullet proof windshields? People get hurt, and truely this would save lives. How about we take the tire pressure sensors once step further and require everyone to have run flat tires. Tires blow on the highway and clearly cause accidents and fatalities. If we all had run flats, well that wouldn’t happen anymore. So let’s add another $400 now to the sticker and an additional $400 every time you purchase tires.

OR, people can just pay attention and drive slower! If you want to purchase that stuff, be my guest. Please do. Don’t force me to buy it as well.

You don’t seem to know how the ESP works. It apply brakes to each individual wheel by comparing the vehicle speed, yaw angle and steering angle to a pre-stored map, then correct the car’s path. It can use all the existing TCS(‘Active engine control’) and ABS(‘Brake control’) compoments of the car, plus some solidstate sensors and chips. No extra ‘motorized components’, minimal added wight, nothing to do with ‘suspension control’ and it can GREATLY imprve the car’s handling ability better then any human driver can do. It’s not ‘false sense of security’, it’s the real deal.

You can be a idiot teenage driver and ESP will limit you within the car’s capability, or you can be a perfect driver and ESP will save you in emergency situations. ESP saves lifes, pure and simple.

Sometimes the answer is yes. How about this: Hwy speed, ‘moose test’ maneuver, poor condition or not, car fishtailing. ESP has MUCH MUCH greater chance to save your ass.

Your argement seems to me is that we can train the drivers to avoid the ‘moose test’ situation all together so the car don’t even fishtail at 1st place therefore we don’t need ESP. Well, guess what, it’s the deer that decided to jump infront of the moving car, not the driver.

It’s just like driving in the snow. More and more these days I see SUVs in the ditch, not rear drive sports cars, or even front drive ricers. It’s SUVs, because these weenies drive around in 4WD thinking there is no way they’ll drive off the road. That is, until they hit the brakes and it’s all over.

I don’t know how many accidents out there are merely an act of sliding off the road in poor conditions. Otherwise, all of the rear endings and fender benders will not be effected. And in the end, stability systems are no antidote to high speed in poor conditions. It’s human error that causes these accidents. Otherwise, all of those expensive SUVs would not be in the ditch.

ESP still work within the laws of physics of course. What it does is that it enables the car to work closer to the car’s traction limit then any human being can do. ESP can selectively brake individual wheel which greatly improve the chance of bringing an out of control car back in control , NO amount of driver training can substute this.

Another relatively low-cost safety feature is a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). Four properly inflated tires is better than ESC with one semi-flat.

1. Stability control systems typically are a huge investment for manufacturers, so if these systems become mandatory in automobiles, the cheapest cars available on the market will have an extra, say, $1500 to $2000 added to their base price.

Additionally, because most of the less expensive cars have stability control as an option, this is an area where manufacturers can really make their profit. It’s similar to air conditioning in a car — it’s an option, but you have to pay an extra $1000 or $1500 for it as an option on a car that doesn’t come with it as standard equiptment. In reality, the actual cost of the system is only a few hundred dollars (if it’s even that much) for the manufacturer to provide… but no one buys a car without air conditioning because of the luxury and convienence, and the detrimental effects on the re-sale value of the car if you do not purchase it.

2. A *very* low-cost option for safety is Day Running Lights (DRL’s). These have been government-mandated in Canada since about 1990 or so, and it’s a system that ensures that you always have your headlights on (dimmer than low-beams, though — you still have to switch your headlights on at night, unless your car does it for you autmoatically).
When DRL’s were first introduced, the public complained that it would blind you when drivers were coming towards you, or when they were behind you it would shine into your eyes from your rear-view mirror, but that was never the case.
I don’t have the exact statistics, but DRL’s in Canada reduced collisions significantly because it made it easier for you to see other drivers on the road (especially dark-coloured cars, because they tend to sort of blend in with the road).

This is perhaps the best low-cost safety feature that can possibly be installed on a car to prevent accidents, and in canada, if you ever see a modern car without it’s headlights on, it seems to be way out of place — you can tell that it’s a visiting tourist from one of the US states.

With the stability control systems, I was not attempting to justify a trade-off between cost and safety, but in reality, we need better educated drivers first, than systems that can save our tails in the event that we miscalculate a manouver. Stability control systems don’t teach bad drivers how to drive well; they in effect give a misleading sense of security to bad drivers that believe that they can be saved in any situation.

When airbags first debuted in the early 1990′s my father said that the same was, in effect, true — that bad drivers would feel invincable if they got into a collision because they would be saved. My father then went on to say “if you replace the airbags with swords, you would see much safer driving on the road.”

And that, my LLN friends, is probably true.

Bush: I concur! Peeps need to learn to drive or get their ass off the road.

The point is to try and keep a small mistake from becoming a huge issue for everyone else on the road.

Certainly the Europeans led the way with safety features and engineering, but the Asians are catching up quickly. Cheap Hyundais come with stability control and side airbags…stability control is not even an option on most mid-priced domestics.

ABS should be mandatory IMHO.

More safety is good