For those of you who are familiar with super cars, I am looking a bunch of accidents who happenned with a simple acceleration, and i have some questions, do this happen cause the dsc was off or did not worked good or fast enough, is it temperature tires related?
or what else? thanks in advance.

 

I'd check the moron behind the wheel before looking at the DSC

 

+1

There are very few people with the required skills and mental attitude to properly control the cars they drive. That includes Fiat 500's.

 

Two expressions come to mind:

"A man has to know his limitations" and "Practice, practice, practice"

It's part of my job requirement to drive some very high powered, exotic, and expensive cars. You don't jump into a car with 500-800-1000 horsepower and just mash the throttle. It takes a good while for an average guy (like me) to become familiar and comfortable enough with how any given car reacts before tapping into even a fraction of the available performance.

I'm not even close to having the skill level/experience level to truly exercise the full potential of this type of car. They can be very scary.

There. I've admitted it . I supect some others won't....perhaps often those who have never actually been behind the wheel of one

Nowadays anyone can buy a car off the showroom floor with the power/speed/acceleration that, a few years ago, would've been seen only on true race cars.

They have traction control for a good reason

Cheers
DD

 

Bear in mind that even the most skilled and experienced drivers take quite a while and many miles to figure out how any particular car behaves at the limits. Even two supposedly "identical" cars will behave differently.

That's why some enthusiast owners upgrade very slowly. The car they have now is like a comfortable pair of old shoes. Sometimes this lets them outdrive a newer, "faster" car through sheer skill and familiarity. With the car, the course ... and themselves.

 

Exactly.

Straying a bit I'll add that, purely from a "driving fun" standpoint, some of the most enjoyable cars don't have the highest horsepower. If you have a car with 350 horsepower there's a good chance you'll be able to enjoy ALL of the horses fairly often on public roads. A car with 700 horsepower? Not so much. A bit frustrating, actually :-)

Cheers
DD

 

I agree with everything that has been said so far. However, I would have to say that the DSC on my Jag does an excellent job keeping things in line when I want it to.

I am afraid to turn DSC off completely if I go for a spirited drive, because I might get overzealous/too confident and kill myself and others!

 

My personal experience with DSC

DSC on


DSC off



All I wanted was a bit more back road fun with the nanny off....

Needless to say, I seldom think about touching that button again...

Vince

 

I'm watching a longer compilation of videos, and it seems apparent to me that many of these could've been prevented by leaving DSC on. You wouldn't see all of the fishtailing, overcorrecting, etc. However, it wouldn't help in situations where the wrecks were caused by not having enough time to stop or running off the road when going too fast around a curve, etc.

A slower and less powerful car, I'd be very comfortable turning off the DSC, but something like the XKR, only in controlled circumstances!

 

you think many fishtailing happened on this video cause the dsc was off then?

 

No, but I think DSC would've prevented the conditions that cause fishtailing.

And yes, I do think the DSC was off in many of these cases in cars that clearly were equipped with DSC.

 

I've long believed that preventing death is an admirable goal. Preventing bashed-in sheet metal is a close second :-)

Cheers
DD

 

I agree.

If an average person is smart enough to have respect (or fear?) for the horsepower and leaves the DCS on he can probably go faster. He'll spend more time concentrating on steering, braking, atc and less time simply keeping the beast under control.




The most important elements being lots of room and no solid objects to run into!

Cheers
DD

 

DSC is actually a bad thing.

It encourages the inexperienced and unskilled to venture into areas of vehicle dynamics that they are ill-equipped to handle.

When a driver is dependent on DSC/ABS and the limits of the devices are reached, they're gone ... off the road.

A skilled driver who has long experience with nibbling at the edges without DSC/ABS would already be feathering all his controls. There should be no fishtailing or overcorrection. A little yaw, yes ... but not gross attitudinal changes.

These drivers do not treat their controls, those being: steering, gas, brakes, and gears as if they were on and off switches.

They know what to do, how to do it and when. The best even know why. For those drivers, everything actually happens in slow motion with lots of reaction time ... for them. Driving like this is like dancing on four small patches of rubber. You have to be as one with the car.

The price of admission is sometimes lots of bent sheet metal. Maybe not lots, but at least some.

There is a reason that many of the great rally drivers of the past came from snow country. Snowbanks are more forgiving of mistakes and snow is more demanding in the requirement for a light touch at the controls.

 

Heh heh.

As we've just seen, the inexperienced don't need encouragement to venture into areas of vehicle dynamics that they are ill-equipped to handle. They're perfectly willing to do so entirely on their own.

And we've also seen that *absence* of DCS clearly does nothing at all to prevent them from going there.

OTOH, the driver who keeps the DCS engaged IS specifically concerned with keeping the car under control. DCS is a safety device. A smart driver, inexperienced or otherwise, uses all the safety devices he can....until he's sure (rightly or wrongly) he can do better without them.

To use an (admittedly rather absurd) analogy, we could said than having brakes encourages an inexperienced driver to venture into places he shouldn't go...and he'd be better off without them so as to avoid being "encouraged" to do dumb things!

Of course there will always be some people who feel that technology ...ABS, T/C, DCS, AWD, whatever....will save them from *everything* and they feel invincible as a result. If those are the people you are referring to, well, I agree with you.

Cheers
DD

 

That's part of it. And it is because they do not know what to do when the limits of the device are reached.

Don't forget, the responses of the systems to a given set of inputs are presets and they have their limits.

The human brain on the other hand is infinitely adaptable and actually quite fast if it is in familiar territory.

The point at which the systems should be overriden is where the system gets in the way.

For example, I am mindful to turn off TRAC on rutted icy roads. For my style of reacting to sideways motion on ice, TRAC gets in the way because it is constantly trying to correct my corrections. In effect, it is fighting me. The car feels very twitchy and unsure. With TRAC off, I can relax and let instinct take over. Not every sideways hop needs correction. You just need to stay generally straight and in your lane.

Your X300/R does not have this problem, you have a PowerLok LSD ... lucky devil

 

I agree that DSC is a crutch. But that doesn't change the fact that in most of these clips, DSC would've prevented the outcome.

Also, consider that just 20 years ago, a 300+ horsepower sports car would've been out of reach of just about everyone except hardcore enthusiasts. Now, you can get a brand new 300 horsepower muscle car for about the same price as a Honda Accord, which puts them in the hands of very inexperienced drivers.

I am by no means an expert driver, but the first car I spent a lot of time throwing around through the mountains was my '94 Mazda Miata. That car was a blast and I did drive it very hard, but it was really a lot less scary to drive fast than my XKR is, just because it didn't have nearly as much power!

That being said, I don't feel like experimenting too much at the limits with my XKR without at least having some form of safety net (i.e., DSC!). It does sort of hamper the fun, though!

 

Of course they have their limits (ice driving, as in your example), but accelerating out of a curve at WOT in a 400-500+ hp car, as is the case in many of these clips, is a situation that the DSC is capable of handling easily. Modern systems are getting more and more advanced such that there are very few situations that could cause the car to become uncontrollable.

I experience the effects of DSC frequently in my XKR. If I'm making a left turn and I give it a little bit too much throttle (purposefully), the DSC system carefully cuts the throttle and applies the brake to keep my trajectory nice and even. It's very annoying sometimes, but if I want to have more fun, I can turn on Track DSC or turn off DSC altogether, at my own peril. Of course, I would learn much more about the car with DSC off all the time, but it only takes one wrong move "experimenting" to ruin the car that I will never be able to afford again!

 

Well, actually, it does. It has both LSD and Traction Control. The LDS doesn't help (and, sometimes, can actually hurt) on an outright ice-covered road and the t/c must be defeated or it'll confound the driver's efforts, as you mentioned.

In most situations, though, I don't have a problem with the t/c, as it isn't too agressive. It allows some wheelspin and then retards throttle at just about the same time the car starts naturally slewing to the side.....which is when when you'd typically ease off a bit anyway.....unless, of course, you were intentionally trying to set up some "tail out" driving.

On the whole I could live without traction control. The XJR/6 just isn't all that powerful. A person would have to be a madman or a total idiot to get into trouble with it.

I'd hate giving up the ABS, though. :-)

Cheers
DD

 

1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am 455SD. The only twin to the one used by John Wayne in McQ, it cost $3K 1 year old in 1974 dollars. No ABS, DSC. Just a positrac. Perfectly controllable under all conditions.

So, 2013 -1973 = 40 years.