November 25th 2005

There's a bloke (a real bloke) named Graeme Fletcher that does road testing for a TV program called Motoring 200X,
or right now it's Motoring 2006 and the Sports Channel remembers to feature it from time to time, usually on a Saturday
morning.

Now Graeme's a pretty good road tester. Restricted as he is by the fact that he, like all other RTs, has to toe the line on what
he says about some manufacturers car or other, he's pretty outspoken. But he has one bee in his bonnet that bugs me to death.
He's highly vocal about the necessity of every car being equipped with ABS brakes.

Like most journalists, technically qualified or not, he insists that this automotive feature is a necessity - even on a car costing
less than a good home entertainment system these days.

And I keep saying that most ABS systems don't do a very good job of actually stopping you in the worst of conditions and are
phenomenally expensive to repair. In fact, I have a whole raft of clients that ask me to disable their ABS system in winter time
and a whole lot more where the system has already failed and they definitely don't want it repaired.

To take a recent example of the cost of these devices, let's look at a strange set of symptoms that popped up this week at
our shop.

A Ford Contour arrived that was putting its own brakes on and causing the car to skid, almost out of control, at about 90 Km/h.

A road test with an analyser attached, showed that the wheel sensors all agreed that the car was travelling at 90 Km/h, but the
computer control module was reading 70 km/h and was assuming that the wheels were spinning, as they would be if you
accelerated hard on sheer ice.

This caused the traction control feature of the ABS system to apply the brakes quite heartily and to continue to brake vigorously
because the speed differential, betwen the computer and the wheels was continuous and proportional.
This weird electronic gremlin didn't happen every time, but if the ABS light came on, you KNEW it was about to brake all by itself
- hard!

OK, so now we jut have to replace the control module, right?

Think again - a call to the dealer established that this particular black box costs C$ 5,400!!

No I didn't just add a zero by mistake - C$ 5,400!!

This is about twice the value of the car, so guess what?

We have another driver out there somehow managing to stay out of trouble on his new snow tires,
just the way he did before ABS was invented.

Usually, ABS, when optioned, adds about $ 400 to the cost of a new car. Air conditioning is usually a $1000 option.
The value of these systems however, when bought as individual components over a dealers counter, will usually
quadruple in "value".

The more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to go wrong.

And the more stuff they're going to go on trying to sell to you.