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Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 00:16:13 -0400
From: Joe Elliott <jee@domain.elided>
Subject: re: ABS
One of my best friends drives an '83 BMW w/ ABS. The first winter he
had it ('99-00?) the ABS clearly worked and kept us out of the hedges
more than once. Sometime between then and the next winter they quit
working, although it's done nothing to make the car any less safe
than it would have been without ABS in the first place. ABS systems
vary from car to car. We all know that the ATE Mk II ABS in the
Milano/75 3.0 (as well as various French and German cars) can fail in
such a way that the rear brakes are disabled. And some ABS is just
dangerous in the first place--in a '94 Ford Taurus, for example, any
braking at all going down my steep ice-covered driveway engaged the
ABS and shook the car so much that it shimmied off the road. Various
Volvos, Audis, Jaguars, Alfas, Saabs, BMW's M-B's, and Hondas in the
neighborhood go down (some of them can't get back up though) this
driveway all the time without difficulty.
God bless the USA, where we can't import certain cars because they
don't meet certain rules, but where (in most states) there is no
annual roadworthiness test like you might encounter in Europe (or CA,
or the eastern USA), so we still have our freedom not to maintain our
cars and to make hazardous modifications.
Uh, California has no roadworthiness tests. But I agree about the irony
of a country that won't let individuals import the cars of their
choice, unless they are brought up to US safety standards, but then has
no national tests for roadworthiness to make sure that these oh-so
strict safety measures remain working or that the car hasn't been
modified in such a way as to circumvent most of them. This is what
happens when bureaucrats who know nothing about a certain subject make
laws pertaining to that subject. They end up being arbitrary, largely
unnecessary, and and some cases even counterproductive (like the FDA
medical drug approval process. Its so expensive and involved that in
the USA, prescription drugs have become prohibitively expensive).