(Gallery: Honda kick starts motorcycle safety tech)

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It appears you overlooked something

While essentially you are correct that the onus seems to
still be on the motorcycle operator's side (we really
don't want to eliminate this, do we?) you missed the
part where there was a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V or C2C
system as read on the biker's helmet) communications
that is intended to alert both operators to an
impending conflict. In essence, 'putting more effort
into helping car drivers be more effective.'

The ABS system is probably going to be of significantly
more benefit to motorcycles than to cars in my
experience. Motorcycles have a bad habit of locking the
rear wheel under emergency braking that throws the
bike out of control much more drastically than most
cars due to its inherent instability onces the wheels
stop turning. I think on rain-slick surfaces this could
actually become more dangerous unless the system
uses something other than wheel rotation or torque to
judge ground speed.
In my own case, driving a Camaro with ABS, I found it
worked beautifully on dry roads, but actually caused
me more issues on an ice-slick bridge than not having
it would have caused. Because of the ice, pressing the
brake pedal stopped all wheels and the ABS assumed I
was stopped despite still traveling forward at
something like 15mph. The ABS actually made
manually cycling the brakes more difficult as a result.
Granted, this was an extreme circumstance, but I felt
in far less control of the car with ABS than I would have
without.

The final point is that at least for the moment, ABS
doesn't stand for "Automatic Braking System" but
rather for "AntiLock Braking System." This is definitely
a boon for the biker as I described above, but adding
an automatic system similar to what's being trialed by
Mercedes, Volvo and other manufacturers would be a
boon for all, including pedestrians.

Posted by: vulpine@...   Posted on: 11/05/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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