Your Opinion: ABS or No ABS?

What would you rather have and why?

I, personally, would rather not have ABS. In my opinion, it seems like it takes too much control out of my hands while driving, and using the brakes is pretty important to have control over. Additionally, it's just another thing to go wrong and have to repair or replace. I hate vehicles with too many electronics. Finally, you can manually manipulate the brake pedal to stop the brakes from locking up without ABS, but you can't do the opposite with ABS. That's just my opinion though. I'd like to hear yours too!

 

ABS (though my car doesn't have it).

 

You can usually overpower the ABS system and lock tires still.



Theres a reason cars have ABS. Yes its definitely possible for a skilled driver to outbrake ABS, but in emergency conditions even many skilled drivers panic and lock. And skilled drivers, those are a real niche thing. Your average driver does not threshold brake, and even if they knew how, under emergency conditions is still most likely to just floor the pedal. Therefore, cars have it to stop average joe skidding into a kid thats run into the street.

 

ABS for a daily and probably no ABS for a track car or something.
Because safety on the streets (like 65% of the people in my city cant drive well), danger off the streets.

 

Growing up, I was always taught to pump brakes in order to prevent the wheels from fulling locking and leaving you skidding straight forward. My first car didn't have ABS (it barely had anything, and what it did have was broken lol), and (being a new driver) I had a few close calls that I would've ended up crashing in had I locked brakes. Granted, I never truly just randomly pumped the brakes - but rather I let off the brakes when/if the tires started slipping then pushed the brakes back down when the tires caught again.
I also think that my childhood of racing games had some influence over driving habits.
Of course, my current truck has ABS so break pumping is all but useless.

 

Depends an the car, and the suspension but i think i preffer with no ABS

 

I've only driven a few cars/trucks with ABS, and they had older ABS systems which I felt kicked in way earlier than they should have, and ruined the feel or dumbed down the brake pedal too much.
The car (and karts) I've driven without ABS gave a lot more feedback under braking and I felt the limits much better, but that's likely because the suspension was pretty stiff and I felt every crack in the road.
It comes down to the suspension for me, if it's really soft (such as on a truck), I prefer having ABS. If it's stiff and I can feel the road very well, I'd prefer not to have ABS. I'd go as far as to say it depends on the weather as well.

 

ABS is considerably better at preventing wheel lock ups than most people are. if anything it can help you learn to brake better as it is a passive system it only activates when the brakes lock. so therefore if you're braking hard and it does activate you can feel this.

It's rubbish off road though, so you can just pull the fuse

 

Personally, I want ABS. My friend had an E36 just like mine, but without ABS, and when a drunk driver cut him off, he locked up his wheels and crashed head-on into a Smart. Needless to say both cars were totaled and he spent a week in hospital. Had he had ABS, he could have steered to the relative safety of the ditch on the side of the road.

 

If my car had ABS, my mother wouldn't have crashed it into a pole.
It happened last February. (Car is FWD and had ContiWinterContact studless winter tires). She was driving through a narrow alleyway behind a mall. It was covered in snow. When she started approaching a 90* turn, she thought she was driving too fast (actually, she wasn't). She stepped on the brakes while turning the wheel, but the car went forward instead of turning (no wonder). She panicked and slammed on the brakes with full force. The wheels locked up and the car slid forward, straight onto the pole's concrete base and the into the pole itself.
Result: severely bent bumper support, deformed bumper, dented front fascia, crumpled license plate, deep scratches on the skidplate. If the skidplate wasn't there, the engine could have been badly damaged, too.

 

ABS wont have helped, with the way most ABS systems work, theyre entirely useless in snow and provide no assistance

 

So, in the snow it doesn't matter if the wheels are locked or not?

 

The parameters programmed into an ABS system are usually configured for damp tarmac. The ABS system will not actually account for being in snow properly and does not act as a proper anti lock system in snow, your wheels will lock anyway.

Also why ABS doesnt work in severe rain, is overly aggressive on dry tarmac and doesnt work well in off road conditions either (and why many newer offroad vehicles with electronic gadgetry have the surface selection switch, which can often adjust ABS parameters too)

 

Well, exploring the limits of my car, i discovered that the ABS works fine on ice/snow/really slippery situations. I tried driving over snow, over gravel and over a really slippery asphalt (first rain in months after summer). So I guess the efficiency on the ABS system changes btween different cars