Stability control standard

Car companies are a fair way along the ESC learning curve, but legislative and consumer affairs bodies are not keeping pace.

Crash-testing authority ANCAP would like to see all new cars fitted with electronic stability control (ESC), but whilst there are rumblings from state governments and road-safety bodies -- and a lot of buyers do see the need -- the car industry (rightly) makes the point that a lot of customers are unwilling to stump up for the active safety of stability control -- either as an option or as a standard feature bumping up the total price of the car.

Variously known as ESP, ESC, DSC, VDC, VSA, VSC and by other abbreviations, the active safety technology applies brake hydraulic pressure to reduce speed on the car's four wheels independently, when on-board systems indicate that the car is out of control.

The Carsales Network attended a media program earlier this week at the Crashlab (more here), a vehicle crash safety testing facility in Sydney's west. Our hosts for the day were the experts from ANCAP (the Australasian New Car Assessment Program), who invited the attending media to compare two cars in an emergency lane-change exercise. One was a Toyota Camry equipped with stability control and the other was a Mitsubishi 380 without stability control.

Based on this test and recent experience driving a Ford Falcon XR6 Turbo in the wet, it's apparent that the different car manufacturers hold dear very different philosophies when it comes to setting up the stability control systems for their respective cars.

Far from feathering the brake and attempting to steer smoothly around an object, the Camry calls for heavy application of brake and violent hauling on the steering wheel. Admittedly, that's probably how most drivers would react in an emergency anyway, although we're not convinced that physically slighter drivers will be able to haul on the wheel fast enough or apply enough lock to steer around the object in the first instance.

Without driving the Camry like a dodgem car, the Toyota understeers initially on gravel and, in real life, the Camry could bounce off the object you're attempting to avoid.

That object might be the tail of a car projecting into your lane after it has oversteered off the road -- and you round a blind bend in the wet to be confronted by that. In such an instance, the ESC might change the parameters of the crash from major impact to glancing blow, which is certainly better than the former.

The situation is different with the Turbo Falcon, which has more than enough power to be as tail happy as you like. There's little doubt that the Falcon, with its excellent steering and front-end grip could avoid the original point of impact, but the Ford's system doesn't necessarily preclude some oversteer.

If you're lucky, you might damage an expensive alloy wheel on a gutter or rip a bumper cover off on a parked car, driving the Falcon in the wet. If you're unlucky, the tail may break loose just as a car or truck is passing from the other direction.

Plainly, Ford and Toyota -- not to mention other manufacturers in the nascent stages of developing ESC -- approach the matter of tuning ESC from respective points of view that are quite far removed.

Currently, there's no stability control standard anywhere in the world -- and the world's car makers are either leading the field with highly sophisticated systems or they're playing catch-up with far more basic systems.

Soames Job, Deputy Chair of ANCAP, believes that it's not impossible to develop a minimum benchmark standard for stability control systems, but most crash-testing bodies globally are still coming to grips with the existence of the relatively new technology, let alone finding ways of measuring its efficacy and publishing the results for the benefit of consumers.

"I would imagine," he says, "that a performance standard would be: at 'X' speed, within this lane, you have to be able to make this manoeuvre, without hitting 'X' -- and it would be a standard like that."

"As long as they meet that target, then they've achieved the outcome."

Such testing would probably need to be layered in multiple tiers for different speeds, otherwise there would be a risk of manufacturers tuning stability control programs for optimum 'nanny' regulation at 60km/h, merely to pass the test.

"You need to make sure that you're not actually getting something which is ideal at 60, but out of whack at 50 and out of whack at 70 [km/h]," says Job.

Finding a consistent, repeatable and verifiable method of testing ESC systems shouldn't be hard -- and there's little doubt that some independent body will assume that type of consumer-advocate testing sooner or later... but who will that be?

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