Safety Device That Truly Saves Lives

Thursday, 10. September 2009

If you are not aware of ESP or Electronic Stability Program (also known as ESC Electronic Stability Control) you must be new to my newsletter and never watched one of my new car videos. If you are aware of ESP you will know that I go on about it constantly because I truly believe that it should be fitted as standard on all cars now and not in a few years (2014) as has now been insisted upon by the EC. Around the world 1.4 million people die in traffic accidents every year. This figure would clearly be higher without the existence of ABS created by Bosch in 1978. In 1995 Bosch released their upgraded ABS system known as ESP which uses brakes, suspension and steering to avoid accidents. In simple terms if you are taking a bend too fast the system detects the speed of the car compared to the angle of the steering and will detect a potential skid before it happens and apply brake pressure in order to prevent it. The system was an attempt to avoid by far the biggest cause of car accidents (90%) driver error. People rarely become involved in serious accidents so they never know how to deal with a skid or a tyre blowout and ‘natural’ reactions aren’t usually the best, for example when learning to drive I was shown how to avoid an accident when the car went into a skid by steering into the skid in order to regain grip before steering out of it. However, the natural reaction is to steer away from the skid which would simply make things worse. Bosch believe that improved driver assistance and safety systems will reduce the number of accidents considerably. It has been suggested that the fitting of ESP can cut accidents by 80%, that is staggering. It does this by preventing the car from skidding and giving the driver greater control. This was already happening with ABS but ESP simply takes it to another level. By Graham Hill