Safety measures are vital for your car apart from comfort and styling. When you think about the safety measures, the first thing running in your mind will be the safety belts. Seatbelts undoubtedly protect the lives of all occupants of the vehicle. There are many other safety features such as the brake assist and traction control which provide safety to you and your car.

Brake Assist: Brake Assist detects circumstances in which emergency braking is required by measuring the speed with which the brake pedal is depressed. Some systems additionally take into account the rapidity of which the gas pedal is released, pre-tensioning the brakes when a “panic release” of the gas is noted. When panic braking is detected, the Brake Assist system automatically develops maximum brake boost in order to mitigate a driver’s tendency to brake without enough force. Break assist uses computerized sensors to track the speed at which the brake pedal is depressed. The brake assist monitors and reports about how quickly the driver depresses the brake pedal.

The mastermind behind this effective safety feature is Mercedes-Benz. Brake assist is available only from a limited number of manufacturers. You should definitely invest your money in this worthy safety feature.

Traction control: Traction control has traditionally been a safety feature in high-performance cars, which would otherwise need very sensitive throttle input to keep them from spinning when accelerating, especially in wet or snowy conditions. This is another effective safety feature for your car. It works in conjunction with the antilock brake system but performs a different, and arguably a more important one. If the traction control system detects that one wheel is slipping, it will electronically send a command to the antilock brake system to apply brake pressure to only the slipping wheel. This limits the wheel spin and sends the power to another wheel which will stop the wheel from spinning, thus enabling all wheels to have maximum traction while the vehicle is being driven.

In recent years, traction control systems have become widely available in non-performance cars, minivans, and light trucks.

In race cars, traction control is used as a performance enhancement, allowing maximum traction under acceleration without wheel spin. When accelerating out of turn, it keeps the tires at the optimum slip ratio.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 5:32 am and is filed under Car Maintenance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.