Thursday, November 23, 2006
Don't Use Cruise Control When Wet
Wink: Welcome to the Church of the Holy Cabbage. Lettuce pray... (Shane, Greenland)
There were numerous accidents throughout the province a few days ago during one of our more severe rain storms. Police made the comment that one of the problems was drivers using cruise control and going too fast when the roads are extremely wet causing hydroplaning.
Do you know why you should not use cruise control when it is wet or slippery? I'll tell you why from my own experiments. You read this and hear this, but no one seems to explain why.
Modern cruise controls appear to be mainly an electronic device that does wonders uphill, downhill and on the level, keeping your speed almost constant with no input from your right foot.
How does it do that? Well I can't get into all the technical details, but when you think about it the unit requires a certain amount of feedback from the driving wheels. The road resistance helps it figure out how much power needs to be applied to those wheels.
If you have cruise activated as you approach a slippery surface, it interprets
that as needing more power because the driving wheels have little resistance (traction). Full acceleration is applied immediately, and if you don't catch it in a split second, your engine will go wide open.
If you are not expecting it, your vehicle will go out of control under full throttle.
Even with steering mounted controls, you will never get to the off button fast enough. If you hit the brakes to deactivate cruise you will probably also cause active braking when you are already out of control, and will likely contribute to a crash.
So don't use cruise if you suspect even the slightest amount of slippery conditions, whether it be from rain or winter time conditions.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
There were numerous accidents throughout the province a few days ago during one of our more severe rain storms. Police made the comment that one of the problems was drivers using cruise control and going too fast when the roads are extremely wet causing hydroplaning.
Do you know why you should not use cruise control when it is wet or slippery? I'll tell you why from my own experiments. You read this and hear this, but no one seems to explain why.
Modern cruise controls appear to be mainly an electronic device that does wonders uphill, downhill and on the level, keeping your speed almost constant with no input from your right foot.
How does it do that? Well I can't get into all the technical details, but when you think about it the unit requires a certain amount of feedback from the driving wheels. The road resistance helps it figure out how much power needs to be applied to those wheels.
If you have cruise activated as you approach a slippery surface, it interprets
that as needing more power because the driving wheels have little resistance (traction). Full acceleration is applied immediately, and if you don't catch it in a split second, your engine will go wide open.
If you are not expecting it, your vehicle will go out of control under full throttle.
Even with steering mounted controls, you will never get to the off button fast enough. If you hit the brakes to deactivate cruise you will probably also cause active braking when you are already out of control, and will likely contribute to a crash.
So don't use cruise if you suspect even the slightest amount of slippery conditions, whether it be from rain or winter time conditions.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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