DTC Saved me on Friday night!

[shah269]

Leaving work on my way home here in NJ. Warmish day cold evening. Let the car warm up before i started driving. Big fat smile on my face as i'm leaving the office and as i go up the on ramp to the high way, on power i hit a patch of black ice on my drivers side.
Now i'm not being racist but that black ice almost killed me.
Unlike it's white ice cousin it's like a ninja!
Car went sideways, counter steer.....forget about it...uphill all the weight on the rear tires...it could have been a very bad day!
The DTC kicked in the car corrected itself and all was well.
Look I'm YOLO and all but thank you DTC!

[miiipilot]

it is a very good system. I think it is a little too intrusive at times, but I like to turn the DTC off. It allows some fun with a little slip and slide.

If I keep all the systems on. It never lets me get outta line.

Glad youre ok

[shah269]

I was driving up the hill on the power and faster than i could react the rear kicked out and kicked out HARD! A quick counter input by me and a correction by the CPU and things were ok after one full oscillation. It was fast and it started very hard but came back ok.
If it wasn’t for the DTC the car would have been dead.
I'm amazed!

[JimD]

Originally Posted by shah269

I was driving up the hill on the power and faster than i could react the rear kicked out and kicked out HARD! A quick counter input by me and a correction by the CPU and things were ok after one full oscillation. It was fast and it started very hard but came back ok.
If it wasn’t for the DTC the car would have been dead.
I'm amazed!

It is good you had stability control and had it on. For oversteer, the first thing you do is to steer into the slide, not against it. Fighting the slide turns into the pendulum routine and a spin. You have to steer into the slide, reduce the gas, wait for the rear end to catch and then counter a bit when it kicks. I don't get enough practice doing this. When I did the 2 day M-school a few years ago, the intructors made us practice until we could do it right. It came back to me quick enough I got to try power sliding around the wet skidpad.

Understeer is much easier (just get off the gas) which is why most people are better off with the car set up to understeer.

[shah269]

It was fast, and i'm glad i had DTC on. I think maybe they should name the DTC YOLO.
I can see how it can save your life if the roads are wet or just not perfect.

[MuNkY6913]

Originally Posted by shah269

It was fast, and i'm glad i had DTC on. I think maybe they should name the DTC YOLO.
I can see how it can save your life if the roads are wet or just not perfect.

No. Please stop saying yolo.

[uberschnell]

Originally Posted by MuNkY6913

No. Please stop saying yolo.

+1

[Overpar56]

What did we do before the auto industry invented the electronic nannies? I shudder to think it was even possible to get behind the wheel if it wasn't 70 out and zero percent chance of precipitation.

I believe in reincarnation so YOLO doesn't apply to me.

[JimD]

What I personally did in the "old days" is I went to snow covered parking lots when there weren't other cars around and did donuts. Besides being fun, it re-taught me how to handle oversteer. I think the electronic nannies are more effective in most cases but they aren't as much fun!

We also had to learn to take it easy when conditions were not favorable. My daughter totaled a car and my step daughter more recently did serious damage, both because they lost control in the rain. My daughter was on the highway and hydroplaned and paniced. Instead of leaving the controls alone for a few seconds until she regained control, she started steering and/or braking and spun. My step daughter was just going too fast around a turn in the rain and slid into a sign. She says she hydroplaned which is kind of true but looking at the site, it is pretty clear what happened.

99% of the time we have full traction and know what to do with our cars. The other 1% is the tricky part. Driving occasionally with some wheels slipping I really think helps some. But only if you can translate the "fun time" to those brief periods when the car stops acting like it should. Instead, we now have the nannies.

[Billup]

Originally Posted by uberschnell

+1

+2

[631twentyeighteye]

Originally Posted by JimD

What I personally did in the "old days" is I went to snow covered parking lots when there weren't other cars around and did donuts. Besides being fun, it re-taught me how to handle oversteer. I think the electronic nannies are more effective in most cases but they aren't as much fun!

We also had to learn to take it easy when conditions were not favorable. My daughter totaled a car and my step daughter more recently did serious damage, both because they lost control in the rain. My daughter was on the highway and hydroplaned and paniced. Instead of leaving the controls alone for a few seconds until she regained control, she started steering and/or braking and spun. My step daughter was just going too fast around a turn in the rain and slid into a sign. She says she hydroplaned which is kind of true but looking at the site, it is pretty clear what happened.

99% of the time we have full traction and know what to do with our cars. The other 1% is the tricky part. Driving occasionally with some wheels slipping I really think helps some. But only if you can translate the "fun time" to those brief periods when the car stops acting like it should. Instead, we now have the nannies.

I agree with this entirely. I learned car control by sliding around in the snow and on wet roads and now i have zero fears about driving with with tc/dsc off. In fact, i prefer driving with it completely off in the snow(and in general) simply because it intrudes WAY too often and doesn't let me predict how the car will behave. I'd rather slide through a turn a little bit than have the tc/dsc cut power and have me get Tboned by another car.

That being said, i leave the tc/dsc on 90% of the time in the winter. I only turn it fully off when i'm purposely playing around in a safe environment, or when there's a layer of snow/slush on the ground.

In the summer i have it off most of the time just so i can pull out and merge aggressively if necessary. At highway speeds in any season or weather i keep it on solely so i don't run as large a risk of drifting into other traffic's lane.

[MZWIE]

In the BMW driving school we did the wet skidpad with and with out the DTC. Once you experience this you will never drive on a public road with it off.

With the DTC on I was going around the pad at 40MPH plus. Without it you can even get started....

[shah269]

In the old days? well we didn't have that much power on a light car with such a short wheel base. And we had actual LSD's on many of the cars. Like it or not things like traction control make the car safe…but did you know they also make the car faster?
Don’t look at me, god himself Mr. michael Schumacher came out and said it…”TC makes cars faster!”

But in my case what mattered was that I lost traction on one side, no lsd put the car sideways I steered into the skid uphill….very odd….the DTC kicked in and brought the car around even though my foot had quickly left the gas pedal alone! I was impressed! Still wish I had a real LSD but for now I’ll live with this.

Though it adds 0.01 kg of weight to the car. And according to the Turkish version of Car and Driver not only was the car slower and less stable and finished last in the race but the driver of the car had bad acid reflux due to the DTC.

[JimD]

I've done one PCD and one M-school (2 day). At the PCD, the instructors showed us the value of the stability control by having us get up near the cornering limit and then they would grab the emergency brake to introduce hard oversteer. We spun. It was fun. Then we turned the stability control on and the same experience didn't do anything.

At M-school, we did much the same thing but we started a little slower and maybe they jerked the brake a little less harshly and we were expected to recover from the oversteer. Even more fun. They timed us and if you could do three in a row correctly without expiring your time, you got to try drifting around the skidpad. That was quite difficult because I couldn't see where the rough pavement transitioned to smooth. I didn't spin but also didn't make it all the way around. Still lots of fun.

[lowbudgethero]

on cold days with a lot of salt and some moisture the car can step out with just steering input

lost my m roadster on black ice with a warm day and cold night

[Overpar56]

Drive to conditions no matter what nannies you have. IF there is a potential for black ice or patch ice, drive like it's always present.

Anytime it's around 40, I figure there's a chance of ice. You can figure out which areas have freeze-thaw-freeze cycle by looking at which areas are in the shade and which areas may ice over.

DTC can assist you, but better drivers training is needed. I personally find that a traction control system to be a bit too intrusive where it's too binary in response. Maybe it's my old school training,like relearning to not modulate braking since antilock brakes became standard.

Yeah, call me an old fart....

[JimD]

For normal street driving, I just leave the stability control fully on. I occasionally, but very rarely, may see if flash if I hit it a bit early going around a corner or something but it pretty much doesn't do anything. But it is there if needed.

I change to the inbetween position (brief push of the button) when I am doing an autocross. That seems to be something like the M mode we used in the M school. M mode let me get an M car cross wise in the track once so it allows a fair bit of tire slippage. But I didn't spin. I could use it this way on the street but it's best not to get the car cross wise in traffic. I actually did that once, years ago, in a rented mustang in downtown Minneapolis. Fortunately I got it straightened out before the light changed and I had traffic around me. I was drifting the corners on the plowed but untreated streets and let it go a bit far.

Jim

[Overpar56]

Back to the OP:

I'm glad you extracted your 1 from mayhem. Bimmers aren't cheap to fix and accidents are never fun for you, others or your vehicles. I've been fortunate having only one semi-serious accident in 40 years (no one was hurt). I admit old habits were hard to overcome (I remember manual wind up/down windows). Anti-locks probably were the best invention next to disk brakes and seat belts.

I do believe it should be harder to get a license in the first place and mandatory testing of skills after a certain age. I'm a realist in which if I or someone close to me think my driving skills are diminished, I'll hang up the keys.

[RideThePigGir]

Originally Posted by Overpar56

Back to the OP:

I'm glad you extracted your 1 from mayhem. Bimmers aren't cheap to fix and accidents are never fun for you, others or your vehicles. I've been fortunate having only one semi-serious accident in 40 years (no one was hurt). I admit old habits were hard to overcome (I remember manual wind up/down windows). Anti-locks probably were the best invention next to disk brakes and seat belts.

I do believe it should be harder to get a license in the first place and mandatory testing of skills after a certain age. I'm a realist in which if I or someone close to me think my driving skills are diminished, I'll hang up the keys.

+1 for the real moral of this story. And another +1 for actual licensing requirements in the U.S. Let's take a cue from Germany (and most of the Scandinavian countries) and make everyone re-certify on a *real* driving test when their current license is up - sooner if they live in a state with sub-40 temps. The biggest reason that "speeding is involved in x% of all accidents, only second to alcohol" is because when things go pear-shaped, the majority of drivers don't have a clue how to react, or more importantly, how their car will.

[RideThePigGir]

And call me crazy, but am I the only one who thinks that gradually testing the limits of your car (be it a 1er, an MP4-12C, or a '98 Fiesta) on public roads in the absence of traffic should actually be looked upon as a good thing, as opposed to a crime?

*edit* For the record, I drive with DSC off almost all the time and DTC on (quick press), for pretty much all of the reasons mentioned above. Sure, there have been some ass-puckering moments - it hasn't cracked 30F in at least three weeks and I'm on the OEM run-flats - but otherwise, being able to goose it a bit around any given corner and see just how much the rear-end kicks out (or doesn't) and how much correction is needed to get myself back where I need to be on the road imparts knowledge that you just can't put a price on.

[JimD]

I think it depends on the conditions. On dry pavement, the limits are so high in my bimmer I think it would be irresponsible for me to try and slightly exceed them. I push it a bit on ramps sometimes, perhaps that is what you mean. I look at the dash to see if the DTC engages, however, rather than letting the rear end get loose. The in-between position will let you get loose enough you could create an issue for other drivers. You could end up sideways, for instance.

On uncertain or relatively slick conditions, I think braking a little harder than you think you can is a good idea just to test things. Pushing on the gas a little hard could accomplish the same thing. The difference, to me, is you aren't going so fast. So if you start to slide, it is easier to recover - you have more time. But I think it is still better to use DSC engagement as your measure, not the rear end coming loose.

I also like to drift - to deliberately get the back end loose - but only in a parking lot with nobody else around. The problem with the streets is there are too many other cars and other things to hit.

[granracing]

The problem is that the limits of the car are often much different than the limits of the driver. My limit to control the car is going to be different than yours (better or worse). Then importantly, it's not a controlled environment. The place to do this is at autocross or high performance driving events on a road course.

I do believe it should be harder to get a license in the first place and mandatory testing of skills after a certain age.

Agreed. I used to teach at an Advanced Driving school marketed more towards teens. We demonstrated then had them do several evasive driving manuvers, let them feel what it was like to go from 60 to 0 with ABS, and several other items. Not only did it teach them how to be better drivers, it also knocked down many guys who thought they could drive and would never get into trouble.

Funny thing was we taught the same course to police and other adults. OMG, they were horrible! Breaking bad techniques and all. SCCA / Tire Rack host similar schools - Skid School.