The point of balance when deliberately hung out is quite delicate. And I don't mean 3 feet sideways, but rather just at the verge of letting go. If the DSC cuts in, it unexpectedly spoils the balance and can shoot you to the inside. Not real pleasant having the DSC work against you.

On the other hand, if you are naturally balanced on the throttle any cutaway is quite predictable and should have been allowed for well before the DSC has a chance to react. There should be no drama at all. Just a feeling that the car is very light on its feet.

Let me give you another example ... a driver can see a pothole or a hump in the curve. For the pothole, all it takes is a finger width of steering adjustment or a slight movement of the gas pedal to avoid having it upset the balance. A hump or dip is another matter, you have to anticipate the effect on balance and pre-correct in order to maintain the line. DSC cannot anticipate, it can only react after the fact.

DSC/ABS also cannot "see" a small patch of sand while going backwards on a sheet of glare ice. A driver can see that small patch, steer towards it and know to dab the brakes at just the right moment to pitch the car to the side of the gas pump that is in the way in the current course of movement. BTW, that's a real example.

 

plums, not sure what to tell you. You act like it's impossible to "be one with the car" and make a horrible mistake that lands you in a ditch or worse!

Let's not forget, in F1, traction control was working so well that they had to ban it because it wasn't fair!

 

I agree.

Thus, if a driver sets-up a driving situation where he wants to be "deliberately hung out" he'd most likely turn off the DSC/Trac Control. Hopefully he has the skill, experience, discipline, and familiarity with how his car behaves to strike (and keep) that delicate balance.

From the videos it seems apparent to me that many drivers do NOT have the attritubes needed to control their beasts much less strike and keep a delicate balance. I suspect they *think* they have the right stuff....but they don't. Or, perhaps they have it but, in the excitement of the moment (that is, showing off), suffered a temporary loss. In any case, DSC/Trac control would almost certainly have saved them some humiliation :-).







Right, and I don't think anyone would disagree. An observant driver sees the hump, reacts correctly, all's well....and DSC never even comes into play.

If the driver doesn't see the hump he can't anticipate hitting it. So, he hits the hump. If somthing bad starts to happen....and he's on his toes, knows what to do, doesn't over-react....he corrects for whatever the bad thing is and happily motors on.

If he doesn't respond corectly to whatever bad thing is happening, and the car starts getting wild on him, the DSC might well save his bacon!





Fair enough!

I'm sure we can list 100 things that ABS/Trac Control/DSC can't do. However, these features are not installed on cars because of what they can't do. They are installed on cars because of what they CAN do !

And I'll wager good money that one thing they CAN do, if left "on", is make many of the drivers in the above videos look much less foolish :-)

Cheers
DD

 

i remember watching a video of an xkr s in india or somewhere else in a circuit a 7 minutes video where the driver loose control too, hopefully the dsc was off or he did not handle the steering wheel enough...i had two real issue during the 500 000 km i did in xj, and i sorted it out very well, one time with a van den plas 1984 and one time with a xj6 1995, each time the car reacted so well it was amazing. ( the rear was leading and front you know, ) but then i managed to bring back the car in the right position at a high speed indeed.(I was alone) it was a very powerfull xj6 from fresno jaguar haron.

I just noticed with this powerfull engine, a slight variation, or even sometimes the same acceleration could be fell different, depending of how cold is the engine, , tires and what kind of pavement you are, it can really drift easily even if you are careful, hopefully the dsc helps but there is a merge and sometime 2 feet is 2 feet and can be too much. oh yes when i accelerate sometimes i watch for all, a good vision, visibility, nobody around, and even with lot of room between me and others if there is a few behind...same when i pass , i always do it very slowly and i start accelerating if its fluid well after passing others...

my car slightly goes on the left and its the tires , so i will go with some pirelli as i always like them on the xj before and i love sticky tires even if i know they don't last, but there was plenty ref available for the xj and i am unsure if it is the same for the xkr, i got 20 inches wheel. Which pirelli are the correct ones, p zero? rosso? i want get those sets on the xkr s.

 

Maybe this is the case here? In a makeshift frame-by-frame I think we see the driver attempting to gently correct for oversteer (like I probably would have) when all four tires have lost traction, not just the rear. It seems the rear tires regain traction first (possibly as a result of the DSC? Or rear engine weight distribution?) and propel him straight forward into the opposing lane despite the angle of his front wheels. When the front grip returns, he completes his turn and he ends up in final position.

Most of us were taught to "steer into the skid" and take our feet off the pedals. But had he instead taken his hands off the wheel and applied the brakes at the first hint of traction loss, would his car still be alive today? I.E., DSC is supposed to keep this from happening, but if it does happen, should we respond differently in emergency situations to todays cars with traction control than we did with the cars we all first learned to drive in? It would be good to know.

If animated gif doesn't come through, click "original link"

 

Well, all you have to do to see how your car responds with the DSC system is to do some experimenting with it in an empty parking lot. DSC does tend to take a lot of fun out of it, but it generally doesn't even let you swing the rear out in my XKR or even allow for much wheelspin at all.

 

I think I'll do that.

 

Hard to say. Since I'm a known expert at accident investigation ( ) and still just lounging about sipping coffee, here's my take.

I don't think the front tires lost traction.

The driver had power induced over steer and was applying opposite lock at least until he crossed the yellow lines ...at which point the front wheels can't really be seen.

I think he was still applying power right up to the last few feet before crossing the yellow lines. I didn't see any brake lights. He then released the throttle and the oversteer ended. Absent oversteer, and with front wheel turned to the right, he quite nicely steered himself between the two other cars :-)

The distance from the beginning of the event to the impact seems very short. He might have been able to drive out of the problem if he hadn't run out of room. It might be said that the other cars prevented him from completing his recovery....with or without DCS assistance.

It might also be said that the other cars simply interrupted what might have been a typical tail-out, oversteering, run-into-something-backwards impact with a fence or telephone pole.






IMHO, yes. I think he was trying to "drive" out of the problem rather than stop short of it. Or, if he at some point intended to brake, things happened so quickly he simply couldn't/didn't hit the brakes soon enough.



I dunno if there's a pat answer. What does your owners manual say? Surely there are many variations of DSC with different characteristics.

My own experiences with DSC system have been very non-dramatic. They happened so fast and were of such short duration I didn't have time to do anything differently. A blink of an eye sort of thing.

If I was advising a non-technical driver (like my daughter) I say to release the throttle (which, if in trouble, she would've already done, most likely), keep her hands loosely on the wheel, and let the system do its job.

New technology requires new learning. I'm sure we all remember having to teach our kids, spouses, etc about proper use of ABS and demonstrate for them how it works, how it feels, etc.

Surely the same applies to DSC systems? So, yes, experimenting in a parking lot would be a good idea.

Outta coffee. Ramble switch turned "off" for the moment.

Cheers
DD

 

Then after you do that, turn off DSC completely and compare.

 

Well a BIG THANKS to amcdonal86 and the Good Woman who called me from her car on the way to work to tell me "It's beautiful outside, get off your butt and go drive your Jag!" So I spent the last hour in the empty parking lot of Emerald Downs, and let me tell you I feel "schooled" on the benefits of DSC. It is now my honest opinion that these people in the videos could not possibly have had this engaged. The Track DSC mode was a gorgeous balance of control and power, and I was only able to get the rear to break loose and swing wide without any DSC at all.

I was mostly experimenting with methods of losing control, rather than regaining/maintaining it (how do those guys make drifting look so easy?) so more experimenting in my future!

 

Whew, I thought this story was going to end with a couple of busted wheels and a citation for improper driving!

 

it's excelent doing so, I have not find a parking lot without people or empty space so I could give it a try yet...but i experienced the dsc when you acelerate, release accelerator re accelerate and all the time it drifts, rear and then front, rear and front again, its fun....what a nice exhaust noise.

 

Oh! Sorry for the scare. No, I was seriously thankful for the suggestion. I wasn't crazy, *****-to-the-wall or anything. I was just getting a feel for the difference between the DSC modes. And there is a big one. I'll add, for the sake of the thread, that I know the XK is not a supercar, and I seriously can't imagine what it would be like to drive something more powerful! But if DSC works half as well in any of those ferrorghinis, there is no way they were using it when they lost control during acceleration.

I'd use an instructor before I tried to do much more. (Incidentally I had a driving instructor once who frequently used the phrase "*****-to-the-wall". It sounded funny when SHE said it!)

 

This is a big venue--a horse racing track--that doesn't open for the season for another six weeks. It was entirely empty and perfectly flat.

 

you're a lucky guy! last time , we had a lot of space on the freeway coming back from france, nobody, dry weather, visibility, all was fine, 240 kmh, was easy...but just a few times not to risk anything...
on our way to france we got arrested by a french cop a gendarmes in motorcycle, he told me , you haven't seen me its like 20 mn i try to folllow you... he said , it is not worth i try to explain you if i raise the ticket for 200kmh ,(you can have the car and licence taken confiscated) he said i write it down for 150kmh! and i put the control tecnic that was obligatory since 6 months! I said i was in another country, he said you can't escape it, i said sure and thanks him for his diligence, and i never received any of these tickets.

 

"Some of the drivers told us they didn't really know the specifications of their cars or just how powerful their acceleration was."


Read more: Cops Handle World's Most Expensive Wreck - Business Insider

 

I think some of it may have to do with the video game era. The kids play the race car games and the throttle is indeed like a toggle switch to them. I would bet that the videos shown often involve young drivers. Things are much different in real life!

 

you guys have seen the youtube video of the lm2 streamliner car...men...
it's strange cause i can not find the wikipedia article online they showed on the site.


that good old jag video...

 

The problem with a really fast car is that the car can move faster than you can think. Your only hope is that you are such a skilled driver that your reactions take over but even then they take a finite time to take effect and by then it may be too late.

 

There's a similar jag video on the XK:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/222956

Mike