Beyond Seat Belts: My Car’s ESC Button
Almost every driver knows that when it comes to cars, the seatbelt remains as the single most effective safety feature in our rides. With other safety devices coming out, it is getting harder to sort the clutter and truly know which safety features matter. If one goes through the list, most of the cool safety devices in our cars are installed to prevent injury in the event of an accident instead of preventing the accident itself.
It is for this reason that people are starting to appreciate a safety feature found in recent high-end American, European and Japanese cars and SUV’s. Aptly called ESC (which will surely remind one of the computer’s escape button), this new feature dramatically reduces the number and severity of accidents in the US.
ESC or Electronic Stability Control is a feature that monitors a vehicle’s directional path and correlates it to the input from the driver’s steering wheel. With this system, the car detects a car’s deviation from what the driver could intend as read from inputs on the steering wheel. This allows the car to apply necessary brakes to prevent over steering, wide tail swings or under steering. This system has a variety of names too. Porsche called theirs Porsche Stability Management; Chevrolet calls it Active Handling, BMW named theirs, Dynamic Stability Control. Whatever its name may be, the ECS proves to be very helpful in situations that could easily result in an out of control, spinning vehicle.
The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration found that equipped vehicles had 42 percent fewer single vehicle crashes and results in 40 percent fewer fatalities. Other researches also gave matching findings. With more than 15,000 fatalities on crashes in the country, this figure could mean that if the system were in place, 6000 lives could be saved in a year. Now, this is definitely a significant perk just from adding high-tech auto parts.
This technology proves to be something that should be implemented on many vehicles on our roads today. Though the system cannot control all situations that lead to a crash, this feature will surely make an impact on the many who put their lives behind the wheel every day.
