Emergency Skid Handling

The Prius has VSC. It will do its best with selective braking and power modulation to avoid any loss of control.

Tom

 

What qbee42 referenced is found here:

Vehicle Stability Control – SUV Safety

 

Where are you located? Some areas have car clubs that let you practice all sorts of maneuvers safely, on a track.

Example is Northwest Alfa Romeo Club :: Welcome. No, you don't need to have an Alfa. I went to one of their Northwest Alfa Romeo Club :: Track Events events before. IIRC, there were some teens there w/their parents.

 

It varies on the situation though. The point of the VSC is to help mitigate some of the skidding by adjusting those wheels, steering wise, you try to turn the car towards the direction you are trying to go. The thing is, the steering practices and power adjustments are more for cars without skid/traction control safety features, which we can't really give you 'proper' ones per say because the systems will mitigate the need for it. The thing most people should be doing in a situation of that should be braking or reducing power in general than 'power through'.

There is no real 'ideal' way to do it unless you want to take a professional driver's course and doing those very specific conditions. Unfortunately, this may not be the best place for the question at hand.

 

With VSC you steer where you want to go. That's just the point: the driver tells the car where to go, and the car figures out how to do it.

Without VSC, most front wheel drive cars will under steer. To get out of a skid, point the wheels down the road (turn into the skid) and apply even accelerator. Too much gas will cause the front wheels to spin; too little gas will cause them to skid. Either leads to a loss of control.

With VSC and ABS you want to teach people to keep driving and steer around any obstacles. Instead of focusing on technique, you focus on driving: steer, and brake if you need to.

Tom

 

This is exactly right. My son took a course in emergency handling on a race track with our Gen II Prius, and the instructors asked me if I knew how to disable the VSC to permit realistic training. I didn't, and subsequently rode with my son during a variety of maneuvers, including sudden lane changes, high-speed cornering, and panic stops. It's very difficult to get the car to become uncontrollable. You place your vote about what you want the car to do, and the computers make appropriate adjustments to keep it from going out of control. VSC is really impressive in these situations, and probably most important for youthful, inexperienced drivers.

 

Despite the value this training provides, I don't necessarily recommend it. For some drivers, I think it reduces risk aversion, which might lead to needless accidents. I suspect this is the reason many insurance companies refuse to endorse this kind of training, conducted by racing drivers. Perhaps something conducted by AAA would be better, if available.

 

This is classic over-control, or driver induced oscillation. The driver corrects for a skid, but fails to remove the correction expeditiously and induces a skid in the other direction. The driver then over-corrects for that skid, returning the cycle to its initial state, but often at higher amplitude. The cycle continues until the car hits something.

We learn all about this sort of driving from an early age, given our snowy winters. Without VSC it takes technique and practice. With VSC it's hard to get into a skid.

Tom

 

Time to hit the gravel roads. If you know somebody with a grass field, use that for practice. Gravel roads will eat up paint, so use your worst car for that. Snowy roads are the best.

If you have more time and money, autocross and other teaching venues as already mentioned would be great. My best learning was done on gravel roads as a kid and in snow. Just make sure to stay away from deep ditches where ever you do your practicing.

 

When you drive a car completely ham-fisted, recovery isn't always possible. If you yank the wheel hard at speed, any car is going to go into an unrecoverable spin. There isn't a car on earth that's going to make an instant 90* turn at 60+mph, and when you've got that much momentum behind the slide, the car is going to rotate so fast that it's going to be physically impossible (especially in a car with a slow steering ratio, high center of gravity, and soft suspension) to crank the wheel back fast enough to counter steer.

Training her to drive should focus on accident avoidance without over-steering. If her first reaction is to yank the wheel as far and hard to the side as she can, the situation is doomed from the start. Your best bet for teaching general car control safety is snow driving. It's the only way to pratice at the limit handling while moving at low enough speeds that things happen slowly enough that reactions can be thought through, rather than relying on instinct.

If all that fails, the counter intuitive solution that will fix 90% of skids (in cars that don't make much power), just floor it. It will stablize the car while you counter steer, sometimes even without counter-steering and will help prevent over-correction.

 

The other problem is that in some cases, using that method incorrectly, especially on cars that have a higher center of gravity, like SUVs, it is easier to 'roll' them as well as trying to correct a skid. The Prius cars shouldn't have a high center of gravity, but I think that is part of the reason why it isn't really encouraged nearly as much.