The miracles of Traction control

Whether it uses energy or not, it's a proven safety feature.

 

You still haven't said anything to support the suggestion that being able to turn off TC would have helped at all. For all we know it would have made things worse. Frankly I find it a bit disturbing when people make suggestions in public forums that the TC somehow is harmful, I think its irresponsible. Perhaps one would be better off to learn how it works and how to use it, what to expect and what NOT to do. But by all means if you have some credible evidence to actually support your gripes about the TC, please present it. What your neighbor's VW did is not relevant.

 

Much as having the knowledge and experience as to the implications of defeating it and proceeding without it.

The point being that for a novice, the risk of operating without the inbuilt SAS/technology may outweigh the benefits.

 

My point being that listing instructions for defeating SAS logic may encourage those without your (and my) experience, resulting in far worse outcomes.

 

Two others listed a set of instructions... that may or may not work, that may or may not end up creating more problems than they "solve".

 

The fact that someone disagrees doesn't mean they "don't understand".

 

Agreed, but thus far you're the only one complaining. I've driven the v in a variety of slippery conditions and think the TC system is great. I certainly wouldn't recommend turning it off for any reason, even if it were possible.

 

My goodness! Have you ever driven in deep unplowed snow? I must have turned traction control and VSC off and on a hundred times on my RWD Lexus V8 sedan last winter while driving home from work in 10 to 15 inches of fresh, mostly unplowed snow. My normal commute is about 10 miles but I probably drove three times that due to having to backtrack out of streets blocked by hundreds/thousands of abandoned vehicles including city buses. OK, I do always use "real" snow tires in winter - currently Bridgestone Blizzak WS70 on all four wheels.

I couldn't budge more than a few inches out of my parking space in the company parking lot with several guys pushing until - DUH! - I remembered I needed to turn traction control off. After I turned traction control off, I shot out of the space like a rocket and powered past a bunch of hopelessly stuck vehicles.

Traction control is wonderful under particular and limited conditions but if you can't turn it off in deep snow and sometimes on ice, your vehicle becomes a road ornament.

 

Easy. All of the below only applies if you have snow tires, not all seasons with "winter ratings"

Slight uphill. Iced over.

TC cuts power too aggressively, car is unable to gain sufficient momentum to make it up the hill on snow tires.

Disabling TC is useless with all seasons, but with studless snow tires, it will permit enough wheelspin to gain you a few extra MPH's to make it up the hill (maybe), or at least to give enough momentum to switch to a different line that has some snow for traction.

Or perhaps making a left hand turn with icey roads from a standstill. Disabling TC would allow more power to translate into forward momentum to clear the intersection in a reasonable manner vs TC cutting the throttle aggressively and result in the prius clumsily turtling its way through the intersection.

Wish there was a fuse to pull for winter.

 

The traction control does take the driver's go-pedal pressure as one of its inputs, so a driver can elicit unhelpful TC behavior by excessive input at the pedal. The TC works best as a fine-tuning mechanism when the driver is already careful to estimate the available traction and give no more go-pedal input than that. When the driver's estimate is reasonably close on that, the TC can do the rest.

If the driver gives too large a go-pedal input, the TC will try to do as it's told, take a great big dig, realize that broke traction completely, take a big pause, and repeat. That approach works poorly and is mentioned in many complaints.

When using the traction control as an assistive, cooperative technology that complements roughly appropriate driver input, the goal is to look more like one of these guys:

The driver in both of those cases would just have been giving a steady go-pedal input that was already judged to be no more than the conditions allowed. The traction control simply took care of making that work.

Ice-polishing like this guy is typically a slower way to reach a destination: