Lately I'm seeing lot of news about someone crashing Ferraris etc.
Sometimes it is the mechanic who took for a spin and then crashed. Even veteran driver like Mr Beans crashed his supercar 2nd time!
Not all these crashes happen at high speed either.
So what exactly causes the crash? Why these cars are difficult to drive even at low speeds?
|
I've often wondered that.
If my lumbering old Volvo 240 will go round corners without falling over or sliding off the road, how come a car with super handling, ABS brakes, traction drive, thousands of sensors and heaven knows what to help the driver, can mysteriously drive into a tree on a clear road with no other cars involved?
|
man crashes £200,000 'supercar' - news
man crashes 10 year old mondeo - not news
|
I've never driven a supercar, but I suspect they are quite hard to drive for the inexperienced.
Injudicious application of the throttle would catapult it into the scenery.
|
>> I've never driven a supercar, but I suspect they are quite hard to drive for
>> the inexperienced.
>>
>> Injudicious application of the throttle would catapult it into the scenery.
Absolutley, in your cooking mondeo you havent got several hundreds of horsepower under your right foot. Plus buying a supercar does not buy you the skill, or the natural ability to use it.
Otherwise we would all be F1 or WRC champions
|
>> I've never driven a supercar, but I suspect they are quite hard to drive for
>> the inexperienced.
They are still cars not aeroplanes :-) So why should they be that hard to drive?
Last edited by: movilogo on Thu 25 Aug 11 at 11:28
|
...So why should they be that hard to drive?...
They probably aren't - in a straight line, on a runway.
But tickle that throttle on a bend, brow of a hill, or wherever, and all sorts of gravitational forces come into play which none of us are used to dealing with.
|
I would say, the inability of the driver to drive it properly, and more willing to take a risk because "they can 'cos its fast".
"Supercars" are designed for a track, where it can stick to the tarmac, where there are no ditches for you to come off, and where there is no car coming round the (non blind) bend in the opposite direction.
They are NOT designed for hurtling through your average B road at top speed, and flinging it around the corners
However they CAN be driven on your average B road if you have the skills and experience to do so
Ive never driven a supercar, I don't have the experience or the know how to drive one properly.
When/IF I do get to drive one I very much imagine it will be on a track with a instructor, someone who knows how to drive the things, telling me where I can or cannot accelerate and where I should be braking.
I very much think there ARE people who can "fling them round your average B road". However I would very much think that the ones who do come off do not have the relevant skills and experience to drive one.
|
>> They are NOT designed for hurtling through your average B road at top speed
I'd say they are designed for this. But you need to be a good driver to do it. All to easy to get wrong with that much power and torque going through the rear wheels.
It would be interesting to see how many accidents in say Ferrari's vs Lamborghinis (both recent varieties) to see how much of a difference all wheel drive makes.*
* Yes I know the Ferrari FF has a pseudo 4wd system with another gearbox driving the front wheels. And some stripped out Lamborghinis have had rear wheel drive only.
|
Thinking about this, without ever having driven one of these things, it seems to me that the mid-engined layout could often be to blame. With their wide tyres and good balance, such cars would normally corner as if on rails, even at high speeds. Owners would become more confident over time without doing anything that would seem to be pushing their luck. Then one day a few bumps in a bend, a bit of water or diesel on the road, and they are up a tree before they can even think.
Cars with less grip and progressive under- or oversteer are perhaps not as quick, but safer and much more fun. I doubt if many owners of Lamborghinis and so on take them on tracks and really, really get to know how to handle them on the limit or over it. Which isn't in any case for middle-aged well-fed people, whose reactions have lost their edge, who are probably the usual type of owner.
I don't fancy supercars really. Only front-engined V12 Ferraris. Small ones, with crossply tyres.
|
I think this is fairly easy to answer - the drivers. The majority probably have an interest in going fast and/or showing off. Not good for safety, in a car that can reach silly speeds in seconds.
I encounter quite a lot of real car enthusiasts, but on the whole they don't go in for expensive new supercars - they usually have older classics, and they aren't generally the ones that end up in an hedge.
Not a very scientific analysis, I know.
|
|
I suspect a lot of supercar crashes happen just after the owner/driver says 'Watch this!' to his passenger...
|
>So what exactly causes the crash?
I'd guess that many prangs are due to a combination of throttle response and changes in road conditions catching out the unwary.
>Why these cars are difficult to drive even at low speeds?
In good conditions they aren't. In poor or changeable conditions you have to be much, much smoother and gentler with the controls. Pushing the loud pedal an extra couple of mm in your average family car does not have the same effect as an extra couple of mm in a "supercar".
The throttle on my Jag is very benign and ideal for cruising, until you push it past about 2/3 where it tightens up quite sharply. The throttle on my Chevy was designed for the traffic light Grand Prix and needs a very gentle touch, even from tickover.
|
I've driven a Formula First (1600cc) single seater and certainly wouldn't want to try anything with a greater power to weight ratio without some acclimatisation first.
I certainly wouldn't want to drive a 'supercar' on the road without slowly building up to it.
|
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0chPBctxcyE
Too much throttle coupled with camber in the road?
|
>>it seems to me that the mid-engined layout could often be to blame. With their wide tyres and good balance, such cars would normally corner as if on rails, even at high speeds. Owners would become more confident over time without doing anything that would seem to be pushing their luck. Then one day a few bumps in a bend, a bit of water or diesel on the road, and they are up a tree before they can even think. <<
I think a few Toyota MR2 drivers discovered that by mistake.
|
there are times, you just want to get out and slap people.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcx3hJjLqLI&NR=1
|
|
No training. Countless people with the money to buy decent cars rate themselves as good drivers and never consider any additional training after passing their test. Anyone with the cash can buy a supercar but that says absolutely nothing about their ability behnd the wheel, as I so often witness. It's all too frequently seen on motorcycles. Extreme performance is available for a few quid and oh so many people are finding that powerful bikes bite. Nothing that a little traing wouldn't help reduce. Driving seems to be the one skill area that people don't like to have criticised and don't think to set about improving. I never have understood why, it can be such a pleasure which is enhanced with improving ones skills.
|
Don't laugh, but I wondered this a while ago when playing Gran Turismo 5 on my Playstation.
Now, I know that they aren't real cars, but the developer has a pedigree for making car simulations with very accurate physics and with HUGE amounts of research and development going into making the cars drive exactly as in real life.
Well I've driven a few nippy cars in that game, but once you get into the supercar bracket, the control becomes far more difficult.
I can't remember the track I was going around, but I could hurtle around it in a Nissan Skyline, without having a care in the world.
Once you put a Ferrari 458 on the same track, then being just being a touch too keen on the accelerator (even at very low speeds) and the thing completely spins out of control. It takes quite a while to get the hang on it, to just keep it on the track.
Again not real cars, but the games are renowned for being very accurate (each one taking years to tweak), and if they are anything close, it would certainly put me off driving one on the roads, and especially without any kind of training.
|
When you exceed the limit of a supercar, you are going as much as 50% quicker on a given corner or roundabout than in a normal car. The resulting slide is more of a "snap", and it takes faster reactions and infinitely more skill to catch and recover the situation.
I remember this to a degree with a humble Lotus Elise. It would simply drive around corners at speeds that would have even a good handling saloon or hatchback heading for the undergrowth. But when you did ask too much of it, boy did it bite. Hard. The tail didn't so much step out, as snap. If you didn't start the corrective inputs within the first fractions of a second, and you weren't perfectly accurate and measured, you were going around, and you were generally going pretty quickly as well. The price of sharp, agile handling is almost always an intolerance of driver mistakes. There just isn't the 'slack' anywhere in the system to absorb it.
A typical modern mid-engined Ferrari or Lamborghini's limits must be near impossible to explore in anything approaching safety on the public road.
Last edited by: DP on Mon 29 Aug 11 at 09:53
|
Another factor is the plethora of 'get out of jail' electronic aids available these days. I've taken some pretty hot cars round the local track, deliberately trying to make these devices 'kick in', and I can assure you that they only dio so when you have really 'screwed the pooch'.
Think of it this way - most cars these days have ABS. When was the last time yours kicked in without you deliberately trying to make it do so? Imagine if you drove to ABS standards every day, approaching each corner, roundabout, car in front at full whack, and hammering the brakes at the last minute.
Now apply the same logic to pushing the car to the limit, and having traction control or EBD kick in and 'save' you. After a while, you get blase about the gadget.
So maybe too many inexperienced drivers are relying too much on the car getting them out of trouble, KNOWING that it will do? Then, when things really go pear-shaped, they have exceeded the limits even of the get-out-of-jail-free gadget, and pile it through the undergrowth.
|
>> Now apply the same logic to pushing the car to the limit, and having traction
>> control or EBD kick in and 'save' you. After a while, you get blase about
>> the gadget.
>>
>> So maybe too many inexperienced drivers are relying too much on the car getting them
>> out of trouble, KNOWING that it will do? Then, when things really go pear-shaped, they
>> have exceeded the limits even of the get-out-of-jail-free gadget, and pile it through the undergrowth.
>>
This, I believe is true, but also with 'run of the mill' cars.
Over the last few years, there has been a steady decline of car's through bodyshop's.
And within that decline, is a strange fact...
We still see much the same amount of low speed damage (parking sensors giving too much confidence?)
We see probably more right offs than ever before, due in part to expensive repair costs -not only body damage (crumple zones folding where in the past the cars wouldn't fold), but also airbags etc.
What is in steep decline, is decent repairable damage... the medium damaged vehicles - where money could be made in repairs.
In conclusion, I believe that driver aids, are pushing up the speed that accidents happen, due in part to the 'Im perfectly safe, the car wont allow me to crash' syndrome.
|
>> We still see much the same amount of low speed damage (parking sensors giving too
>> much confidence?)
The only ding I've put on a test car was when some derelict person (Ok, it was a wino bum) tried to wave me in to a parking space, and the combination of his gesticulating and setting off the sensors caused me to be distracted, and I kerbed a very expensive 18" alloy.
>> In conclusion, I believe that driver aids, are pushing up the speed that accidents happen,
>> due in part to the 'Im perfectly safe, the car wont allow me to crash'
>> syndrome.
>>
As Mr Scott said (in every episode): "Ye cannae break the laws of physics, captain!"
Sady; it seems, many modern-day drivers never took physics at school, thus do not understand the principles involved.
How many times have we seen people tailgating another driver, because the tailgater is convinced that ABS will stop him on a sixpence?
And back to my original post - how many drivers actually (a) know the principles behind these driver aids; and (b) have ever pushed the vehicle to the limit to deliberately see what effect they have on the car when they kick in?
I know of people who have panicked when ABS starts to do its little performance on their feet- they've never experienced it before.
|
Why so many supercar crashes? - Cliff Pope
