Dead man's curveA slippery bend almost defeated Martin Love, but his car's lightning reflexes took it in its stride
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer
Mercedes C-Class 220
£27,292
Miles per gallon: 46.3
Seats: 5
Good for: Flash Harrys
Bad for: Crash Dummies
If you're reading this over breakfast, idly biting into another almond croissant while you ponder which route you'll take to your mate's house/country pub/rugby pitch, keep this in mind: today, like every other day, nine of us will die in a road accident. If you are a man, aged between 18 and 25, and you're going to be driving on a rural road, take extra care, because you have a greater chance of being one of those nine than the rest of us. The director of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, Neil Greig, says this is because 'rural drivers need to travel further to reach their destinations, and emergency services have further to go to attend accidents'.
Paul Smith, founder of SafeSpeed.org.uk, says it's actually because 'British drivers are getting significantly worse and rural roads expose shortfalls in skills and attitudes'.Over the New Year, I'm not proud to say, a rural road cruelly 'exposed a shortfall in my own skills and attitudes'. It was a situation we've all been in. We were late for lunch at my mother-in-law's and rather than phoning ahead and saying something simple like, 'Sorry, we'll be a bit late', I decided to risk the lives of my family by driving too fast on a wet road. Coming up a gently banking righthander my car started to aquaplane. We should have ended up in the ditch. But the Mercedes sport coupe I was driving had other ideas. More precisely, its ESP system decided to save our bacon.
This doesn't mean Mercs come fitted with Extra Sensory Perception, though the system is so clever it sometimes seems that way. ESP in this case stands for Electronic Stabilisation Programme. Sensors located all over the car feed details about steering angle, wheel angle, yaw rate (spinning) and lateral acceleration (side to side movement) into the car's brain. When the central computer detects that any of these are wrong it takes action to automatically correct them by applying the brakes, thousands of times a second, to each individual wheel and automatically adjusts the engine's output. Mercedes invented the system in the Nineties and all of its cars now have it fitted as standard, with many manufacturers following suit.
Modern car safety falls into two categories: active and passive. The first includes airbags, crumple zones and high-strength occupant cells which protect you when you have an accident. The second are clever developments that prepare a car before a crash. Mercedes' engineers realised that in the two or three seconds before an impact, the 'Oh Jesus' moment, there were things they could do to minimise damage, like a falling cat bracing itself before it lands. So while the ESP system does all it can to bring the vehicle back under control, it also instructs the car to prime all its airbags, pre-tension its seatbelts, activate its head restraints and to cross its fingers ...
In my case, in a split second - a split second which could have been life-changing - the ESP worked magnificently and we didn't need to test the 'active' crash capability.
'Sorry, we're so late,' I said shakily as we arrived. 'Don't worry,' came my mother-in-law's reply. 'I was late putting in the lamb anyway ...'.
martin.love@observer.co.uk