As mentioned, while ABS is beneficial to the grand majority of motorists, there is absolutely no substitute for good traction. My wife's Optra5 (without ABS) now has winter tires since the tire shop finally got the right size in and installed them. For the last three weeks, when the weather was terrible, driving on the three-season tires was managable, though terribly slippery. I thought this to be a good test to see just how good a winter tire changeover on this car would be. The advantage of the combination of deep dreads with adequate siping were immediately recognized. No tire spin or lock-up have occurred in the same places of ice and compact snow I go through almost every day where the three-season tires had noticable trouble.
Disregarding winter, on typical tires, ABS does have a place for the average driver. There is no way to gauge how well a driver will perform with or without ABS unless it's on some sort of track setting. Nobody is going to say to a person just avoiding an accident, "Okay, now let's pull the ABS fuse and see if you can do that again."
I feel as though people tend to drive differently when ABS is equipped. I'm not saying they would tend to be more aggressive; however, knowing that a car has ABS perhaps leads to a higher confidence level that deters some drivers from defensive and careful driving. I am curious if the butt-horn tailgating me in his pickup truck on icy roads would have more common sense if he left more room between himself and my rear bumper if he didn't have ABS to assist him to swerve around me only because he was too close to begin with. Having ABS, he went around me (literally a 180) and stopped just to my left. If there were no ABS, he either would have been skilled enough to manage threshold braking and get around me, or he would have locked up and slid right into my bumper. There's no way to know but to say that ABS helped avoid a worse accident...even if he did tag me with his rear bumper in my quarter-panel.
A whole lot of variables in this debate. My only question would be for the only ABS hater I've read, safristi, what makes ABS past it's due date? Have driving habits somehow changed for the better since the onset of its standard availability in virtually all vehicles? If anything, I'd say it's now worse. Is there another point you meant to indicate by this?
