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(Gould 0738) wrote in message ...

Personally, I tend to agree with Suzuki and
some of the other manufacturers who cried "foul" at the time. If you found
yourself in a situation where you were required to dodge
a series of consecutive obstacles and slalomed back and forth between them,
would you continue at full throttle? I'd hazard a guess that few people are
often at full throttle in a motor vehicle to start with, and most would slow
down if encountering such a situation.

Braking could exacerbate the situation by shifting the balance of the
vehicle further towards the "forward corner" and actually increase the
chances of a rollover.

The test is meant to simulate the situation where collision is
inevitable unless evasive steering is undertaken, i.e. not enough time
to brake. Once a rapid avoidance maneuver is made, the driver often
finds themself in the position of making another turn to get going in
the right direction on the road again. Anyway, the physics is that if
you swerve left then swerve right, if you swerve left again the car
has already "forgotten" the 1st left swerve, so it is moot whether a
slalom is an accurate recreation of real life driving conditions. The
point is that a slalom allows the testers to make increasingly tight
turns and record the velocity and lateral acceleration sustained
before the vehicle becomes partially airborne. If one vehicle scores
significantly worse than all others on that test, and other vehicles
have already been shown to roll in real life driving, then it is
reasonable to conclude that the car in question will be significantly
more unsafe in certain situations encountered in real life.

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