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Congress considers car stability law

Congress considers car stability law

Wayne Cunningham Managing Editor / Roadshow
Wayne Cunningham reviews cars and writes about automotive technology for CNET's Roadshow. Prior to the automotive beat, he covered spyware, Web building technologies, and computer hardware. He began covering technology and the Web in 1994 as an editor of The Net magazine.
Wayne Cunningham
The recommended that Congress require automakers to include electronic stability programs (ESP) in all vehicles. The DOT points out that ESP can prevent approximately half of the fatalities currently caused by vehicle rollovers. ESP is a relatively low-cost addition to cars that already have antilock brakes, and it works by braking individual wheels when sensors detect an impending rollover. While some old-school drivers object to any of these newfangled systems, I think it's important to realize that cars aren't designed to let a driver brake each wheel individually, and if they were, a human probably couldn't manage that additional level of control finesse on top of steering, throttle, and other car controls. Automakers must be onboard with this initiative, because we're not seeing the same kind of backlash that the attempt to improve corporate average fuel economy caused.