Wasn’t trying to impress anyone Ergot so sorry if it came over like that to anyone, just letting any of the new lads know there’s a whole different world out there in lorryland in how vehicles handle, and the same vehicle can change like chalk to cheese just by a change of make or type of tyre fitment…let alone what i alluded to in the previous post when you pick a different trailer type, or have a load put on that weighted differently or worse light at the headboard and heavy at the arse end…which in a van or container you might not know till you get out on the road and feel it…always worth having a look at your tyres, they can give you a good idea where the weight is sitting.
The problem now for the new drivers is that up to a point the modern stability traction and other driver aids damp some of the minor slips and deviations out, where years ago there was no ABS no TC or ASR, no power steering if it comes to that, you as a new lorry driver very soon came to drive by the seat of your pants.
Lorry tyres have in many cases very poor wet grip, if you turned everything off including ABS and power steering and removed the load sensing brake proportioning valves you would find in short order that in the wet you are driving a very skittish vehicle that could step out of line very easily, thats the sort of vehicles i and other old hands started with, we very quickly learned to respect that lack of grip and learned to read the road, surface camber signs of damp and especially kept an eye open for signs of fuel spillage on wet roads which reveal themselves through that rainbow pattern reflection as oil sits on water.
In many ways its now worse for the new driver, because in the modern vehicle the driver is insulated from the road, you can’t hear the tyres like you once could, you can’t feel whats happening at the road through power steering.
Slight slips, even slips that would have once seen the tractor go sideways now the vehicle usually controls for you.
Every new driver of an artic is going to see the TC light flicker up when accelerating empty in the wet, that wheelspin can still be happening right up to and including top gear on a seemingly good wet surface, that alone if you keep an eye on it will prove to any of you just how little grip there can be in the wet, now in pre TC/ASR days the slightest wheelspin of both wheels will have seen the arse step sideways out of line, again you would have heard the wheels spinning years ago but sound deadening has reached fantastic levels so you sometimes won’t know its happening.
Don’t rely on these new vehicles doing it all right though, the TC/ASR triggering to stop this doesn’t always work as effectively as it could when just one wheel spins up…and if one wheel only is spinning up the vehicle won’t step out of line because the other wheel will keep it straight (you can use this phenomenon to dig you out of snow where sometimes a diff lock won’t help because it sends you sideways)…so by the time both wheels have started to spin up and the TC/ASR cuts in the drive axle is already starting to slip sideways, trust me this is a thoroughly unpleasant sensation and it can very soon get out of hand even with the new systems.
The biggy is you can’t defeat the laws of physics and once a modern lorry lets go completely it might be completely irrecoverable and only ends when something solid stops the slide.
I’m not saying us older drivers are any better, far from it, the difference for us is that we might have detected the light sensation through that seat of pants feel before it could have got to such a stage.
Basically what i’m trying in my usual long winded way to say is that all these new stability systems are great, but the good driver learns to control the vehicle themselves and not let it get to the point that the vehicle itself has to interfere.
I’m not going to to get into the latest gimmick, the new auto braking features that is…i have several bags of popcorn here waiting to see what happens in a few years when the number of euro 6 lorries with this (IMO troubling) fitment is in high proportion to the number of non equipped vehicles on the road, when we have a serious winter again and we’re all trundling along at 25/30mph on black ice and compressed snow just trying to keep the bloody wheels turning without sliding into the ditch and then every now and again these auto brake systems decide to chuck the anchors on because they’ve sensed something that wasn’t in the least of concern…what could possibly go wrong 
”. I’d like to think it was normal, and suspect it is, it’s probably just that some will admit it and some won’t… Cornering speed was also something I was paranoid about, but at the same time I rationalised that if I took it slower than was possible nothing would go wrong, but taking it faster than possible was a whole different story… 
