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Breakthrough: Anti-lock brakes – Part two
2 years ago
The history of Mercedes-Benz and ABS goes back decades – but it wasn't the first
Now, I prefer not to get too deep into the debate about who really did invent it. Many would claim that it was a chap called Mario Palazzetti, who worked for Fiat’s Research center. The conventional story is that Palazzetti (‘Mr ABS’ to some) – invented it, then Fiat sold the patent to Bosch, who took his idea, developed it for production, sold it to the three-pointed star and the rest is history.
Except it’s actually a bit muddier than that. You see, a brilliant young engineer named Heinz Lieber at Teldix, a small German company, had come up with a similar idea in the late 1960s, inspired by what was happening in the aerospace industry. M’learned colleague Mr Peter Robinson wrote a wonderful piece in his ‘Heroes’ column in Autocar about Lieber’s titanic struggle to get his ideas to production, including a hair-raising account of him tuning an early, analogue version of his system on the very unforgiving test bed that was the Porsche 917 – in the middle of a race! Heinz Leiber eventually joined Bosch, as it acquired Teldix, spent years as director of electric and electronic development at Mercedes-Benz, and is still innovating to the present day. His name is maybe not as well known as it deserves to be, so let’s make sure we put him on that list of major innovators alongside Mario Palazzetti.
Leaving aside the Italy vs Germany debate, the uncomfortable fact is that a whole load of production cars – not research or race cars – were launched with electronic ABS systems in the very early 1970s, before any of these European efforts. Palazzetti’s patent dates to 1971, Liebherr’s from 1977, and the latter was not actually granted until 1987. But by 1971, electric ABS systems were already in production on the rear axles of various Ford and General Motors products, and on both axles of the 1971 Chrysler Imperial and the Nissan President. By the way, the latter went with the beautifully Japanese it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin acronym of EAL – Electronic Anti-Lock. These systems were supplied by companies like Bendix, Kelsey-Hayes and Denso – not Bosch.
"Modern ABS was effectively a parallel invention by several companies in the late 1960s and early '70s – no one company can really claim to ‘own’ its genesis. The reality is that technology became available and a whole raft of bright engineers brought systems to market in and around the same time"
Now, we could at this stage plunge down a very geeky rabbit-hole debate about how many channels these systems had, and whether they were using analog or digital electronics, but modern ABS was effectively a parallel invention by several companies in the very late 1960s and early ’70s – no one company can really claim to ‘own’ its genesis. The reality is that technology became available, in the form of reliable power transistors and cheap, fast microcontrollers, and a whole raft of bright engineers brought systems to market in and around the same time. So let’s not fall out about who was first.
But as we’ve observed, it’s not necessarily the first that is the most significant – or wins the biggest slice of the market-share pie. While I’d argue with anyone that says Bosch invented ABS, I’d fight their corner every day to say that it most certainly popularised the technology. Throughout the ’70s, Bosch plugged away diligently on ABS (based on ideas acquired from clever chaps like Palazzetti and Lieber), and when it launched it as an option on the 1978 Mercedes S-Class, it’s fair to say it was ABS’s coming-out party. Mercedes held a demonstration over four full days at its test track near Stuttgart, and showed the motoring press the benefits of what it had patiently developed over so many years with its partner Bosch.
Needless, to say, Ti was there. Or rather, Mel Nichols was there, and I am now lucky enough to have the privilege of picking his brains on behalf of all of you. He wrote a major piece on the ‘new’ technology and what he experienced for Car magazine in October ’78, but let me quote Mel himself for a flavour of it – he puts it much better than I could:
‘I remember being shocked at being able to pound towards the obstacles on the wet test track at 75mph, then braking late and being able to swerve around them. It was magical stuff, and the impact of the significance of ABS was not lost on anyone who attended those sessions.’
“ABS has followed a classical technology growth curve. At first a cost-option on expensive cars, it trickled down through the car hierarchy – first becoming standard on expensive cars, then a cost option on humbler models, and finally a standard fit for almost everything”
Bosch also invented intensive winter testing of ABS systems – a key part of developing the technology. It’s a lot easier to calibrate such a system on very low friction surfaces, where the limits of grip are reached at much lower speeds. Mercedes and Bosch had been travelling to the far north of Sweden for road testing for a few years, when one of their engineers spotted an airstrip on the frozen lake at Arjeplog in 1973. Bosch bought it, and the automotive tradition of spending the winter sliding cars around frozen lakes in the Far North was born. It’s since become such a fixture of the automotive calendar that it probably deserves a piece to itself.
Since this seminal moment in the late ’70s, ABS has followed a classical technology growth curve. At first a cost-option on expensive cars like the S-Class, over a decade or two it trickled down through the car hierarchy – first becoming a standard fit on more expensive cars (all Mercedes-Benz models by 1992, for example), then a cost option on humbler models, and finally a standard fit for almost everything.
My very first job, as a sprog engineer in 1992, was packaging a rear ABS sensor into a Primera – so by then it had become commonplace in even workaday cars like the Sunderland-built minicabber’s special.
David's very first engineering job at Nissan in 1992 involved ABS
In 2004 ABS reached automotive Valhalla – becoming a legal requirement. In the EU, it became mandatory for all new cars in 2004. Our US cousins took a little longer to be convinced – it became an FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) requirement only in 2012. Lawmakers the world over now consider it as obvious and as necessary as a three-point seatbelt.
These days, ABS units are typically combined with ESP/ESC traction control systems. These ‘combined’ ABS units don’t just control straight-line braking duties – they are clever enough to be trusted with much more complex dynamics. They are remarkably effective and subtly benevolent – it’s likely that they have intervened on modern cars you’ve driven without your even knowing it.
Okay, I know that many of you will now be swearing at the screen and lamenting how hard it is to turn such systems off – and it’s true, it can be a chore to get the traction control systems to go away for a track day, or when you feel brave and want to show your drift skills off to your mates. And here’s a little industry secret – when they’re ‘off’, even ‘fully off’, there are probably little bits of ‘Hail Mary’ ABS functions still active, to save you from yourself in extremis.
But I admit that I love ABS. I’m an electronics engineer by training, but ‘pure’ electronics or software never really turned me on. Transistors controlling flashing pixels on a smartphone screen are cool in their own way, but it’s when they start to control something physical that things get really interesting. It still amazes me to think of a few microamps of current firing across the unimaginably tiny gate of one of the myriads of transistors buried deep in the chip that’s buried in the ABS unit that’s hidden under the hood of your car, flashing a light-speed message to a power transistor that supplies the juice to a thumb-sized solenoid – and two tonnes of metal meekly obey their commands, seemingly cheating the laws of physics, stopping safely and saving us crazy little monkeys from ourselves.
And ABS does all this not just because it’s cool, or because some engineers decided that simply because we could, we should. It does it to help us, and to keep us and our loved ones safe. So while I hope I never activate ABS in a car again in anger, I know that if I have to, my little electronic guardian angel will be there, shoving on that pedal with me.
Read part one here
