Why Do Modern Car Companies Make It So Hard to Turn Off Traction Control?

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If you think it’s always as easy as pushing the “off” button, think again.

First, you put your foot on the brake and push the traction control’s off button. Then you turn it on again. And then you activate the parking brake, take your foot off the normal brake, and hit the traction control button again—and then yet again just before a repeat of mashing the foot brake, and, uh, pushing that traction control button not just once but twice more.If the above sounds completely absurd to you, you’re not alone.

Then things started to get tricky. Ground zero for weird traction control voodoo is undoubtedly the introduction of factory launch control, which became the shiny new toy in nearly every high-performance automaker’s portfolio toward the end of the aughts.

The clunky system activation, however, not only persisted but set the tone for how drivers would interact with increasingly complex traction control systems for the foreseeable future. The sequence went as follows: flip two switches on the dashboard to “R” mode , tap the shifter into manual mode, and then hold the brake.

Cognizant that sports car owners might bristle at having training wheels always attached to their rides, some engineering teams continued to bake “full off” settings into their nannies, but they made sure they were hidden behind byzantine sequences of steps that at times felt specifically designed to humiliate.

 

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