Tag: Ancient Greek

I think many of you may have heard of Ancient Greek philosopher Thales. Actually we know Thales from the geometry but he did many other things besides geometry. One of his discoveries was the electricity, of course it wasn’t the same electricity we know now but he realized there is something electrical! And all these things happened around BC 600. So there was not four wheel drive vehicles, actually they have four wheel drive horse. Basically they have four legs and this means they are similar to nowadays SUVs.

I am sure that he never thought that his discovery will help human race to move around the environment by vehicles. I am talking about the SUVs with electronic traction controls. After thousands of years, electricity started to help us to increase our traction! Mostly this is a creative of idea of marketing department which does not work in real life conditions. Now every SUV has electronic traction control system, ABS sensors identifies the loss of traction and traction control reduces the engine power and apply brake. As a result of this chain reaction, you are able to go around tough terrains but this is totally crap! I tried many vehicles with these systems and they were not that effective. Especially I love the videos shout for the press releases, everything is so well designed and SUV moves around in every condition. This is similar to looking at girls on FHM Magazine and expecting to see girls who look like that in real life! Exactly the same effect.

However we can see the FHM Girls in real life :) Recently I watched some videos on YouTube titled as Range Rover and BMW X6 snow off roading and similar thing and the results were amazing. The BMW’s perfectly made video is exactly the real, the electricity helps the huge X6 to go around the snow. And they call this xDrive. Land Rover has similar technology for long time and it is one of the best one and I am not shocked when I saw Range Rover is going around the snow with no problem, this is normal. Of course there is a small difference between Range Rover and BMW X6, Range Rovers in many YouTube videos are the new ones with Terrain Response technology which offers variety of configurations for rough terrain and vehicles reacts totally differently. As a result of this technology Range Rover has less wheel spin and offers efforts off road, on the other hand BMW’s system works quite well and you can enjoy some kind off roading!

Despite these great performances of traction controls, I still don’t trust them that much. If you want to climb somewhere, try to order a Range Rover with differential locks! This is what electricity cannot do in real life :)