Recently, while reviewing trends in chassis engineering, it struck me with some force that engineers can sometimes be guilty of ignoring the obvious, and letting their enthusiasms run away with them. The idea was sparked by the contrast between the success (or lack of it) of brake-by-wire on the one hand, and of the automatic parking brake on the other. As we are all rather painfully aware, brake-by-wire has not achieved the rapid advance once predicted for it. As an electro-hydraulic hybrid, it was adopted by Mercedes for some of its top-line models, but then rejected, in the new S-Class, for a refined but essentially conventional system. Nobody else has yet offered brake-by-wire in a production model, and the horizon for its introduction on any scale has now surely been pushed back to around 2010.
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