I am a field technician, and my possible territory includes most of Maine and NH. I realized today as I had to drive several hours on snowy roads, that I really should have anti-lock brakes and all wheel drive. Heated mirrors would be very nice as well. Would it be cheaper to add these features to my current car, or to buy one that already has them?
Buy another car.
Without a doubt buying a car that came from the factory with these things is the way to go. The heated mirrors are doable, find some in a junkyard. But adding awd and anti lock would be beyond the show off most backyard mechanics and cost prohibitive to try and do.
No one will do the work for you. And if they did, it wouldn’t work as well as one that came from the factory.
BTW, you’re much better off buying good snow tires if you don’t already have them. It will be far more effective than ABS or AWD, and much cheaper.
Ha! That’s a good one!
Definitely cheaper and simpler to buy a car that has them, maybe an old Subaru Forester.
But as for your hypothetical adding them to your current car, post what year, make, and model of car you have. It’s possible these systems may have been available on a different trim level of your car and with some junkyard parts some mad scientist garage may be able to add them for you, but I would think it would be many many hours of labor. If you are envisioning buying factory parts for ABS and AWD you’re likely looking at thousands of dollars in parts alone.
The heated mirrors may be feasible, I know on my 1998 Contour I was able to get intermittent wipers just by replacing the wiper stalk. And I’ve heard of cars that added power seats just by installing seats from the same model of the car that had electric seats, the connectors were already there under the carpets. YMMV though, this isn’t universal I’m sure.
Isn’t it arguable that driving on the snow better without anti-lock brakes?
Adding the heated mirrors shouldn’t be too terribly difficult, though!
But what Telemark said about the snow tires. When you’re shopping for your new car, I think ABS is a must-have if you do a lot of winter driving but it shouldn’t be too hard to find these days (although make sure it is really true 4-wheel ABS if you’re buying a truck-type vehicle) but good snow tires trump AWD every time.
It seems like it would be possible, if impractical, to add ABS to cars where ABS was originally an option. I’m basing this mostly on my half-ass reading of the service manual for my Mazda 3. It appears that the only difference between the conventional and the ABS system is an ABS control unit and the wheel sensors (plus minor differences in brackets and brake lines).
I also second the suggestion for snow tires, btw. This year I was late swapping the regular tires for snow tires (on that same Mazda 3), and had the joy of driving up and down some moderate hills during some kind of rain/ice/slush storm. Even with ABS, there were a few times when the car would not stop when going downhill. Now, with proper snow tires, it’s possible to drive on any kind of snow or ice, up or down significant hills, as long as there’s clearance between the snow and the bottom of the car. I can’t be careless, but in moderately slick conditions I have a ton more control, and in more severe conditions I won’t be completely stranded.
If you’re driving in deep off-road snow conditions it can sometimes be better to have the wheels lock up and build up a berm in front of them. But 99.9% of the time, your car is going to stop vastly better on snow or ice with ABS than without and, possibly more importantly, ABS lets you steer during hard braking on a slippery surface.
I’ve been driving in snowy upstate NY near Buffalo for 30 years. Always owned pick-ups. The last 3 had ABS, I can’t imagine going back.
The history of ABS in the US is hilarious. Avoided for years because manufacturers feared people would assume ABS == flawless braking capability.* So among other things, there is a generation of pickups that has ABS… only on the rear wheels.
But yeah, putting a 4WD chassis under something bizarre like a VW Bug or a station wagon was a great jackleg mechanic stunt in the 1960s. These days, that tech is not something that can be transplanted. It has to be an integrally designed part of the vehicle to be safe, stable and effective.
Buy a new AWD car. A Subaru up to 10 years old is a good option on a budget.
*ETA: I got in a rather heated argument with a good friend who had gone from tech to selling cars. When I casually mentioned that ABS was good because it resulted in shorter stopping distances, his dealership training kicked in and he strenuously rejected every variant of the notion. (My point, which is pretty much indisputable, is that ABS will shorten braking distances and allow drivers to keep control of the car even when applied in a panic; better brake performance can only be obtained by a very skilled driver willing to modulate the brake pedal and steer correctly out of slides.) But he warn’t having that - he had been thoroughly conditioned to counter such arguments lest GM (I think) get sued into nonexistence. This was around 1989-90 or so.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that manufacturers preferred poorer braking capability, so they sandbagged on ABS? Explain further, please.
You’d have to go look up the arguments. It’s a repeating objection by US makers to new safety tech, from seat belts to air bags to ABS to AWD to whatever. I don’t know how much is genuine (corporate stupidity) and how much is just resistance to a new, expensive technology to which they don’t own major rights, but it’s very common.
IIRC, ABS would lead drivers to think they could stop safely under any conditions, even bad weather, slippery surfaces and getting far too close at too high a speed, and someone would get killed (or worse, crippled) and sue the hell out of them (and win) because “GM promised this wouldn’t happen.”
They tended to point at things like flat, dry-surface tests where a car without ABS would stop in a shorter distance (with some driver skill, or even just slamming into a skid) than one with ABS, since the need for ABS to let go a tiny bit would necessarily add stopping feet. The reality is that few drivers have both the panic-avoidance mentality and the trained control to carefully modulate a brake pedal to the non-skidding limit. Letting them mash it will, in most circumstances, stop the car shorter and without losing control. Win. But as GM had no ABS cars, they couldn’t really talk about how great it was, could they?
(Another such area is the absolutely dismal safety ratings of early minivans, which Chrysler and the other makers carefully camouflaged until they got to the point where they could trumpet “safety improvements!!!”)
None of that rings a bell to me, other than the argument that consumers wanted cheaper cars without the expense of add ons like airbags or ABS. I don’t recall any news coverage of not offering ABS due to fears they would be sued.
It was commonly known among auto magazine readers. Those issues of CD, R&T etc. are still on file.
Consumer objection to cost was not insignificant, but it’s a little misleading. There was strong consumer demand for these improvements (add in Consumer Reports et al. for that)… but like most such things it was supposed to come at no significant added cost for all the usual nonsensical reasons.
The makers used the “buyers will balk at the cost [and go buy our competitor’s cheaper deathtrap] if we try to push it on them” argument, too. But then, these are the same guys who insisted that minivans were “utility vehicles” and thus subject only to the much weaker safety, emissions and mileage requirements as pickups, pocketed the added profits, and sent your family of seven off down the road in a combustible tin can.
The problem I have with this whole narrative is that GM wasn’t particularly behind on ABS cars. They started putting it on their higher end cars shortly after the fancy Euro imports started getting it, and they started putting it in regular family cars around the same time the Japanese did.
Maybe they used some of those arguments to answer the timeless “if it’s so great why don’t you put it in all your cars?” question, but it had nothing to do with GM being especially slow to adopt ABS because they weren’t.
I’d have to go back and do far too much model-by-model comparison to produce a solid cite. I stand behind the gist of this although I may be wrong in pointing at GM over Ford or Chrysler as the worst offender. US makers were very selective about ABS - it was an option, only on select models, well before it was standard on anything but the most loaded models and weller beforer it was close to universal.
They had to develop, buy and license technology to implement it and that took years and megadollars, both big barriers even without any deliberate intent to delay the change.
Find any discussion of why pickups were given only rear-wheel ABS for a number of model years and you’ll find a summary of or connections to the more general pattern.
I agree with the RWABS issue on trucks. It was especially dangerous because RWABS is basically just an electronically controlled brake proportioning valve that can change the front-to-rear bias on the fly. That means that you still need to pump the brakes if they’re locking up, but you wouldn’t know that because all of the badging and the light on the dash says “ABS.” But the Japanese pulled the exact same trick on their trucks, so it wasn’t just a domestic thing.
But you’re definitely wrong about the cars. By the mid-1990’s most American sedans had ABS either standard or as a very common option. Chrysler was a little bit slower on the uptake, but that was mostly because their car designs at that point were ancient. The Japanese started offering ABS around the same time in the early 1990’s but were a lot slower to make it standard. For example, ABS became available on the Camry in 1991 but wasn’t standard on all trims until 2005. The Taurus had it standard since 1996. Also, amazingly, you could still get a Civic without ABS until 2011, whereas GM’s compacts have had it standard since the 1992 Cavalier.
Granted the early domestic ABS systems were pretty grabby and generally less refined than their import counterparts, but Detroit was pretty gung-ho about ABS in the 1990’s. Of course a lot of that is because trying to compete with add-ons like ABS was a heck of a lot cheaper than addressing the more fundamental deficiencies of their compact and midsize designs compared to the Honda and Toyota ones.
the funny thing is, it was GM who *invented * the low-cost ABS system which led to it being rolled out across the industry. See, when ABS first started getting rolled out in the late '80s (it existed beforehand, but was uncommon) it was the Bendix 10 high-pressure active systems. these are the cars where you were exhorted to pump the brake pedal 30 times before even thinking of cracking a brake line/hose fitting, else 3000 psi brake fluid would drill right through your arm. plus the system was expensive and failure-prone.
GM’s Delco-Moraine subsidiary invented the passive ABS manifold/system which- as far as normal brake servicing was concerned- was no different than a standard non-ABS system. you could replace the brake linings and bleed the system the same way everyone had been doing it for decades. it didn’t need any high-pressure pumps, accumulators, etc. It just worked, and it’s why practically every car had ABS before NHTSA mandated it.
You can easily make your mirrors heated.
Here’s a shop with all sorts of accessories and mods.
http://kalecoauto.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=6&zenid=xISjIbF-7bYAPULkvhQjm3
But seriously, if the AWD was available as an option for your model (or close ) and doesn’t require computer changes, then it can be cheap to get the transmission and parts from the wreckers.
see DIY: FWD to AWD Conversion
There are ABS kits.