Make 4ETS Work 4YOU!
Thread Starter
Junior Member
Joined: Nov 2019
Posts: 22
Likes: 15
ML430
Make 4ETS Work 4YOU!
NEW VIDEO BELOW!!!!!!!!!!!
The W163 is an AWD soccer-mom car made to get the kids to school in the snow or get you to your cabin way out in the wilderness but not a rock crawler my any means. However... there are some tricks to get you through some deep snow or convince the little beast to climb obstacles that other open diff vehicles have no chance of getting up. "Open Diffs" refer to the differentials that have no locking capability. The center diff is a limited-slip/viscous design that allows the front and rear wheels to spin at different speeds for happy highway miles. Older vehicles or cheaper ones without all this all-wheel-drive nonsense have no slip in the center diff. Once you place the transfer case into 4WD, the front and rear drive shafts are locked. But that's still not really 4-wheel drive is it! Because even though you have power to both front and rear diffs, those differentials now send power to only one wheel and it's the one that spins with the least resistance. The 4ETS system combats this with loads of computer trickery and ones and zeros. It's constantly measuring and comparing wheel speeds of all 4 tires and when one slips and goes, lets say 10% faster than the others then it alerts the ABS system to apply brake pressure to that wheel to slow it down correcting the obvious miscalculation made by the dumb driver and makes itself happy. What this also does is increase the load on that wheel thereby with physics and science pixies send the torque to the other wheel that should have traction. It can do this several times per second because obviously its a damn computer and that's what they do is think faster than us. So this system has pi$$ed me off several times hitting the brakes and bogging the engine when I just wanted to have fun or needed it to just push through deep snow. It's very situation specific. 60% of the time, it works every time! Take the stump crawl as example. A typical open diff truck is never going to make it up this stump. That driver rear and passenger front are going to spin till you run out of gas. But this little oddball off roader was finally convinced to make the climb. And no, I had no clue working the steering would help at all. It just did.
The W163 is an AWD soccer-mom car made to get the kids to school in the snow or get you to your cabin way out in the wilderness but not a rock crawler my any means. However... there are some tricks to get you through some deep snow or convince the little beast to climb obstacles that other open diff vehicles have no chance of getting up. "Open Diffs" refer to the differentials that have no locking capability. The center diff is a limited-slip/viscous design that allows the front and rear wheels to spin at different speeds for happy highway miles. Older vehicles or cheaper ones without all this all-wheel-drive nonsense have no slip in the center diff. Once you place the transfer case into 4WD, the front and rear drive shafts are locked. But that's still not really 4-wheel drive is it! Because even though you have power to both front and rear diffs, those differentials now send power to only one wheel and it's the one that spins with the least resistance. The 4ETS system combats this with loads of computer trickery and ones and zeros. It's constantly measuring and comparing wheel speeds of all 4 tires and when one slips and goes, lets say 10% faster than the others then it alerts the ABS system to apply brake pressure to that wheel to slow it down correcting the obvious miscalculation made by the dumb driver and makes itself happy. What this also does is increase the load on that wheel thereby with physics and science pixies send the torque to the other wheel that should have traction. It can do this several times per second because obviously its a damn computer and that's what they do is think faster than us. So this system has pi$$ed me off several times hitting the brakes and bogging the engine when I just wanted to have fun or needed it to just push through deep snow. It's very situation specific. 60% of the time, it works every time! Take the stump crawl as example. A typical open diff truck is never going to make it up this stump. That driver rear and passenger front are going to spin till you run out of gas. But this little oddball off roader was finally convinced to make the climb. And no, I had no clue working the steering would help at all. It just did.
