Heart In My Mouth Moment, But EBA Works Well

Was driving a customer to the airport this morning along a very busy road when I had cause to use the Emergency Brake Assist feature. Driving along at 60 mph on a busy road to the local airport when a pet dog on the path (sidewalk?) pulled free from its leash and ran into the traffic, whilst its owner looked on in horror.

All hell broke loose, cars braking hard and skidding all over the place avoiding this dog which was then running scared from all the noise. Guy in front of me slammed on his brakes to avoid a car skidding into our lane from the other direction which then required me to bang on the brakes - hard. This obviously activated the EBA which stopped the car very quickly and very hard, but smooth and progressively with hardly a chirp from the tyres.

Was very impressed with the EBA. I pressed the brake hard and you could feel the EBA take over and it felt almost like someone else had pressed on the brake pedal too. Didn't see if any warning lights displayed or whether the brake lights flicked (which they're supposed to do with EBA) as I was too busy concentrating on the road ahead. I did have a scary moment when the truck (semi?) behind me started to jack knife and almost didn't manage to stop and he left a big cloud of burning rubber smoke drift past me.

Escaped dog made it back to its very relieved and rather embarrassed owner safely and amazingly nobody crashed. So all ended well. It also gave me a good opportunity to test the Emergency Brake Assist, which worked very well indeed!

 

No I didn't and no they didn't. He was quite amazed at how well the car braked and we were quite relieved that we didn't hit anything or get hit and that all worked out well.

He was a very wealthy bloke so it's just as well I didn't hit anything otherwise I'm sure a large claim would have been heading my insurers way!