For this precise reason I like to drive with tons of buffer to the car ahead. Given the fact that I am usually in a sports car, I know I can brake much faster than most people around me. Should I need to come to a complete stop, I can control the braking distance to make sure the cars behind me are not only aware that I'm coming to a full stop, which gives them the time/distance they need to brake, but it also gives me time to react to them should they fail to see me slowing down (not paying attention).
An added bonus is that most of time the impatient drivers will just go around me and I don't need to worry too much about tailgaters.
> An added bonus is that most of time the impatient drivers will just go around me and I don't need to worry too much about tailgaters.
I so wish this were more true; I've been tailgated for 10s of miles in the right lane on a freeway with light traffic that was never fewer than 3 lanes for the entirety of that distance.
When I've encountered this, I've just taken my foot off the accelerator and let the car gradually lose speed. Eventually, the person behind loses patience and passes me angrily.
Yep, it's always better to put the car behind you in a non-accelerating frame before they slowing down is required.
Honestly I would love for tailgating to have automated enforcement with each ticket doubling in fines. In a few weeks we'd weed most of the bad drivers off the road, and at least in my imagined scenario road safety would increase dramatically.
I believe the term "pumping the brakes" refers to applying and releasing pressure on the brakes. With ABS off, a tire that's locked up (not spinning) will stop in a significantly longer distance than one that's at the limit of grip (slipping with a slight under-rotation).
Assuming you have exceeded the limit of grip of the tires with the initial brake bite and the tires have started to lock up, by releasing and reapplying pressure you allow the tire to spin up again to regain grip and then apply more brake to help stop the car. I assume this was to kinda emulate what ABS is meant to do (albeit much slower?) but I never knew this was a thing until recently.
You do not need to pump the brakes if you can threshold brake, though I understand the fact that the vast majority of drivers on the road cannot do this and ABS is a life-saving fallback.
Also to add to your comment about everyone taking some time to practice. I would also 100% recommend a good racing simulator if you or a friend you know has one. Specifically a setup that has a load cell braking pedal. Most entry-level sim pedals are potentiometers which measure the distance your foot travels as opposed to a load cell which measures the force applied on the pedal. This is how my younger self learned to threshold brake (among other things) and I was surprised at how it all transferred to the real world when I finally hit the track later in life.
Amusingly, a loadcell is in fact a very precise measurement of how far something has travelled in response to a load. More specifically, a resistor changes value very slightly as it is compressed or expanded. If you laminate a resistor to a strip of metal, you can use that change in resistance to measure the deflection, and then derive the force that drove that deflection. In principal you can get the same information with a lever attached to the same strip connected to a potentiometer; indeed, lever scales based on amplifying the deflection like that used to be universally used.
Source: I was a loadcell technician in a previous life.
If you want to visualize how the attack at Peal Harbor happened and have about 20 minutes to spare, consider watching the Montemayor video that explains how the attacks occurred, in the order they occurred, along with historical photographs.
An added bonus is that most of time the impatient drivers will just go around me and I don't need to worry too much about tailgaters.