[s-cars] Installing Torsen diffs and disabling EDL on a 95.5 S6.

[Steve Marinello]

I am uniformly disgusted with the ESP that is on the GTI and A3, which 
should be similar, even in FWD form.  The first step taken after 
starting the car ON DRY OR WET ROADS is to disable it.  It is so 
hyperactive that it even activates backing out of the driveway and, 
particularly, when accelerating away from the drive with the wheels 
turned.  Utterly ridiculous.  The difference between cornering with and 
without it is intrusive annoyance vs. enjoyment.  How they can have it 
dialed in so incorrectly on a 'sporty' car is beyond me.  When trying it 
out in the wet, I also found it more annoying than helpful.  Can't 
imagine how bad it could get in reducing the effectiveness of AWD...

Steve

Matt twentyV wrote:
> calvinlc at earthlink.net wrote: >Aside from the better braking under stress, EDL sucks
>
> Was the EDL on the UrS significantly different than the EDL on the B5 S4's?
> My '01 S4 EDL works pretty darn good.  First, sorry for taking this thread further off-topic.
>
> I agree- when I had a '00S4 I found the EDL to work transparently nearly as well as the manual diff lock on my '91cq.  A litmus test is turning into my driveway- it is very steep and you must approach at a sharp angle to avoid dragging the nose and tail.  This results in the inner rear wheel lifting off the ground, and the outer front wheel having minimal traction.  With the '91 the lifted wheel would spin in the air, I'd need to lock the rear diff to proceed up the driveway.  The '00 did this transparently- just a bit of ABS chatter.  And performance in snow and ice was right up there too.
>
> To get straight to your question, IMO on our 95.5 S6 the EDL works about the same as on the '00.  A little ABS chatter but otherwise transparent.  It doesn't drive sideways in snow as willingly as the B-series cars but I think that is more due to the wheelbase than the drivetrain.
>
> Now this is not the case with our new A4 that has ESP (stability control), and ASR (traction control).  The driveway test seems to confuse the computers and while I do get up the driveway with the usual ABS chatter, it lurches and shudders.  And worse, the drivetrain behavior becomes very unpredicable in snow.  I was at Tahoe a few weeks ago when it snowed 5 feet and charging through snow berms etc. was not at all controlled or comfortable.  I could feel the ASR (which cuts the throttle) kicking in, ABS chatter, some burning clutch smell, and no forward movement.  Fortunately, there's a button to disable all this (except for EDL which cannot be disabled) at which time it works very much like the '95.5 and '00- straightline or sideways.  With a new set of Pilot Alpin snows on the car it was quite unstoppable (given the usual ground clearance constraints of course)- provided I remembered to hit the ESP disable button.  It also gets up the driveway with much less drama when
>  disabled.
>
> -Matt
>
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