G-Analyst can lead to smoother, safer ride

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: Wednesday, 19. August 2009

This article originally appeared in Vol. 3, Number 3 of Driver/Education, in September 1993.

Ask experts to summarize excellent driving and the word that crops up time and again is "smoothness." The smooth driver, the experts say, knows how to control the car without being abrupt and is so good at anticipating changes in the environment that there is never any need to brake or accelerate heavily, or swerve. The capability to measure smoothness would be an obvious boon to driver educators, and this is what Valentine Research's G-Analyst does very effectively.

When the technology was developed by Mike Valentine several years ago it created a sensation amongst the car racing fraternity because it brought previously very expensive performance-measuring technology within the reach of the average driver. At a cost of less than US$400 drivers now had the capability to measure just how good they were at getting the best out of a car under racing conditions.

What race-minded drivers like to measure is their ability to drive a car to its limits while staying within what they call the "friction circle." The friction circle, simply put, is the limits of adhesion of the car and its tires set out on a graph. You find out how much braking, how much acceleration, and how much cornering force it takes to cause the tires to lose their grip, and plot all this on paper. Of course it won't really be a circle, and the shape of the graph will change from one car to another.

What does all this have to do with everyday driving? The G-Analyst can measure braking, acceleration, and side forces to an accuracy of +/- 0.01g - that's just one hundredth of the force of gravity (g) that's acting on your body right now. It's also a very small fraction of the kind of side forces a typical car can sustain in a turn. For comparison, consider that a Corvette might get away with a 0.9g force in a turn under ideal conditions, and an aggressive driver might pull 0.4g to 0.5g while coming off an expressway ramp in the family car. Just about any passenger will feel comfortable while cornering at 0.1g or less.

The sensitivity to changes in speed or direction offered by the G-Analyst, and the ability to produce hard evidence in the form of an electronic read-out or print-out, have obvious benefits for driver trainers. It's evidence that drivers can't argue with. The big question for the trainer of street drivers, as opposed to race drivers, is how to use the Analyst in a way that relates to the everyday realities of managing an automobile on typical roadways and in traffic.

Al Lund believes he has a solution to that problem. Lund is director of the Pacific Traffic Education Centre (PTEC), in Vancouver, B.C., which was established in 1988 as a joint venture of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) and the Justice Institute of B.C. The Driving With Finesse program developed by Lund uses the G-Analyst as an indicator of how well the driver anticipates problems in traffic and manages to reduce the abruptness with which changes in speed and direction need to be made.

Lund's program focuses on developing a driving attitude that leads to smoothness rather than any emphasis on performance. The program is conducted entirely on-road, four students and one instructor in a van, and the concept hinges on giving drivers a goal of smoothness to attain, based on feedback provided by the G-Analyst.

The Analyst sensitizes drivers to the sensations of driving, says Lund, and it makes them more aware of occasions when they've had to brake, accelerate or steer more abruptly when a little anticipation would have avoided it. "It's an excellent feedback system and it makes them look for the keys to visual tracking." Allowing drivers to analyze their driving in this way, to compare, set goals and achieve, is, Lund feels, much superior to the typical driver improvement course which tends to antagonize drivers from the start.

"The worst thing you can do," he says, "is to identify a driver because he's had a few accidents and then bring him in for a course. He's mad because you've attacked his self-esteem. That's just a quick answer for administration and bureaucracy."

Driving With Finesse provides a more philosophical approach to driving. The driver is focused on positive aspects and given an incentive to change attitudes and behavior. The rewards for being more aware, looking farther ahead, anticipating, adjusting and positioning, are tangible and presentable in the form of feedback provided by the G-Analyst's computer.

"You change your thinking and behavior because you see the results and want to change," says Lund.

PTEC is working with ICBC and the B.C. Motor Vehicles branch on a follow-up study to track the driving records of graduates of the Finesse program.

Ontario Police College trainer Don McKnight took a different approach to using the Analyst. He likes the idea of the feedback but found the amount of information the G-Analyst could produce somewhat overwhelming ("56 seconds of driving was 15 sheets of information").

He also found that attempting to use it in the car as an ongoing part of the training was too distracting. He wanted the driver's main concern to be the traffic rather than the car.

He asked Valentine Research to change the data read from 100ths of a second to 10ths, which they did. But still he felt that the data produced was too much and that students weren't getting the connection between it and the point of the exercise. Then he had an idea. He decided to devise a more user-friendly feedback device which would be less distracting and would allow the driver to concentrate on the task at hand rather than on the G-Analyst read-out.

The device was a version of the coffee-cup-on-the-dash idea. He fixed a dish on the hood of the car and in the dish placed a tennis ball with liquid inside it. If the tennis ball left the dish, then the g-limits of the exercise had been exceeded. McKnight was able to adjust the dish-and-tennis- ball device by varying the dish and the amount of liquid in the ball.

To set the standards for performance, McKnight asked several senior officers to ride along on one of his course exercise routes and offer their opinions on acceptable limits for g-forces and performance. He recorded these parameters using the G-Analyst and then used the G-Analyst to set the ball and dish device. He found, however, that the novelty attraction of the dish and ball still presented somewhat of a distraction problem and tended to draw the driver's attention from the road.

The kind of feedback provided by the G-Analyst and the dish-and-ball device are excellent for training instructors, McKnight feels. "You can spend countless hours dissecting particular maneuvers and analyzing driving techniques." He's installed a G-Analyst on his own car, which he uses for teaching instructors at the Aylmer, Ontario, police college, and another one on the van used on officer training programs. The Analyst on the van is hidden from the view of the driver.

"If I see something I don't like," says McKnight, "I can play it back or print it out. The Analyst's computer can play back up to eight minutes at a time and can show the pattern of braking, acceleration, and steering in a maneuver."

In contrast, Lund's Finesse program uses the G-Analyst more as a comparison tool. Drivers can see how they did in relation to others and then set goals for themselves. "It puts the fun back in taking the program in a challenging way," Lund says.

More information on the G-Analyst can be obtained from Valentine Research, 10280 Alliance Rd. Cincinnati, OH 45242. Tel: (513) 984-8900, Fax: (513) 984-8976.