|
The winter button has nothing to do with tracton control. Infact, I hear a lot of misunderstanding as to how traction control even works. Yes it is completely tied into ABS, but it nothing on how the engine reduces the actual torque to the torque requested by the body control module of the car. All the module does it look at wheel slip, driver intent, enginer torque, etc. and either reduce the engine torque via a communication protocal to the engine ecu and in most cases build brake pressure to certain wheels to stop them from spinning wildly.
Traction control in no way helps your fuel economy because it will allow your wheels to slip and "waste" energy using the brakes to keep the wheel slip down or nill. This waste energy from the engine and will hurt fuel mileage not like anything described above, but from just letting your wheels spin.
The witner mode button just gets you into such a high gear that you cannot produce enough torque to make the wheel spin, for the most part, causing no need for a traction control system in most cases, but also limiting your acceleration greately. This COULD save you gas mileage, would be a good test!!!
(FYI, I'm a slip control systems engineer in charge of system/vehicle integration for new products)
|