ABS Comparison Test | Absolutely Brilliant Stopping

It’s becoming more and more likely that all sportbikes in the very near future will have ABS as standard equipment. If you buy a BMW next year, it will have ABS — the company announced recently that the safety feature will appear on its entire lineup beginning in 2012. Governments in both Europe and the USA are pushing for mandatory ABS on motorcycles, citing fewer accidents and improved safety. Until recently, this was a definite cause for concern with sportbike riders, as systems for motorcycles were quite obtrusive, adding weight and complexity in addition to underperforming — intervening when they shouldn’t, and not working when you think they should.

That has all changed in the last couple of years with the introduction of various systems specifically designed to work on sportbikes, offering light weight, higher thresholds of operation and smooth activation. Here we have three literbikes with such systems: The BMW S 1000 RR, with the company’s Race ABS that is offered in conjunction with its Dynamic Traction Control system; the Honda CBR1000RR ABS with its combined electronic setup that is a brake-by-wire system and links the front and rear brakes; and the Kawasaki ZX-10R ABS with KIBS — Kawasaki Intelligent anti-lock Brake System.

We are well familiar with the BMW S 1000 RR’s ABS, as every test unit we have sampled to date has been equipped with that option. The BMW, equipped with ABS, has won our literbike shootout two years running, an indication of how well the system works — although we still disable it for racetrack use. We likewise have plenty of experience with the current generation CBR1000RR, which has consistently ranked near the top of our literbike comparison tests since its introduction in 2008. And while we haven’t sampled an ABS version before, we have tested the CBR600RR C-ABS model (“Future Indicator”, May ‘09) with favorable results. The current ZX-10R we have also tested numerous times this year, although we’ve had limited experience with KIBS, (we had the KIBS-equipped ZX-10R for a week and wrote about it in our last literbike test) which is an advancement of the company’s K-ACT (Kawasaki Advanced Coactive-braking Technology), which we have used extensively on the Concours model. See the attached “ABS Tech” sidebar for more information about each bike’s system, and for even more information about each bike, visit www.sportrider.com/magazine/1112.

Give it a Brake
To get an idea of the outright braking capabilities of the three bikes, we headed to Auto Club Speedway’s dragstrip facility and scared Kent into making some panic stops with our data acquisition strapped aboard. The results of those tests are shown in the attached sidebar. We know from past experience, however, that the major benefit of ABS is not in absolute stopping distance — an experienced rider, given some practice attempts and ideal conditions, can stop in a shorter distance than most systems. So, we sent Kent, Bradley and Eric Nugent on a street ride with instructions to find some wet, dirty and gravelly roads and experiment with each bike’s ABS to see how they reacted to various scenarios in not-ideal conditions — the real value of ABS.