Rewind 20 years and you’d be hard-pushed to find many motorcycles fitted with an anti-lock braking system, but now the majority of new bikes have ABS.
Unsurprisingly it was the field of aviation that led the way. Aviation was and still is at the cutting-edge of technology and in the 1920s the fledgling civil aviation scene was suffering from a number of accidents…
The early airliners were big, heavy and cumbersome beasts and had to fly in as wide a range of conditions as they could: come rain, shine or ice… The thing was a plane full of passengers was liable to skid as soon as the brakes were applied to the main wheels on the undercarriage, meaning there was a big risk of potentially fatal crashes and collisions. This could happen in cold, icy or just plain wet runway conditions. ABS offered a solution to the problem.
A simple description of an early ABS system is that sensors on the wheels tell a ‘black-box’ when a wheel is locking when the brakes are applied, the brakes are then released and then applied again. The control unit itself makes these decisions many times a second, applying and releasing the brakes until the aircraft comes to a stop. It would take until 1978 for Mercedes-Benz to manufacture and market the first mass-production car with a Bosch, four-wheel ABS system and a further decade for BMW to get a much smaller system onto their bike range…
The K100 of 1988 was the first machine to be fitted with the system. The first downside was easy to spot: it looked like a small, black cylinder attached to the side of the bike and it weighed a hefty 11 kilos. It also suffered a little thanks to the system itself being a little crude, so in operation it could feel a little snatchy and would pulse hard at the lever. Also, braking distances were often longer on ABS-equipped machines than those without it and many ‘experienced’ riders would poo-poo the system as a result…
Thankfully, BMW engineers persevered with it on their touring models and more than 60,000 ABS-shod Beemers had been delivered by the middle of the 1990s with the system improving year-by-year.
ABS would keep getting smaller and more efficient, but still – until relatively recently – they have still been the preserve of larger, more ‘touring’ style bikes. Sports machines and off-road bikes weren’t deemed suitable for ABS, thanks to the need to subtly use front and rear brakes independently.
In the noughties Honda stated that they would have ‘advanced braking systems’ on all of their range by 2007 – and – eventually, even range-topping sports bikes would have ABS. BMW once more led the way with ABS on their HP2 Sport – but this system was supposed to be switched off at the track. Eventually Honda came up with their Combined ABS system, which was first seen on the 2009 CBR600RR and CBR1000RR Fireblade.
Since then most modern sportsbikes now feature an intelligent ABS system, that works from a central ‘brain’, often a ‘five axis IMU’ or ‘Inertial Measurement Unit’ which gathers information from various sensors and uses this accordingly with the ABS and other systems, such as traction control, anti-wheelie etc.
Today the old argument of whether a good rider on a non-ABS bike can brake quicker than on a bike with ABS are gone. Miniaturisation, advances in electronics and the brakes themselves means the ABS-equipped bike wins every time. And while ABS systems do still add a premium to the price of a bike, they now add little weight, with modern systems almost a seventh of the weight of that original Bosch set-up on the K100…
