Discovery 3 up and down slippery hills

We did some off-road driving up an down some artificial hills near Antwerp. As it has been raining the last couple of days, the soil was pretty wet and muddy. This made things more difficult and slippery than necessary for my on-road tires. But it was very fun and interesting…

It was especially difficult to drive up the hills (I had to try several times to get the correct route and speed on every location of the hills), but driving down was also a challenge as the car had the tendency to slide down instead of drive down. In these situations, it’s nice to see the Hill Decent Control (HDC) working.

HDC is an electronic system on some Land Rovers that uses the ABS sensors on each wheel to find whether it slips or grips, and then brakes each wheel individually to get the maximum grip.

Also the traction control (TC) did its job. TC is more or less the off-road equivalent to ESP. When a wheel gets less grip, because of slippery mud or simply because it’s in the air and doesn’t touch ground anymore, the TC will apply the brakes to that wheel so that the force can go to the other wheels that do have traction. Otherwise, because of the differentials, all the force would go to the wheels that lost traction. My car needs TC because I can only lock my center differential, and not the front or rear differential (as I alluded to in a previous post.)

The movie shows each of these systems doing their job. On the movie you can see that the HDC even illuminates the brake lights each time it automatically applies the brakes when the car descends a hill (so that is not me hitting the brakes, as proper 4x4 driving requires that you use first gear and keep you feet off the pedals when driving downhill).

As always with videos and pictures, in reality it looked a lot more spectacular than on the screen… Ask my father or my ‘brother-in-law’.