Team-BHP - Moose test of cars is acid test of handling

Hi all,

One of the important criteria of car review (evaluation) is its handling, which if I am not wrong, is more subjectively done in reviews than say 0-100 kmph acceleration timing etc.
I was looking at moose tests done by km77.com (and they have lot of videos on youtube). It seems to be that the moose test would be an acid test of handling but I wanted to check with experts here what they think of its effectiveness as an acid test of handling.
Also, another reason for asking is, many of known best expected handlers don't seem to have done well. The best ones are an assorted lot : Tesla 3, Ford Focus, a Honda Jazz and so on, but not the usually expected ones like BMW Ms etc

Tesla 3 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRCWBFSQsp4
Ford Focus : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_v9sy32Z5I
Honda Jazz : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCPl7Er22e4

Audi Q8 seems to do very well for its size :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IrxinmHjQ

BMW M4 is not that great though :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uotjzSoJc9g

I remember watching a video strongly criticising the test (at least the Tekniken's Varld one; I'm not sure if the setup is the same for km77 com). The biggest complaints were bad repeatability because of the human driver, penalising wider cars (the distance between the cones is fixed) and also simply being unrealistic. I cannot for the life of me find the link to the video (or was it an article?) but will share it if I do.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Revention (Post 5512446)

Honda Jazz

Remember the Indian one never had ESC at all so results would be wildly different.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ron178 (Post 5513482)

At start of some videos (if not all) they do mention the ISO standard they follow : ISO 3888-2
Plus some cars are actually indeed wide and yet do good like the Tesla 3, Audi Q8

Quote:

Remember the Indian one never had ESC at all so results would be wildly different.

Yaa, I didn't expect our Jazz to match that Jazz :)
Though even I10 did good and I hope thats same in India

One major thing that the moose test misses out normalizing on is the speed drop from entry to exit.

The most dynamic cars actually retain a lot more of their speed while entering the last turn, but many cars have ESP systems which are tuned extremely conservatively, and they drop tons of speed during the first part of the test, which results in the last part being relatively slow.

As an example, the Tesla model 3 drops from 83 to 53KMPH at the entry of the last turn.
The BMW 520d shown below only drops from 79 to 63KMPH at the same point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9HvFJDmsBk

Similarly, all the cars from the first post drop their speeds in the low 50s (or even below 50 in the case of the Q8's hyper active ESP due to the high height) at the entry of the last turn.

This just means that the BMW is actually far more dynamic and has an ESP that doesn't intrude unnecessarily and take away all the fun. It's easy to tune the ESP to be super conservative and bring the speed down dramatically and pass the test easily, but it's far more difficult to tune it just right.

Another part is EVs go into regen mode which naturally drops speed throughout the course, whereas brakes are not touched in ICE cars which results in the speed not dropping as much.

And of course, the length and width of the cars plays a huge role as well. Ideally the distance between the cones should be scaled as per the dimensions of the car. Although you can also make the argument against this that the roads & the moose dimensions will not change to suit the car you're driving :)

To me, the actual behavior, composure & fluidity of the cars in this test is far more interesting to observe than just the maximum entry speeds. And for that, these moose tests are awesome! They clearly separate the wheat from the chaff!