Anti lock brakes

[flynrider]

Normally, if the front wheel blocks on your grabbing the front brake then you're going down very quickly.

Thus, with ABS you can still try to brake as good as you can, just before blocking of the front wheel. That's what you would try to do for max brake, if you had no ABS.
However, if there was a slippery patch on the road and you overbrake, ABS would save your butt by not letting you block up the front wheel.

That's imho the main benefit. It's different to car ABS, where the benefit of ABS is the ability of still stearing the rotating wheels while brake full force.

Interesting. My first experience of ABS in a car was stamping on the brake on a wet road and the brakes not locking and the car stopping much more quickly than had I slid on down the road.

Flynrider, I'm almost certain all motorcycles above 125cc sold in Europe from 1 January 2017 must be fitted with ABS. I'd have thought that might make them inevitable on all new bikes everywhere. It'll be interesting to see.

I'm sure it'll be standard equipment everywhere in the future. I'm not against ABS at all. As a desert dweller, I rarely ride on wet pavement and I honestly can't remember the last time I locked a wheel while braking. Given the choice, I'd rather spend the $1K elsewhere.

I actually recommend ABS to new riders, though. Applying maximum brake without locking up the wheels is a skill that takes awhile to develop. In my newbie days, I could've used it more than once.