I don&#x27;t know what you think ESP is but it&#x27;s purely a &quot;damage control&quot; type of driver aid and is only a layer of programming on top of ABS.<p>ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways.  It&#x27;s basically automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS.<p>All ESP does is utilize the car&#x27;s existing technology to better do what the driver wants.  It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the wheel hard enough to use up all available traction.  It keeps the vehicle in an understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes).<p>The point of this is so that the &quot;AWD means I don&#x27;t actually need to know what I&#x27;m doing people&quot; are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he&#x2F;she hits a pole he&#x2F;she hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that&#x27;s good at crashing &quot;softly&quot;<p>The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant.  If the used is trying to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it&#x27;s thing and the ESP code is telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...