ElI5: What does traction/traction control mean?
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When you are driving a car, there’s a limited amount of force that can be transferred from the car to the road, through the tires. This of course gets lower in wet weather, or really bad road conditions like snow or ice.
So traction is the ability of the tires to transfer force from the car to the road. For instance if you are accelerating quickly from a red light in wet weather, it might be that the driven wheels on the car begin to spin, because the force they are trying to transmit to accelerate the car exceeds the amount of traction the wheels have on the road.
Traction Control is smart electronics in the car which will lower the power being sent to the wheels so that the power being transmitted no longer exceeds the available traction, and instead of spinning the wheels, the vehicle accelerates as close as possible to the limit of traction available.
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