eli5: Why do you need to “Drive 50 miles” to reset the sensors in a car?
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Any idea what sensors? Modern cars often contain dozens of individual chips.
I’m having a hard time thinking what might want you to drive to calibrate. Emissions perhaps
Well the sensors themselves aren’t reset, it’s the data the sensors take that needs validated.
When you disconnect the battery (or replace a bad sensor with a new one) the car has no idea if it can trust the sensor readings, and it needs real world data to validate against.
Note that “drive 50 miles” is just an estimate that is likely to hit all the needed data points.
Many manufacturers will publish an actual “drive cycle” that can be run to get the needed data for all of it’s sensors faster. Something like start car from cold and between 1/4 and 3/4 tank of gas, idle for 5 minutes, drive at a constant rate of 30mph for 5 minutes, drive at > 60mph for 5 minutes, let car engine cool below 130 F, repeat.
you orobably do not need to go that far
if you ineeded 10 foot of rope from the store would you purcase exactly 10, or a little extra?
by telling the customer 50 miles its at least an hour at highway speeds or two in the city(25mph average) and by then the car is well warmed up
lets say the actual requirement is 30 miles that extra 20 is like that extra rope
if you might start looking and complaining at 40 which means you have gone past the required 30… so its what we call an engineering safty margin
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