Super confused about this! Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
In: Engineering
Simply put, each wheel’s rotation speed is measured separately. If a wheel begins to skid on the ground, the brakes on that wheel suddenly aren’t dealing with nearly as much weight any more and rather than stopping the car, they only stop the single wheel, and do so pretty suddenly. This sudden loss of speed is detected. Due to variance in vehicle weight distribution and stuff, not all tires lose grip at once so the difference will be very noticeable to a computer.
The response is simple: release brake pressure on that one wheel. Now what would be skidding starts to turn the wheel and it picks up speed again. Once it gets its grip again, the brakes can be applied again. Done just right, your wheels ride the edge of skidding and the driver can still steer while getting (almost) maximum stopping power out of the brakes simply by slamming the pedal.
Traction control is similar, catching more variations. If you apply too much gas in a slippery situation, you can also spin wheels again snow or ice, and that’s detected and countered. But don’t rely on it to save you. It can’t prevent all kinds of skidding and on very slippery surfaces like ice it can’t give you more grip than is available.
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