Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com where smart Happens, Hi and Marshall Brain with today's question, could an anti lock braking system detect a flat tire in a car? And anti lock braking system is a system that helps the driver to avoid skids during panic stops. In a car with normal brakes, all four wheels will lock and cause the card to skid if the driver jams on the brakes in a panic situation. The problems with skidding our first, the car will actually take longer
to stop. In second, the driver loses all control of the vehicle. And anti lock braking system lets a computer monitor of the wheels. If one of the wheels locks, the computer compulsed the brake on that wheel, so the wheel keeps spinning a little bit. Because the wheels continue to spin, the driver can continue to troll the car with the stirring wheel. The computer census rotation using a
rotation sensor on each wheel. If the computer were programmed correctly, and if there were a light on the dashboard, then the computer could detect a flat tire and warn you about it. What the computer could do is look at different rotational speeds for one out of the four wheels, a flat tire would spin faster than a properly inflated tire, so the computer would look for one tire spinning faster than the other three on average over the course of a period of time that it could warn the driver
by activating the light on the dashboard. There are several production cars that use this technique, starting with two thousand six models. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration requires that all cars have some kind of tire pressure monitoring system. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future Join House to Wark staff as explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houshoff
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