Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com. We're Smart Happens brought to you by Pisa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, Visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud safe Secure Visa, 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 the 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 keep spinning a little bit.
Because the wheels continue to spin, the driver can continue to control the car with the steering 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 US You're monitoring system. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.