Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart Happens, Hi and Marshall Brain with today's question,
Speaker 1: could an anti lock braking system detect a flat tire
Speaker 1: in a car? And anti lock braking system is a
Speaker 1: system that helps the driver to avoid skids during panic stops.
Speaker 1: In a car with normal brakes, all four wheels will
Speaker 1: lock and cause the card to skid if the driver
Speaker 1: jams on the brakes in a panic situation. The problems
Speaker 1: with skidding our first, the car will actually take longer
Speaker 1: to stop. In second, the driver loses all control of
Speaker 1: the vehicle. And anti lock braking system lets a computer
Speaker 1: monitor of the wheels. If one of the wheels locks,
Speaker 1: the computer compulsed the brake on that wheel, so the
Speaker 1: wheel keeps spinning a little bit. Because the wheels continue
Speaker 1: to spin, the driver can continue to troll the car
Speaker 1: with the stirring wheel. The computer census rotation using a
Speaker 1: rotation sensor on each wheel. If the computer were programmed correctly,
Speaker 1: and if there were a light on the dashboard, then
Speaker 1: the computer could detect a flat tire and warn you
Speaker 1: about it. What the computer could do is look at
Speaker 1: different rotational speeds for one out of the four wheels,
Speaker 1: a flat tire would spin faster than a properly inflated tire,
Speaker 1: so the computer would look for one tire spinning faster
Speaker 1: than the other three on average over the course of
Speaker 1: a period of time that it could warn the driver
Speaker 1: by activating the light on the dashboard. There are several
Speaker 1: production cars that use this technique, starting with two thousand
Speaker 1: six models. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration requires that
Speaker 1: all cars have some kind of tire pressure monitoring system.
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