How to avoid potholes using new car tech
Save your wheels, tires and sanity from potholes with new tech in your phone or car.
- 5G Technician, ETA International
Does your commute feel like you're doing durability testing for your car's manufacturer? Potholes are a fact of driving across cash-strapped municipalities, but technology is arriving to help you deal with their seeming permanence on the driving scene.
Some Ford and Lincoln vehicles have a continuously adaptable suspension that senses the deep drop off of a pothole and "lifts" the wheel to avoid most of it.
Jaguar Land Rover has a similar logic, but rather than lift a wheel through a pothole, it adjusts the suspension in milliseconds to best absorb the impact from it. All about that space, pace and grace.
Boston's Street Bump app uses the GPS and accelerometers in your phone to automatically detect potholes and report them to the city. Rolling a truck to actually do something about them is another matter, but this is a good start we'd like to see in more places: How many times have you actually taken the time to note the location of a pothole and report it? Right.
Michelin's Acorus technology concept doesn't care if potholes are ever filled, it just flexes around them.
And if you're a road cynic, like me, with no faith that potholes will ever be under control where you live, then keep an eye on Michelin's Acorus concept wheel, which uses firm flexible rubber outer flanges that keep the wheel from being bent and the tire from being cut.