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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Have you ever actually driven on a busy freeway? I for one would not look forward to the prospect of changing multiple lanes in a car whose velocity is not in my control.
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Don't be absurd. Of course I wouldn't look forward to it; but it wouldn't be a catastrophe, either.
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As for why a wheel losing power will cause a car to swerve, its because the car is then pushed unequally one its two sides, creating a torque, a turning force. Think of rowing a boat and how rowboats turn by stopping the oar on one side.
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It may apply a differential torque which will naturally cause a turning moment, but to say it will make the car swerve violently out of control is hardly likely. In an airplane or a boat, that's what a rudder is for. The rudder on an airplane, for example, easily overcomes the yaw from one failed engine and the other at maximum thrust. In a car, the tendency to steer would be even easier to overcome because of the friction of the steerable wheels on the road. Unless you were rapidly accelerating at the time, you probably wouldn't notice much pull just going down the road with the pedal lightly pressed to maintain speed. At the worst, it would probably be less of a problem than a blown tire. Regardless, not even a half-wit engineer would design a car with completely independent power sources to the wheels if the failure of one motor would immediately cause the car to be uncontrollable.
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And claiming that safety oriented agencies should outlaw something simply because it *might* cause problems is wrong.
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Depends on where your definition of "might" is, doesn't it?