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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

If you notice in the video there are no nearby hard walls, it's a giant open parking lot and the course is set up by soft pieces like plastic traffic cones. I'm sure a course could be made with appropriate margins for safety. Even so, in the ride world there are accidents but that doesn't stop people from riding.

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Not to mention the fact that this system is monitoring the traction of all 4 wheels constantly and would detect the slip in milliseconds, transferring power to other wheels. It would be fine.

They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to reduce wear on the tires.

> They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to reduce wear on the tires.

That's a real skid pad at a real road course[1] with real rules and regulations[2], not some expendable engineering testbed greased up to save tires.

[1] https://www.thunderhill.com/renting/skid-pad

[2] https://www.thunderhill.com/s/Skidpad-Event-Guidelines-2018-...

On top of that, there's the deadman's switch on the console that stops the car if the driver releases it. Would definitely pay to ride in something like this.

It's an e-stop button (probably NFPA 79 Cat 0 implementation), not dead man's switch. This timestamp[1] clearly depicts an air gap between fingers and button while maneuvering.

[1] https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE?t=74

Hah you're right. That makes more sense, the other angles looked like he was holding it down the entire time. Thanks :D

it’s the skid pd at thunderhill. there are definitely walls, they are just off camera.

Yeap. That's where I sent my roommate from college to learn performance driving; a Korean dude with a CS degree from an UC turned California highway patrol (CHP) officer. (How many cops has anyone ever run into understood Big-O notation?)

Disclaimer: I learned a thing or a thing and half sliding around the back roads of the Sacramento levee system with water hazards on both sides. }:]

i did a track day up there years ago who was chp and was trying to explain you had to take trigonometry to me for taking the radar speed of a vehicle at an angle...

Vehicle speed within traffic lane, or relative speed along a vector to/through the radar device - which vector might be at a significant angle to the traffic lane?

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