Focus Gets Enhanced Stability Control

This is a 2015 Ford Focus that is evidently parked:

However, there are times, when the car is in "D," that things can get rather. . .extreme and lead to a skid which can lead to a spinout.

(Given the surface of where the Focus is located, which is undoubtedly a test track, the driver of that vehicle has been trying to make the car do things that the rest of us never want to experience in our daily driving.)

So Ford engineers have come up with a way to mitigate that, a capability they’re calling “enhanced traditional stability technology.” This, according to Ford, makes the assessment within 100 to 200 milliseconds.

This new feature goes beyond the standard stability control system in the vehicle. The inputs—including car’s speed, steering wheel position, turn rate of the steering wheel—are all used, just as they are in conventional stability control.

But for this enhanced system the information is additionally processed in a way that it heretofore hadn’t been.

Which makes this development all the more clever, in as much as it is one of those unexpected benefits.

That is, Ford engineers used an algorithm that had been developed for the Ford Roll Stability Control system to see how it would affect the ability to control a vehicle from spinning.

And it turned out to be beneficial.

Said David Messih, Ford Brake Controls manager (when a potential skid is detected, brakes are individually applied), “By recognizing scenarios that can lead to a potential loss of driver control before oversteer has developed, the enhanced transitional stability system is setting the recovery process in motion quicker than ever before, resulting in smother, more refined control.”

If you’ve ever been in a car that spins you know that that is absolute understatement.