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Comment by aitchnyu

1 day ago

Tangential, do vehicles detect motion by crosswind or road camber and compensate? I saw some social media post of lots of trucks toppled over by crosswind.

Our camper van (which is a tall sail) compensates for sidewinds. Other RVs can have this feature as well, though often as aftermarket fitment. Pretty neat when it works, “man, sure is windy today, but this van is a lot easier drive in the crosswind than our old RV. Oh…”

But an RV is not a semi tractor-trailer setup. In fact, crosswind compensation is something I’ve only seen on RVs that don’t involve a trailer (Class A, Class C). And for a semi, how much is in the trailer? Seems a compensation system would need to know that.

  • Seems very integrated into the vehicle. Who is selling aftermarket versions?

    • I'd swear I've seen such systems advertised in the appropriate magazines for large RVs (Class A "tourbus" RVs), but for the life of me a web search brings up nothing. For now, assume I hallucinated such a thing (or maybe what I think I saw was actually just an old-school steering stabilizer that advertised "crosswinds!".)

      And you're right, it does seem that the systems are integrated. For example, Mercedes' system for the Sprinter applies the brakes on one side to compensate. Seems like something would need to tie into the CAN bus to pull that off. Not that aftermarket couldn't do the same, but is that functionality even available on a 43' pusher diesel?