Oversteer and understeer are twins and opposite vehicle aerodynamics. A driver have less control on the direction and weight of vehicle in case of oversteer. While driver have less control on the steering in understeer.
Why Oversteer and Understeer take place?
Oversteer and understeer both are potential threats to our lives and valuables. Here we try to find out its root cause.
Causes of Oversteer
Oversteer is more common behavior in cars with rear-wheel drive. A list of root causes with brief is given below.
- Crosswind: can occur on either side of your vehicle
- Connected trailer: a powered vehicle is towing an unpowered vehicle
- Worn back tires: back tires slip and lose grip as they rotate in the reverse direction, resulting the back end of the vehicle to attempt to overtake the front
- Inadequate air pressure in the back tires: tires loose shape ultimately grip lost
- Heavy load at the rear: reduces lateral force produced by the tires and resulting that end to drift out at the turn
- Vigorous acceleration with a rear-wheel drive: if driver applies more power at turn than allowable capacity of tires
- Assertive braking: excessive pressure slips the tire and bumps the rear end of the car outwards
- Hydroplaning with the back tires: tire’s tread can’t quickly disperse water and tire surface plays on water which results loss in grip
Causes of Understeer
Understeer is more frequent in front-wheel drive cars. However, in below given list we shall try to find out its core causes.
- Worn Front Tires: area of tire surface participating in slip increases i.e. camber slip enhanced, resulting failure of normal steering (understeer). camber causes serious wear of outer shoulder of tire
- Heavy Nosed Car: in front engine drives, weight of car moving towards rear and off the driven wheels, car takes less turn than commanded by the driver
- Failure of ABS Braking System: in turns it activates electric stability control (ESC) to apply brakes on individual wheels also it controls the throttle
- Aquaplaning with front tires: tires are unable to disperse water underneath and acts like a boat without steering thereby lose contact with the road.
- Forced acceleration in front wheel drive: front wheel drive vehicle may lose traction to its front wheel while we speeding into a corner too fast. In this situation wheels are unable to spin the car in spite of forceful input on steering.
Oversteer and Understeer: How to Control?
Expert’s Opinion to Control Oversteer and Understeer
Turn the vehicle in the direction of skid to recover control and then steer towards safety. Any attempt of braking may worsen the situation quickly. When we drive, a number of situations can occur on the road what matter? The thing only matters how we react and tackle the situation.
Size of the United States’ (U.S.) replacement tire market from 2016 to 2023, by segment
https://www.statista.com/statistics/581639/size-of-the-pneumatic-tire-market-in-the-us
You can compare tire replace market from this data. It is clear that tire replacement market in 2023 shrank compared to 2022. It may be due to price increase (consumers change only pair instead of all tires) or other factors involved.
Oversteer and Understeer: How We Create this Issue Before Time?
In this blog our sole effort is to guide you about causes, effects and how to control on oversteer and understeer. Above given all situations happen suddenly on the road.
In my opinion, at a point we create this problem ourselves knowingly or unknowingly before we face its effects on the road.
It is a common practice in front-wheel drive or rear-wheel drive, that instead of replacing all tires of our vehicle we only replace a pair of tires. It may be front pair or rear pair.
What the case may be, it is a bad practice as new pair will have proper tread while old pair will have worn tread. Instead we should replace all tires and interchange front pair with rear pair after every 10,000 KM and vice versa. In this way tread wear of all tires will remain same i.e. all tires will be of same health.
