I spent 3 1/2 months in far northern Sweden with a couple of weeks in England thrown in. 

I was working for an automotive supplier known at the time as Kelsey-Hayes (which was later subsumed into Lucas and then later still into TRW but that's another story). We had begun work a few months earlier on a full speed traction control system that managed both the brakes and the engine torque.  Up until that time we had only done work on brake-only systems so we basically started from scratch. 

I spent countless hours that winter driving on frozen lakes, snow covered roads and even some heated asphalt and learned a lot about real world vehicle dynamics and how we could influence it with electronic control systems. Although I didn't know it at the time, many of the lessons I learned from driving and analyzing the sensor data would later be incorporated into enhanced ABS, stability control and even launch control systems. 

+Motor Trend Magazine takes a look at the differences between traction control and launch control in an excellent primer.

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Launch Control vs. Traction Control – Motor Trend
Just as closed-loop control systems have enabled powertrain engineers to extract more work from every drop of fuel, they're also helping vehicle integration engineers do the same when it comes to enab…

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