WHEN YOU GOT in your car this morning, what did you think about? Presumably, you buckled your seat belt, synced up your phone to the radio—or plugged in an aux cable if you’re old skool—and maybe wondered if you put the coffee grounds back in their airtight container (yuppie).
What you probably didn’t think about is potholes. Which, depending on how much you like spending piles of cash on car repairs, is something of an oversight. AAA just revealing that US drivers have spent $15 billion on pothole-related damage over the past five years. The average cost of repairs after pothole encounters is $300, but as AAA points out, drivers aren’t just dealing replacing punctured tires. Fixing a bent wheel or, worse yet, damage to a suspension system can get real expensive, real fast.
Such a specific growing problem needs a very specific solution to address it, and Ford is trying to be the change it wishes to see in the world. At the Lommel Proving Ground in Belgium, the company has laid down 50 miles of test tracks, serving up more than 100 challenging surfaces modeled after real terrain from 25 different countries. After all, Ford sells car all over the world, and its customers’ enemies are a varied bunch, including French cobblestone streets, Brazilian speed bumps (um…), and rutted traffic junctions in China.
The Detroit automaker describes its pothole gauntlet as “diabolical”, loaded with replicas of some of the world’s worst pavement. Ford engineers scoured roads in Austria, France, Russia, Australia, South America and beyond, all to find model-worthy hazards. The result is kind of like Disney World’s “It’s a Small World” ride, but instead of having that song stuck in their head, Ford’s engineers come away with sore rear ends. That’s because they drove over these roads at up to 46 mph, in cars equipped with seismology-inspired equipment to register the strains to the suspension and other components.
Naturally, there’s a point to all of this. Ford’s goal is to make vehicles that can handle the world’s crappiest roads without falling apart. And to ease the jarring pain of driving through potholes that could be mistaken for craters, Ford’s new Fusion V6 Sport sedan now offers a computer-controlled shock absorber system.
But let’s just take a minute to examine why Ford needs to make a car with computers that make gunning through potholes less jarring. Every year Americans are essentially spending $3 billion because the country’s infrastructure is turning into chalk. The terrible problem of pothole-related car repairs is just going to keep getting worse until the government provides an adequate amount of money for real, long-term solutions.
America’s roads and bridges are quite literally crumbling. In the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s collective infrastructure a D+. Last summer, ran an article with advice on how to best enjoy the country’s decaying roads and bridges.
The government can’t be bothered to find the money to fix these things, and seems to have minimal interest in the problem. It spent most of the past decade passing stopgap measures to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent. In December, Congress finally managed to pass the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, providing $305 billion for transportation infrastructure over the next five years. But , a private nonprofit research think tank, clearing the epic backlog of repairs to roads, highways, and bridges would cost $740 billion.
There are a couple of alternative ways to fund these sorts of repairs, but no sweeping changes are on the horizon. So for now, let’s hope Ford’s faux potholes can make the ride at least a little bit smoother.
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