It can be certainly acknowledged that skidding has been a problem for as long as wheeled vehicles have existed. A 1952 paper by A.C. Gunsaulus of Goodyear Aircraft Corporation [28] defines skidding as simply the “unwanted sideways movement [of an automotive vehicle] not planned by the driver... Its prime cause is a combination of a lessened grip of the tyre on the road coupled with a sideways force that is greater than the tyre’s grip. Its effect is usually a partial or, it may be, a total loss of control of the vehicle by the driver.”
In road vehicles, the unwanted skidding phenomenon can be prevented by means of active braking control systems.
As a matter of fact, most modern road vehicles are equipped with electronic ABS. ABS can greatly improve the safety of a vehicle in extreme circumstances, since it can maximise the longitudinal tyre–road friction while keeping large lateral (directional) forces that ensure vehicle driveability. The use of automatic braking control systems has also been extended to electronic stability control (ESC) systems (see, e.g., [27, 39, 45, 88]).