There’s nothing worse than car sickness on a long, winding, pothole-filled drive. For the one in three people who are especially prone to motion sickness, the inevitable nausea can be enough to make them stay home. Now, one company says it has the solution for beating car sickness, and it could even help with the teeth-shattering experience of driving along bumpy terrains. ClearMotion — a Massachusetts-based startup — has just announced a $1 billion deal to create a futuristic chassis that claims to cancel unwanted car motion. Traditional suspension systems use loaded springs in the car’s chassis to absorb some of the impact from uneven road surfaces. To get an even smoother driving experience, ClearMotion has updated this technology, and instead of springs the car is fitted with a small, fast-acting motor, coupled with a pump mechanism. The wheels are pushed and pulled by these motors to meet bumps in the road, allowing the car to move smoothly over obstacles. What makes this unique is that ClearMotion’s technology actively responds to the road surface as the car moves. The motors move the wheel up and down at really high speeds to sense what the road is doing and then it cancels out any motion before it hits the body of the car. In essence, it works like active noise-cancelling does in a pair of headphones — the suspension sense disturbances from the environment and actively responds to cancel them out. The company expects its technology to become more widely available in the future.
