🧊 Car on Ice: Predict the Path

Why does this happen?

Friction between the tires and the road is what supplies the centripetal force that bends the car's path into a curve. The instant the tires hit frictionless ice, that sideways force vanishes. With no net force acting on it, Newton's First Law says the car keeps moving at constant speed in a straight line — tangent to the circle, in whichever direction it happened to be heading at that exact moment. It can't keep curving, no matter how sharp the road's curve looks, because curving takes a sideways force it no longer has.