what?

this page calculates whether a car will scrape on a steep driveway transition and visualizes the car’s movement through the slope. update the parameters for your wheelbase and ground clearance and the tool will update the calculation.

calculator

inputs and results

interactive visualization

notes

why?

I wrote this because I wanted to have an easy way to calculate and visualize if a car would scrape on my driveway. in the past I’ve felt bad when people come to visit and I don’t know if their car will scrape, but now I can just send them a link to this page and then they will know. :) my driveway has a slope of roughtly 13 degrees.

how?

I tried to use claude to write the code. turns out that once I added the corner radius, the calculations were hard. ai is bad at solving systems of equations, currently. (turns out that there were easier ways to calculate some of what I wanted, where I didn’t have to use solve two equations when one of them was the formula for a circle) I worked everything out on a whiteboard and in desmos, and then solved the equations using wolfram alpha. I spent more time on the visualization, so there are still some bugs with the yes/no calculation when there is a corner radius. if you look at the visualization when the car is lowest, you can visually see if it will scrape or not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

desmos screenshot

from the calculations that I used to figure out the math