I’m still working on some anti-skid technology which will avoid the need to spray salt-laden grit all over any roads facing the possibility of freezing.
Aside from the huge cost and logistical nightmare of attempting to deliver the grit to the places predicted to be most at risk of ice formation, my real problem is that the salt prematurely destroys the road vehicles its supposed to be helping.
Blasting grit and salt all over the undersides of vehicles is an ideal way to encourage them to corrode (despite whatever sealing/ paint/ mudflaps may have been applied).
Today’s invention is therefore an underbody wash system not unlike that provided for windscreen washing.
This consists of a number of pipes down which clean water is pumped from an on-board tank. The water, which would be partly topped up by run-off collected from the car’s frozen upper bodyshell, would automatically be sprayed at the most grit-impacted regions of the car’s lower surfaces whenever the outside temperature was less than 0 deg C and the vehicle had stopped.
The water used might also contain some more active inhibitors eg vegetable oil.
