The first
1987 · BMW 7 Series E32 (ASC)
BMW's Automatic Stability Control was the first production traction control system that actually worked. It sat on top of the existing ABS hardware and used the same wheel-speed sensors. When a driven wheel started to spin faster than the others, ASC told the engine management to retard ignition and cut fuel to the offending cylinders. The driver felt a faint stutter through the throttle pedal and the car carried on.
Earlier "traction control" systems — Buick's MaxTrac in 1971, the optional ETC on the Cadillac Allante — were essentially throttle stops, mechanical or vacuum-actuated. ASC was the first one based on actual wheel-speed feedback and electronic engine intervention.
What's worth noting is the speed of adoption that followed. Within four years (1991), Mercedes had ASR on the W124 E-Class, Volvo had TRACS on the 850, and Cadillac had productionised its electronic traction control on the Eldorado. The reason the cluster of launches happened so close together: every premium manufacturer was already developing CAN-bus engine management for emissions reasons, and once the engine ECU could be commanded externally to cut fuel, traction control was a software feature rather than a new hardware development.
The early problem
ASC and its first-wave imitators (Volvo's TRACS, Mercedes' first ASR, Cadillac's later traction control) had a fundamental philosophical issue: they only knew how to take power away. If you had a powerful rear-wheel-drive car and one wheel hit a wet patch mid-corner, the system would cut the throttle on both rear cylinders, which meant the car suddenly had no drive and the driver had no idea why. Early Mercedes 500 SLs were notorious for it. Drivers reported a sensation of the engine "going dead" mid-overtake.
The fix was to combine engine intervention with brake-based traction control — selectively braking the spinning wheel so the differential redirects torque to the wheel with grip. That required ABS that could pressurise individual brakes on demand, not just release them, which the first-generation systems couldn't.
The hardware change took until 1993. Bosch ABS 5 introduced the modulator block that could pressurise as well as release individual circuits, and from that point onward all traction-control systems on premium cars used both methods. The "engine cuts" generation became a five-year window in the late 1980s; from 1993 it was the brake-and-engine combination.
The version that made it stick
1993 · Mercedes-Benz S-Class W140 (ASR)
Mercedes' second-generation ASR on the W140 combined throttle reduction with selective single-wheel braking, all running off the existing ABS pump with an upgraded hydraulic block. It was the architecture every modern traction control system is built on.
Bosch productionised the same hardware as Bosch ASR-5 in 1995, and within five years it was a standard option across most of the European premium segment. By 2000 it had reached the Golf. By 2010 it was effectively universal — ESP regulation in the EU finished the job, since ESP requires brake-based traction control as a building block.
Traction control didn't replace driver skill. It quietly removed the consequences of not having any.
What traction control actually did
The headline outcome was the demise of the throttle-steerable rear-drive saloon. Through the 1980s the BMW M5, Mercedes 500E, Audi 200 Quattro, Volvo 850 T5 — every fast saloon was, in some sense, a car you could provoke into a slide on the right surface. Traction control made that nearly impossible without finding the off button, and on most cars from the late 1990s onwards the off button only partially disabled the system. By the 2000s, the off button had become a "Sport" mode that just raised the threshold.
The other thing it killed was the cultural assumption that powerful rear-wheel-drive cars were dangerous in winter. Throughout the 1980s, motoring journalism is full of warnings about "snow tyres essential" on E30 M3s, 944 Turbos, and 911s. Once traction control arrived, an automatic-equipped 911 became more usable in snow than most front-drive saloons.
There's also a less-discussed effect on the engineering of the cars themselves. Pre-traction-control, a powerful rear-drive saloon needed a limited-slip differential to be remotely usable on wet roads — without one, a single wet wheel would spin the whole drivetrain to a halt. From the mid-1990s, brake-based traction control replaced the LSD on all but the most enthusiast-focused cars. Mercedes dropped the mechanical LSD from the C-Class in 1995, BMW dropped it from the 5 Series in 2003, Audi dropped quattro mechanical LSDs on the volume models in 2008. The traction control system became a software differential, working off the same hardware that handled stability control and ABS.
The drift mode era
The interesting twist: by the mid-2010s, manufacturers had spent two decades killing oversteer with traction control, and customers — or at least the journalism that influenced them — wanted it back. So the systems started shipping with multiple modes:
- Off / Track: still actively manages drift angle, just permits more of it - Sport: traction control intervenes later, ESP off - Drift mode (BMW M3 G80, Mercedes-AMG E63 W213, Ford Mustang GT): software actively encourages lateral slip up to a calibrated angle
It's a strange technological round trip. The systems are doing more computation than ever, but the result is calibrated to feel like the cars from before they existed.
The most extreme version is the BMW M5 G99 (2024). It has a "Drift Analyser" that scores the driver on drift duration, angle and consistency, then logs the result for later replay. The car's traction control isn't off — it's just been re-tuned to permit and measure exactly the kind of behaviour the original 1987 ASC was designed to prevent. The cultural arc is complete: traction control was created to stop drivers being able to do this, and is now used to help drivers do it better.
The EV-specific challenge
Electric cars made the entire field more interesting. An electric motor can deliver 100% of its torque from zero rpm, which means the wheelspin problem is theoretically much harder than on a petrol car — there's no clutch to slip, no torque ramp from rpm, just instantaneous full thrust if the software lets it through.
In practice, electric traction control is far better than mechanical-era traction control, because the same motor that's spinning the wheel is also being controlled by the same ECU that knows about the wheelspin. Latency between detection and intervention is measured in tens of microseconds, not milliseconds. Tesla, Porsche and Hyundai have all published claims of "10x faster than the equivalent petrol car" for their traction systems, and the claims are accurate.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N (2023) is the current state-of-the-art for an EV with a track-focused traction system. It can do everything a petrol M car can — including drift mode — and it can do it without a clutch, a gearbox, or a mechanical limited-slip diff. The whole system is software running on the same drive inverter that controls the motor.
What's left to fight for
The remaining frontier is feel. A petrol car with mechanical LSD has a specific cornering character — the unloaded inside wheel doesn't slip first, so the car turns more progressively into a corner. Brake-based electronic traction control can simulate this, but only by braking the inside wheel, which loses energy to heat. EV systems can do better — they can torque-vector by motor rather than brake — but only on dual-motor or quad-motor cars.
The cheap end of the market is still on brake-based-only systems and will be for the foreseeable future. The 1987 BMW 7 Series ASC and the 2026 Dacia Sandero traction control work on essentially the same principle: cut throttle, brake the spinning wheel, hope the driver doesn't notice.
That's a forty-year run on essentially unchanged hardware. Few automotive technologies last that long without being either replaced or marketed as luxurious. Traction control did neither — it just got cheaper and quieter, until you can have it on every new car sold and you don't have to think about it. That's probably the highest compliment you can pay an active-safety system.