Dangerous Electronic Stability & Traction Control

Interesting, that certainly looks broken
I personally haven't noticed anything weird on ice lately, but then again I don't spend great amounts of time driving on ice.

I'll take a look if I can replicate this, there have been a few rather dramatic changes to the ESC after the last update, that might help already.

 

So, I've been doing some investigation and it seems like this is caused by the recent calibration changes to the understeer correction.
The issue is that I have been able to get the understeer correction working much better lately so cars can turn quite a bit faster at high speeds (at the expense of brake wear if there was any) but this also tries to correct the understeer on ice obviously.

So here's what happens:

• You try to avoid the obstacle on ice and steer heavily to one side
• Due to missing grip, initially nothing happens
• The ESC notices this and tries to correct the understeer by braking a rear wheel to create a momentum
• Fortunately the correction measure works and the car starts to turn while the front wheel also start to help turning eventually
• The car is now at a proper angle for the desired wheel angle the user requested
• Now we passed the first obstacle and want to turn the other way
• Again our front wheels can't do anything really on ice and the ESC starts to correct the understeer again
• Unfortunately this time we can't get the car back soon enough and crash into the obstacle
• (In addition to that there was also a bug in the latest update making the ESC less effective than intended due to interferences with the TCS)

So all in all there are a few key issues going on here:

• ESC is now calibrated to correct understeer much more effective (a good thing)
• User input is most likely full steering lock in this situation which the ESC will try to actually bring to the road (this is the actual issue here)
• The "inertia" of the whole "car" system is very high on ice, thus making any response slow

So how do we fix this issue? There are two ways:

• Use a steering wheel and make sure to never give the car too much steering angle (just like in real life)
• Compromise tarmac ESC understeer correction for better reliability on ice when the user is using too much steering angle