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This paper describes the results of a test program to evaluate various roadway disturbances present in the driving environment. The specific objectives were to pare down the list of possible roadway disturbances to the worst cases, identify handling problem areas, find meaningful response parameters and compare responses of different vehicles which might influence the results. The program provided an accident data analysis, survey questionnaire results and full scale test results which found the pavement/shoulder dropoff (requiring an edge climb maneuver) to be the most severe and most likely disturbance to result in lane exceedance. This occurs when the vehicle is scrubbing one set of tires on the shoulder edge (or encountering the edge at too shallow an angle for climb), thereby climb), thereby requiring the driver to apply a large steering deflection to get the car to climb back onto the pavement. In this case the vehicle will “spin out” if the speed is high enough.