Degrees of freedom (mechanics) has only one degree of freedom because the positions of the cars behind the engine are constrained by the shape of the track. An automobile with highly stiff suspension can be considered to be a rigid body traveling on a plane (a flat, two-dimensional space). This body has three independent degrees of freedom consisting of two components of translation and one angle of rotation. Skidding or drifting is a good example of an automobile's three independent degrees of freedom. The position and orientation of a rigid body in space is defined by three components of translation and three components of
Degrees of freedom See: Degrees of freedom In many scientific fields, the degrees of freedom of a system is the number of parameters of the system that may vary independently. For example, a point in the plane has two degrees of freedom for translation: its two coordinates; a non-infinitesimal object on the plane might have additional degrees of freedoms related to its orientation. In mathematics, this notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When "degrees of freedom" is used instead of "dimension", this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system is only implicitly