When a ball moves to the right, friction acts to oppose the motion, in other words, to the left. However, when a car travels around a bend, the friction acts in the perpendicular direction to the car's velocity and provides the centripetal force. I just cannot understand why friction would act in that direction.
Best Answer
This is my attempt to illustrate what happens when the car wheel is turned:
Focus on the bit of the car tyre marked with a red spot, and the bit of the road marked with a green spot. If we could look at the contact patch between the tyre and the road we'd see something like the rectangle I've drawn on the left. When the wheel is straight the red spot on the tyre and the green spot on the road move together (I'm assuming the car is moving to the left so the ground is moving to the right).
but now suppose we turn the wheel to the left. The contact patch now looks like the rectangle on the right. Because the patch has been rotated relative to the road the red and green spots now don't move together, but instead the red spot on the tyre is scraped across the road surface. It's this lateral motion of the tyre surface across the road surface that causes the frictional force that turns the car.