Exactly what I was thinking. Mobility issues or not I'm not jumping from a 30mph moving vehicle unless it was the only option (cliff or alligator-filled moat or something).
Jumping out the door of a car moving 30mph is a great way to end up with a mobility issue.
From looking at the picture of him, and this is an admittedly shallow take, I don't think he has enough mobility issues that it would require modifications.
From reading the next sentences, I doubt the officer did anything beyond adjust the direction to keep it more stationary by the oppositional force of their vehicle.
Given adequate highways, rotaries and traffic going faster, one can drive indefinitely without breaking, so while there's always a question of whether a notable incident is a stunt of some sort by someone who actually knew how to stop, etc, I don't see anything unlikely about the outcome.
I remember a few years ago there were run away semi-autonomous cars like this. But in almost every case, it turned out the user was holding the gas thinking it was the brake, a floor mat holding a pedal down, or there was a lack of data pointing to a car fault. So I would definitely take this with a grain of salt.
It was pretty trendy to report on these incidents at the time.
That said, if the article is to be believed, throwing the keys out the window and hitting the power button not working is a bit crazy. So is only having a "fly by wire" brake system.
And if an engineer did a black box dump and it reported tons of faults, it very well could be an error in the car.
Either way, I'm glad I own a car where my pedal is connected to the actual brakes, with or without power.
Hm. On large electrical machines in industry there is always a nice big red mushroom shaped killswitch. Might not be a terrible idea to have such a thing on any kind of EV? Because all those fancy electronic switches can fail in complex and hard to predict ways.
They already do, and in a very intuitive way - it is called a properly implemented brake pedal.
For example, on Teslas, hitting the brake pedal to the floor automatically overrides any other input and cuts off motor torque, and iirc they have quite a few redundant mechanisms to ensure that this actually happens. You can even press both the acceleration pedal and the brake pedal, and nothing will happen. It operates perfectly as expected, even if the car computer is rebooting/not working.
I meant depressed as hard as one can. A very valid question, so i think you might find this teardown[0] interesting. It goes over the braking system and the brake booster they use (so you don’t really need to fight against the hydraulic force).
No idea honestly, but reading the NHTSA report[0] on the whole unintended acceleration debacle, they seem to corroborate what I said.
Relevant quote: “In the few cases where the brake and accelerator pedal were applied at the same time, the brake override logic performed as designed and cut motor torque.”
So, that's not what I meant then. That kill switch as listed above works by releasing the current that holds a relay that keeps the mains power connected, break the loop and it will take a lot of doing to get it back up again. There is no 'logic' involved, no electronics and there are no semiconductor bits & pieces in a typical e-stop chain (at least: there wasn't when I was working on stuff like that), just a plain electromechanical device. The only way in which it could theoretically malfunction is if the contactors of the mains relay had fused.
On cars with an electronic handbrake, do they have a way to apply the brakes while the car is moving?
Also while it's not mentioned in this article, The Guardian's article says "MG Motor UK has been urgently trying to make contact with Mr Morrison so that his vehicle can be fully inspected by our engineering team." It does seem a bit suspect that he's happy to chat with journos and pull faces in front of photographers, but not to chat with MG.
> On cars with an electronic handbrake, do they have a way to apply the brakes while the car is moving?
It's a while ago now, but I had a Jaguar XJ with an electronic parking brake. If you just pulled it up while driving it would beep angrily at you, but if you held on to it for a few seconds it would apply (while beeping angrily). I tried it once in an empty parking lot to see what would happen, but only at like 20mph. It just slowed down a bit. Not a chance it could've overcome the engine at any more than idle.
In fact, I remember my dad once trashing his handbrake in the '80s by driving his car for 50 miles or so with it applied. He just thought it was down on power for a bit, before the brakes heated up and they stopped having any effect.
> On cars with an electronic handbrake, do they have a way to apply the brakes while the car is moving?
It's not like you'd actually want to do that if the car is fwd and refusing to stop. These are more parking brakes than anything applicable to an emergency. A fwd car with a yanked handbrake is a poor mans drift machine, and not stopping. This is because they generally only engage the rear brakes.
Nonsense. He doesn't stand to gain anything by interacting directly with the car company which if he has a lawyer they most certainly pointed this out.
Jesus Christ. Get out of lawyer land for a second and realize if there is a flaw in the design that resulted in this outcome, you've gotta do a full teardown to find it.
If you want a neutral third party to do it fine, but they'll still need to interface with the people who made the damn thing.
The first step in any legal fight would be to root cause it to determine liability.
Arguably the best people to figure that out are those intimately familiar with the design of the vehicle - like those who designed and built it in the first place.
And true there some pressure to "sweep it under the rug" - but that's what government safety agencies are for. And they'll probably ask the designers to help figure out what happened anyway, but they (should) have the power to counter that pressure and provide oversight. I suspect the first step of any retained lawyer would be to report it to that exact agency.
This wouldn't end up being some personal lawsuit about an issue where "Don't speak to your opponent at all" is often good advice, as the courts are simply not equipped to make a ruling on such a thing. This isn't some disagreement on some contract interpretation, but a material statement of "Is this design unsafe according to the law". So those agencies that define that will need to be involved anyway, and end up taking point on any legal process too, and the process would likely look very different to "Making your personal argument in front of a jury" that some people seem to think is the end result of any such process.
Most countries have mandated reporting of safety issues already for exactly this purpose, and again they should have the teeth to enact heavy penalties if their rules are found to have been circumvented. They would look extremely poorly on any attempt by the company to strongarm the one who reported a safety issue into dropping it.
You definitely do not want the counterparty to have unfettered access to the vehicle until it has been independently inspected. They obviously have good reasons to want access but if your goal is a damage claim you should be very careful with preserving the evidence.
I'm still saying that treating this like a lawsuit isn't really correct, as "Is this design inherently" unsafe isn't a legal issue, so not answerable by the courts.
And honestly if a car company is willing to subvert a safety investigation to that extent, it doesn't really matter if you gave them "unfettered" access or not. If they're willing to break DVSA rules they'll have plenty of chances to do so during their investigation anyway.
Ok so in a situation where you're looking at a lawsuit that could clock in at an order of magnitude more than the cost of the car your plan is to let the people you're thinking about suing have access to the car before you've had an independent 3rd party perform a thorough examination? Good luck with that.
Electric cars are "drive by wire" much more than conventional gas cars.
On a mechanical transmission, shifting to neutral would disconnect the engine from the wheels. Even on some automatic transmissions with physical shifting cables/linkages, shifting to neutral would achieve the same thing.
Besides the transmission, most older/lower-end cars without keyless ignition have the ignition switch physically disconnect power to the engine management electronics, which a gas engine needs to keep operating.
Gas cars are unfortunately also moving away from the above (some automatic transmissions are fully shift-by-wire, and ignition switches no longer do any electrical switching), but enough of the past persists that generally you'd at least still have one of those.
Fully electric cars have none of that legacy baggage. This is good for many reasons, but unfortunately they seem to have forgotten the cardinal rule of any heavy machinery - a big fat "emergency stop" button that physically disconnects power to all actuators. I guess regulation hasn't caught up yet, because until very recently it just wasn't required since the ignition switch fulfilled the same purpose.
An "emergency stop" button on a car would be dumb, you don't want to e.g. lose power steering on a vehicle in motion. A working break pedal is sufficient and safer.
It's not like ICE vehicles never suffered from stuck open throttles for myriad reasons either.
From footwell carpets sliding forward and catching on the physical pedal keeping it "to the metal", or plain binding at the actual butterfly plates, I've had more than my fair share of "run away" gas vehicles. It's just I've also always had a clutch pedal at my disposal to immediately decouple the max-revving engine from the drivetrain in such circumstances.
EVs tend to lack any physical cutoffs between the "on" button and tires. They're always physically coupled in the drivetrain department, and you're generally operating a soft switch asking a computer somewhere to shut off. It's far beyond any sort of fly-by-wire ICE implementation I've encountered, where you'd generally still have the ability to just kill the ignition switch, forcibly shift to neutral, or push in a clutch pedal.
Problem with an ICE that has its throttle stuck wide open is there's no vacuum, so the vacuum-powered brake booster stops working. (even worse on a turbo vehicle)
That makes things more interesting to say the least, and for a naive driver in a panic it would easily be perceived as "oh shit no brakes!" since you basically have to stand on the pedal without the vacuum assist - and that's without the engine fighting you IME. (I used to coast downhill with the engine off in my mx5 when we'd get stuck in stop-and-go Sunday traffic over Skyline Ridge heading to the coast @ Half Moon Bay. Not the easiest thing to stop once the residual vacuum disappears, and that's a small light car)
That's a pretty dangerous thing to do. In Switzerland it used to be that if you were caught 'coasting' that would be severely punished. Not sure what the state of that is today but it is asking for an accident. Vacuum is one thing, then there is the powersteering which at some point will fail and if you're going to want to do a hairpin turn down a mountainside without assist you better be ready for it.
Manual rack on the car... it wasn't particularly dangerous, we're talking about a glorified go-kart on a sustained downhill in stop-and-go traffic, the engine just burns fuel pointlessly idling.
The main issue is remembering to put the key back in the ON position so the steering column doesn't lock up. Then it's also ready to resume running, all it takes is selecting a gear and engaging the clutch to bump start the motor... approaching the bottom of the mountain pass.
Electric vehicles are necessarily more electronically complex than ICE ones. While many ICE cars on the road today and virtually all ICE cars for sale today are also electronically complex, an ICE car does not necessarily need to be so electronically complex.
ICE cars did (and could still) exist entirely without computers, electric cars can not.
The integration of things like regenerative breaking inherently requires turning functions like breaks from linkages and cylinders to things like solenoids and sensors and code.
While each of these points is debatable about what the safer solution is overall, the fact that this is an electric car (with the associated electronic requirements) is relevant to the debate.
Electric cars can and did exist without computers. There was an electric car driving on the streets of Paris in 1859. [1]
I would argue it's the other way around: regenerative breaking is a nice to have, but good luck building a production ICE car without a ECU that comes anywhere close to meeting emission standards.
Not specifically the "energy source", but the overall method of controlling the car.
"the entire dashboard lit up with faults." --I don't think this would happen (or matter) with a convential ICE, where you could always just turn off the engine with the key.
i think the significance of the car being electric is that the driver had no clear way to stop ignition of the car, which is very easily done with a combustion engine.
Unfortunately that's less the case as "fake" ignition switches are much more common nowadays especially on higher-end models with pushbutton start and no conventional keys.
"Despite this, MG has managed to deliver a pure electric SUV at a decent price which is ultimately its main weapon in attracting buyers – in fact, we named the ZS EV our 2022 Affordable Electric Car of the Year." [1]
Probably not representative of more mainstream EVs from established manufacturers. MG Motor is a new and entirely different company since collapse of MG Rover in 2005.
Terrifying. It is my understanding that in the US all BEVs are required to have a mechanical braking system in addition to the electronic regenerative brakes, though I can't find a source for this at the moment. Does anyone know if the UK or EU has a similar requirement? If so it seems in this case the electric motor was able to overcome the disc brakes which is astounding
I have not heard of any road-legal EVs in any markets not having mechanical brakes.
So either there was a failure of that braking system here or the driver was very confused about what was going on.
The bit about the car still trying to move after the police had forced it to stop definitely raises this above the usual unintended-acceleration story, I hope there's a public report on what happened with this at some point.
What I don't understand is why people find this situation so hard to belive it's possible. We've seen computer freezes/hangs for 70 years. Why is it so impossible to belive that an ECU can freeze too?
Before you say "watchdog", remeber that the watchdog needs to be reset by the actual "gas pedal" execution thread to work, and not by anything else that may still be running while the "gas pedal" thread is stuck/crashed. Also remember that an ECU needs to be specifically instructed to cut the gas/power after a reset, not assume that the car was off and it just booted normally.
I think he's saying that Tesla is always mentioned if something happens to one of their cars, but other brands don't get the same treatment. For example a headline about a Tesla exploding would be "Tesla car explodes!", while for any other brand it would be "Electric car explodes!".
I don't have any love for Tesla but I do notice that whenever something happens with one news outlets put the fact that it was a Tesla front and center, while with other brands usually not.
Um what? Bailing out at 30mph is definitely risking life & limb. I wouldn't attempt that unless the car was about to go over a cliff (certain death).