6 ms·

I was kidnapped by my runaway electric car

42 points by CraigJPerry 3y ago

matthews2 3y ago
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.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  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.
  - salawat 3y ago
    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.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      Dude got taken for a joyride by his car. If ever there was a time to camp out in lawyer land this would be it.
      - kimixa 3y ago
        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.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
        kimixa 3y ago
        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.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Yeah you're off your nut if the first thought reading this wasn't MASSIVE LAWSUIT.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        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.
- scrumper 3y ago
  > 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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Especially not with an electric car, the torque is 100% at standstill. A conventional handbrake doesn't stand a chance.
- pengaru 3y ago
  > 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.
tantalor 3y ago
> he was unable to escape the car travelling at 30mph by jumping out. He added: "It might not sound like it is very fast 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).
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  > Mr Morrison has mobility issues, so 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.
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    That might be a contributing factor. It’s possible the mobility conversion went wrong and the system malfunctions
    - AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
      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. I think it's just poor reporting.
- dartos 3y ago
  Can confirm. I fell off an electric scooter at 30mph earlier this year and broke my arm and my nose. If I wasn’t wearing a helmet I’d be dead.
cbdumas 3y ago
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
- stetrain 3y ago
  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.
cko 3y ago
I’m sorry, what? Mister car? Excuse me?
thebruce87m 3y ago
Any reason to highlight the drive train here? I’m not sure the energy source was the cause of the problem. Edit: looks like I should have explicitly said that fly-by-wire was the real issue but at least one person picked up on it.
- ricardoastley 3y ago
  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.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    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.
- PopAlongKid 3y ago
  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.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    Lack of keys is not limited to EVs though, many ICE cars have buttons or alternatives.
  - AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
    Unfortunately, with a modern ICE you're probably wrong. The reliance on electronics is more intrinsic on an electric vehicle though.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  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.
jacquesm 3y ago
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.
- filoleg 3y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    How does that work? Mechanical disconnect of battery power?
    - filoleg 3y ago
      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.” 0. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
spullara 3y ago
As usual the #1 way to know for sure it wasn't a Tesla is that Tesla wasn't mentioned in the headline.
- superb_dev 3y ago
  I'm confused, did you want them to put Tesla in the title for no reason? This article has nothing to do with Tesla
  - spullara 3y ago
    Meaning that if it says EV it isn't a Tesla. Even though all Tesla's are EVs.
    - ImAnAmateur 3y ago
      Tesla only makes EVs. Are there other car manufacturers who only make EVs?
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Yes.
  - whensdinner 3y ago
    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.
    - gdulli 3y ago
      Live by a PR circus, die by a PR circus.
sottol 3y ago
"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. [1] https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mg/zs/ev https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mg/zs/ev
- jacquesm 3y ago
  MG is owned by 'SAIC', a large Chinese vehicle manufacturer.
playa1 3y ago
> ''After that, a police officer jumped into my car and did something which seemed to keep the car still." How can they leave it at “did something”. That is a very important part of the story. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. He had to drive for a long time to be able to call and wait for the police to arrive. Too many things don’t seem plausible.
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    In this case there is ample evidence that the driver tried very hard to stop the runaway vehicle.
    - spicybright 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago
M95D 3y ago
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.
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  As I understand it, most modern cars (past 15 years or so) also have the gas/power controlled by the ECU.

42 points by CraigJPerry 3y ago

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.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
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.
- salawat 3y ago
  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.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    Dude got taken for a joyride by his car. If ever there was a time to camp out in lawyer land this would be it.
    - kimixa 3y ago
      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.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
        kimixa 3y ago
        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.
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Yeah you're off your nut if the first thought reading this wasn't MASSIVE LAWSUIT.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        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.
scrumper 3y ago
> 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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Especially not with an electric car, the torque is 100% at standstill. A conventional handbrake doesn't stand a chance.
pengaru 3y ago
> 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.

tantalor 3y ago

> he was unable to escape the car travelling at 30mph by jumping out. He added: "It might not sound like it is very fast 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).

AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
> Mr Morrison has mobility issues, so 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.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  That might be a contributing factor. It’s possible the mobility conversion went wrong and the system malfunctions
  - AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
    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. I think it's just poor reporting.
dartos 3y ago
Can confirm. I fell off an electric scooter at 30mph earlier this year and broke my arm and my nose. If I wasn’t wearing a helmet I’d be dead.

cbdumas 3y ago

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

stetrain 3y ago
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.

cko 3y ago

I’m sorry, what? Mister car? Excuse me?

thebruce87m 3y ago

Any reason to highlight the drive train here? I’m not sure the energy source was the cause of the problem. Edit: looks like I should have explicitly said that fly-by-wire was the real issue but at least one person picked up on it.

ricardoastley 3y ago
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.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  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.
PopAlongKid 3y ago
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.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  Lack of keys is not limited to EVs though, many ICE cars have buttons or alternatives.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  Unfortunately, with a modern ICE you're probably wrong. The reliance on electronics is more intrinsic on an electric vehicle though.
Nextgrid 3y ago
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.

jacquesm 3y ago

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.

filoleg 3y ago
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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  How does that work? Mechanical disconnect of battery power?
  - filoleg 3y ago
    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.” 0. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      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.

spullara 3y ago

As usual the #1 way to know for sure it wasn't a Tesla is that Tesla wasn't mentioned in the headline.

superb_dev 3y ago
I'm confused, did you want them to put Tesla in the title for no reason? This article has nothing to do with Tesla
- spullara 3y ago
  Meaning that if it says EV it isn't a Tesla. Even though all Tesla's are EVs.
  - ImAnAmateur 3y ago
    Tesla only makes EVs. Are there other car manufacturers who only make EVs?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Yes.
- whensdinner 3y ago
  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.
  - gdulli 3y ago
    Live by a PR circus, die by a PR circus.

sottol 3y ago

"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. [1] https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mg/zs/ev https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mg/zs/ev

jacquesm 3y ago
MG is owned by 'SAIC', a large Chinese vehicle manufacturer.

playa1 3y ago

> ''After that, a police officer jumped into my car and did something which seemed to keep the car still." How can they leave it at “did something”. That is a very important part of the story. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. He had to drive for a long time to be able to call and wait for the police to arrive. Too many things don’t seem plausible.

fatfingerd 3y ago
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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  In this case there is ample evidence that the driver tried very hard to stop the runaway vehicle.
  - spicybright 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago

M95D 3y ago

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.

soupfordummies 3y ago
As I understand it, most modern cars (past 15 years or so) also have the gas/power controlled by the ECU.