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Comment by vegardx | Hacker News Reader

Lots of stuff is completely off with this. If you're stuck in cruise control at 120km/h for an hour you will drive 120km, not 100km.

Also, what about just turning the engine off? Or... break.

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> Also, what about just turning the engine off? Or... break.

It says the brakes didn't work, and push-button start cars don't have an easy way to "just turn the engine off".

Your breaks will always work, regardless of any electrical systems. You might lose boosters, but I doubt it, given that the car still has electrical power.

Some newer cars come with electrical parking break, and those will refuse to engage if you're moving. A lot of people in this thread seems to confuse this with actual breaks.

Mine has a "hold button for 5 seconds" type override - don't know if that's universal though.

Don't tell me it's the ACPI hard shutdown signal, that would be scary.

I believe you need to push the break when turning off a car with push button starts.

More and more vehicles are shipping with electrical controls which replace physical levers, switches, etc. It could be possible that the brake lever was really an electrical control which happened to fail and become unresponsive.

> Xue, an amateur car racer himself, tried opening the car door slightly to help slow the car down, which slowed to 60km/h, but nothing else could be done

And likely push-button ignite --- otherwise you can just pull the key out.

I would like to see a better source for this, but this point is explained in the post, saying the driver opened the door slightly, managing to bring the car's speed down to 60km/h, which sounds weird too, but I sure have never tried.

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