I was kidnapped by my runaway electric car
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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).
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.
I think it's just poor reporting.
If I wasn’t wearing a helmet I’d be dead.
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.
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.
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.
Those other cases did not involve LE on the scene who confirmed the whole thing.
> Either way, I'm glad I own a car where my pedal is connected to the actual brakes, with or without power.
Likewise.
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.
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
Never operated a tesla, but I can get nowhere near the floor on a normal brake pedal, with the hydraulic force I'm pushing against.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Trouvé#/media/File:Cap...
They could, but unless they are vintage they won't get road approval due to emissions limitations.
"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.
The reliance on electronics is more intrinsic on an electric vehicle though.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.