Driver Gets Stuck On Cruise Control 38
Benaiah writes "In something seemingly out of a Keanu Reeves movie, an Australian driver was unable to make his freeway exit when his car failed to slow down as he applied the brake. For those of you too lazy to RTFA he tried everything to stop the car including turning off the ignition but to no avail, the computer was in control. Police at one point escorted him down the wrong side of the road at 80km/h(50mp/h) until he eventually was able to stop it by repeatedly stepping on the brake pedal. Ford Australia spokeswoman Sinead McAlary said there has been a recall on that make of car but for a different reason."
Re:Throw it in neutral and apply the hand break? (Score:2, Informative)
The article pretty clearly states he tried.
This could actually be true... (Score:3, Informative)
The parking brake, or the hand brake is not strong enough to brake a moving car, at least not at speeds above 30 kph. At 80 kph the hand brake is most likely to take considerable damage and/or premature wear and even further disable its operation when trying to use it at that speed.
When it comes to the brakes, cars have what is known as ABS. ABS is an electronically controlled braking system which neutralizes the braking force on the wheels that are starting to spin, when you hit the brakes hard or you hit them when the road is slippery. It is technically possible for the electronic control unit (ECU) to hang and force all brake calipers open no matter how strong pressure is applied on the brake pedal.
Even the automatic transmission gearbox is controlled electronically consisting of electronically controlled actuator valves that reroute hydraulic fluid in the box in order to switch operating mode of the gearbox. It is fully possible for the ECU of the automatic transmission to stop responding to "shifting commands" from the shift stick.
Usually there is redundancy in those systems and the systems at least used to be isolated from each other, i.e. they operate independently from each other using their own circuitry and wiring except for perhaps the diagnostics interface (OBD, OBDII, et al). The ABS-system used to be this way on most cars until the TRACS feature came where the ABS system sends commands to the fuel injection box forcing the engine to rev down in order to prevent spin when accelerating. This is also used to enhance the effect of the ABS control when braking.
But my bets are, since the invention of the CCAM bus that all electronic components have become more and more integrated into each other and the manufacturers do what they can to cut their production costs and save copper wire by letting all components communicate over the same CCAM bus which goes around the car in a loop. If this bus breaks, gets congested or overloaded then things don't look good for the driver.
So, all in all, I think this is possible to happen and the cruise control may have overloaded the CCAM bus disabling all electronically controlled operation of the vehicle.
The newspaper and police are being charitable (Score:3, Informative)
NO, no it does not. Given that he tried other options, and he seems to have remained calm for at least the first few KM of the problem, he probably did. from comments in the article and below, it does seem that at least some modern automatics are completely fly by wire affairs.
The article said it was a 2002 Ford Explorer. They're not drive by wire. He could have shifted to neutral and there's pretty much no mechanical failure that can prevent that. If it were a manual transmission and it was stuck in gear (kind of an unlikely failure at the same time the brakes and throttle mysteriously fail) then he could have still disengaged the clutch by holding the clutch pedal down.
The are several controls that can be used to stop or at least prevent further acceleration: The ignition key switch, the clutch pedal (on a manual transmission vehicle), the shifter, the brake pedal... The idea that all of these failed simultaneously is implausible.
What we have here is an idiot who became hysterical when his throttle pedal got stuck down. His parking brake probably didn't work because it was out of adjustment. The service brakes could have failed due to a fluid leak, but had he shifted to neutral he probably could have still used them to slow down because cars have dual-circuit brakes so if one side loses fluid you can still stop on the other circuit... He probably tried to downshift which resulted in stronger acceleration, when he should have just shifted to neutral and let the engine bounce off of the rev limiter (pretty much all fuel injected cars have a rev limiter routine in the engine computer).
Seriously, he sounds like a total numbnuts who just went to pieces and has no understanding of how his car operates and how he can control it:
"I was hysterical, I was absolutely hysterical. When the police opened the car door to ask if I was okay - I have never screamed so much in my life," he said.
Re:This could actually be true... (Score:2, Informative)
Just a point of detail but ... (Score:2, Informative)