http://www.wftv.com/newsofthestrange/3783378/detail.html
The cruise control stuck at 190km/h and there was nothing the driver could do? :dubious:
What an asshole! The simplest thing he could do would be to put the car in neutral. The other thing he could do (and he eventually did, according to the article) would be to brake hard . Car brakes are way stronger than the engine. You can stall the engine with the brakes even at full throttle.
Sounds to me that the guy did everything in his power to avoid catastrophic consequences, and succeeded.
and that all attempts to brake or put the automatic into neutral had failed
Sorry, but that sets my Bull-o-meter off the scale.
What with this DA?
Can’t cancel cruise control.
Can’t down shift.
Can’t brake.
Why not turn off the ignition? Works for me!
CLUE: Article said it was a saloon car. He was a drunk DA!
It was an ignition controlled by a magnetic swipe card as opposed to a key, he says he had no way of turning off the ignition.
And now is as good a time as any to mention that every time I see your name I read it as “Sping Ears” instead of Spin Gears, for some ungodly reason.
If this story is true, the car has a serious design defect. A single fault causing the car to accelerate uncontrollable with nothing the driver can do to stop it? No manual override? Lawsuits, anyone?
I was once driving a car in which the cruise control flaked out and decided to accelerate uncontrollably. A simple tap on the brakes stopped it, and very soon afterwards I had the cruise control mechanically disconnected.
Cruise controls have several layers of fail-safe systems. I can’t believe that all of them failed at the same time and on top of that, the driver could not put his auto box on neutral (a purely mechanical device) or apply the brakes (another purely mechanical device). This story is really fishy.
Slashdot had some good commentary on this from an engineering perspective (along with the usual dreck).
Well it would be an interesting attempt at speeding and getting away with it, but that seems kind of odd too. The Yahoo article says they’re testing the gearbox, etc. and the results should be out Wednesday. Will be interesting to see what comes of it.
Me too.
The article says that he was racing towards a toll booth, got scared and hit the brakes really hard and he finally stopped to end the incident. Isn’t it always the way that the solution is the last place you think to look?
My bullshit-o-meter is reading pretty high on this one. Audi 5000 deja vu, anyone?
This really sounds to me like the all to common headline: Elderly woman runs down group of schoolchildren. Says “The harder I hit the brakes, the more it sped up”. In this case though, the guy is 29 so he doesn’t even have the senile excuse.
It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. I believe a Ford model was recalled for suddenly accelerating due to a faulty cruise control circuit, I’ll see what I can dig up.
That didn’t take long.
:smack:
But even if you experienced unintented acceleration, A LOT of things would have to fail simultaneously in order for you not to be able to stop the car. The cruise control has an on/off switch, for one. It also has a second switch that disables it automatically when the brake pedal is pressed. If it’s a manual transmission, it has a clutch pedal switch as well. Then the transmission would have to somehow get stuck in Drive - the odds of that happening simultaneously with the cruise control failing seem astronomical. Finally, the brakes would have to fail too.
When I was in high school, my family had a '65 Mustang. The motor mounts broke, and the engine would actually twist to the point that it pulled on the accelerator cable, causing the car to suddenly start accelerating. This happened to me, and it was kind of scary, but it was a very simple matter to just hit the brakes and overcome the engine power. Then I was able to hook my foot under the accelerator pedal and pull it back. I just can’t imagine all the things that would have to go wrong in order for it to be impossible to stop the car.
Oops, didn’t see this before. Didn’t mean to imitate what you said. Sorry about that.
Point is, it’s possible for the circuit to entirely short out thus disabling all the switches. As for the transmission and brakes, this guy was in the middle of traffic at 120MPH. Doing anything to mess up his car’s handling would have been disasterous.
:smack: For some reason, I always have read it as “Spring Ears”