Car With A Mind Of Its Own -- Part 2

An anonymous reader writes "As a sequel to the previous Slashdot story where a car 'began accelerating to 120 mph on its own', Renault (the car manufacturer) has examined the supposed faulty car, and as many of us have suspected, no anomaly has been found (google translation). Renault will initiate a court action to discover the truth about the matter. Read more about it here (translation)."

Comments

Computer?

[Silverlock]

IANAM (I Am Not A Mechanic), but could the problem have been in the car's computer? Perhaps a bug that is temporarily fixed by rebooting? If that's the case, it could be very hard to track down and would also explain why they didn't find anything.

It seems a bit unrealistic that he would endanger his life for this. Wait.. not unrealistic. Irrational maybe. Oh, and he's a human. Nevermind.

You're the one spreading mis-information.

[Genjurosan]

Read some of the other posts below, then search google. *sigh*

Please don't say that

[gillbates]

Your comment reminds me of the minority report where the one false positive is considered by the public to completely outweigh all the good the system has done.

This is exactly the same line of thinking that gets people killed. For example, airbags are now mandatory in automobiles, and yes, they have done a lot to save idiots who couldn't be bothered to fasten their seatbelt before they drove drunk. And unfortunately, this profile does represent a lot of people.

However, the side effect of that cars are now more dangerous for those who wear seatbelts. Prior to the airbag, a conscientious driver who wore a seatbelt stood a low risk of injury in a low to moderate speed impact. But, thanks to the airbag, children and elderly have been killed in minor accidents because the airbag went off. Worse yet are the cases in which people have been burned to death in vehicles after having a minor accident because an exploding airbag broke their wrists and were unable to exit the vehicle.

The problem is that the majority of people choose to drive in unsafe ways. But, we shouldn't reward their negligent behaviour by installing a "safety device" that will mitigate the consequences of their unsafe actions at the expense of making cars more dangerous for safe drivers. Safe drivers are being punished for the folly of reckless ones.

Re:Please don't say that

[ksheff]

not to mention that some passenger side airbags will break the windshield. requiring yet another expensive part to be replaced on a car for what could be a minor bump that could be ignored on earlier vehicles.