Software Glitches Stall Toyota Prius

t35t0r writes "CNN/Money/Tech reports that 2004 and early 2005 Toyota Prius models have software bugs that cause them to stall while traveling at highway speeds. While no accidents were reported to have been caused by the software glitch, could we be heading into an era where our automobiles will require software updates and fixes to keep them from literally 'crashing'?"

Comments

Failover

[Nos.]

Like planes, and other vehicles, any software problem should failover to a tested, less automated system. If my car stalls on the highway and I lose power steering and/or brakes, there's a big problem. Instead of stalling the engine, it should just shut down and let the engine take over, maybe flashing some warning lights.

Re:Failover

[TopSpin]

...should failover to a tested, less automated system...

It did. At least based on the anecdotes posted at edmunds.com by the drivers. The engine shut off, the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and the battery continued to power the car. Not surprising that you might conclude total failure from the /. posting and its exceptionally lame, MSM-like allusions to 'crashing'...

Guess what folks; you are expected to be capable of coping with vehicle problems while traveling at the phenomenal rate of "highway speed". Tires blow, people fuck up, things fly off randomly; deal with it.

Re:Shouldn't have stolen that code not informative

[DavidTC]

I'm amazed people don't do that anyway. How do you know how your anti-lock brakes work if you don't practice?

Whenever I get a 'new' car, I run down to the nearby college at night and find an empty lot and slide around a bit, and see what happens when I turn the engine off and if I can turn the key back and have it start magically, aka, a push start, which is incredibly useful if your car stalls while you're driving down the highway. (The other option being a normal start in neutral, but that takes much longer. And wouldn't work if your battery was dead, but that's a rather worse-case scenerio.)

Then I come back and do it again when it's raining, solely for seeing how it skids.

And if I have a car I've never tried it on, and I'm on a completely empty and straight stretch of highway, I kill the engine there, too, to see if it does something different at high speeds. (That's probably a traffic violation, but if a cop appeared out of the blue, I'd just say I stalled for some reason.)

I will admit I've never tried to solve a hypothetical 'stuck pedal', but, OTOH, the parking lots aren't really big enough for that. It's a good idea, though. I know I can shift into neutral at any speed, but I agree that cutting the engine is better...for one thing, it should let the engine slow down the car. I'll have to figure out some way to test that.

Do people really drive around in a ton of metal and not know in advance how it operates when bad things happen to it? When, exactly, are they planning on learning? The time to learn what happens when you slam on the brakes on a puddle of water is not in the middle of traffic. I once had an early antilock system that pulsed the brakes really oddly...there was a lag between losing traction and the unlocking of the brake, or something, I never really figured it out.

I mean, there are somethings you can't learn until they happen, for example, if you really need to stop the car, you can switch into park when you're going 20 mph, but you'd obviously never want to do that unless you had to. But what happens when your engine cuts off, or if you hit a patch of water while turning? Everyone should test that.