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$1M Prize For Finding Cause of Unintended Acceleration
phantomfive writes "Edmunds Auto has announced that it will be offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can find the cause of unintended acceleration. As Wikipedia notes, this is a problem that has plagued not only Toyota, but also Audi and other manufacturers. Consumer Reports has some suggestions all automakers can implement to solve this problem, including requiring brakes to be strong enough to stop the car even when the accelerator is floored."
.. the problem is between the pedals and the seat, morons.
While you're at it, maybe you can explain the acceleration in the Pioneer anomaly. It could be the same cause, even!
Make the reward information on something related to Portal or Half-Life. Seriously, the guys on Valve's forums will quickly solve any puzzle thrown at them if there's the slightest prospect it'll lead to information on a new game.
... but unfortunately I'm speeding to my death as I type.
Yup, the cause of unintended acceleration is unintended pressing of the accelerator.
I guess these people haven't heard of neutral?
It's fascinating to see how complex classical mechanics are. There are misunderstood mechanical behaviors in 2010! . Hope someone solves the mystery behind Toyota cars. some frequency resonance state?
Okay, I'll save them a million right here. "The" cause is that humans make mistakes. Cars are designed, assembled, and operated by humans.
Turn the key off or put the car in neutral...........I guess common sense ain't so common.
maybe because voting algorithms that only have two voters are total fail?
Here it is: Jam the front and rear axles! and if that doesn't work, eject the axles so the car slides with all it's underframe on the road for a while...
That, or turning the car off. Heck, there's always "the other way of stopping": throw it in reverse!
complicated cars.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
electrical connections.
The driver was knocked out with chloroform and then the umbrella was jammed between the seat and the gas pedal...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
How about some sort of a mechanical linkage between the throttle body and the pedal....oh wait...where have I seen this before?
How the idea of "drive by wire" became popular is beyond me. There are some things that need to remain simple, and in human control. Steering, braking, throttle, and gear selection should never be done fully by electronics and remain in the drivers hands...along with the ability to kill power to the engine for that matter.
May I be the first to point (and shake) the finger at the Chinese boogeyman.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
For the millionth time, these new cars have electronic transmission controls.
The "shift lever" just tells the computer what to do.
It is not mechanically linked to the transmission anymore.
And when the computer screws up, it says "Hey I've got the throttle on full speed right now, no way am I shifting to neutral!"
And the car speeds up like crazy!
The cars in question are all electronic no key just an electronic fob. No "off switch" just a start button. Even the gears are controlled by electrical signal.
Unless this problem is occurring in all areas where Toyota sells cars with electronic throttles, it is likely to be that Americans do not have to know how to drive in order to get a license.
If it is also occurring in those areas, why hasn't it been publicized in the USofA? (Oh, yeah: "no parrots were killed in the plane crash").
We already have a solution - Cut the power when the break is pushed.
What I struggle to understand is why this isn't a legal requirement on all new drive-by-wire cars?
Yeah, if common sense were a bit more common you'd realise that people actually do try that and it doesn't work on the models in question.
The last words coming out of the stereo were "Good night, asshole."
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The proper response to "car accelerating on its own" is Neutral gear. Whats the problem? Nobody needs especially strong breaks.
Oh noez! The engine will revv up! Oh me oh my! The noise is skeery!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Never mind the million dollars, give us the source to all the drive-by-wire modules so we can find the race condition (literally!) for you.
"... including requiring brakes to be strong enough to stop the car even when the accelerator is floored."
Yikes. Isn't that always the case, or are they really selling cars in the US with brakes that aren't able to do this? Just for the record, lack of this ability would basically mean that the car can accelerate faster than it can decelerate, and most cars accelerate pretty darn slow.
If your brakes can't do this, get them the fsck fixed. They're broken.
Profit
although Ford is equally as valid an answer.
It's called neutral, and it's a feature of your transmission. It disconnects the engine from the wheels. Transmissions, both manual and automatic, are designed to easily select neutral, for emergencies like this.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Considering the cost of the recalls have had a couple of extra digits this sounds like a pretty cheap bounty.
I'd love to take a shot at the prize money. Now, will Toyota kindly release the source code to their electronic throttle systems?
What was that? No?
Didn't think so.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Almost all cars generate braking forces far in excess of whatever the engine is capable of putting out. Adequate brake torque isn't the problem here. If the brakes have to resist the the torque input, then their effectiveness will obviously be diminished.
The proposal of having engine power being cut off when the brakes are applied seems to be sensible, however there are certain situations where you will need both the engine power and brakes on at the same time. Such as starting from a stop on a hill. So the solution isn't that simple. The easiest thing would be to either install an switch that trips past an certain amount of brake travel, or to sense the line pressure. They can use that data and determine how hard the operator is trying to brake, along with the vehicle's current state, is it stationary, or moving, and if so, how fast? They can use that to generate parameters to decide when and if to cut out engine power. At high brake pressures, and moving at high speeds, one would not be expect to continue to accelerate. At low to moderate pressures and being stationary or barely moving, engine power should not be cut off.
Another thing they could do is install a sensor and determine if a foot is present on the accelerator or not, specifically in non-cruise conditions.
Some people apparently had trouble shifting into neutral, but that should not happen at all. I don't know if it's an issue with the transmission trying to block that action, or if it was not able to mechanically disengage due to the engine accelerating. In either case, they should change the shifter from an mechanically controlled operation to an electronic one. Being controlled electronically also makes it easier to move the shifter. If the car is shifted into neutral, that's a fairly clear indicator that the ECM should override the pedal and drop to idle, and shift into neutral.
I think it would help if there was a verbal and textual feedback system to aid the driver along with a command system.
What's the appeal of these drive-by-wire cars?
Automatic transmissions I can understand. I don't have one, but I can understand why some people do. But why are people making cars with as little mechanical linkage between the controls and the car as possible? It seems like it's often more expensive and dangerous. What do you get out of it?
> What I struggle to understand is why this isn't a legal requirement on all new drive-by-wire cars?
You would think that there would also be a requirement that the source code be released for review to anyone who cares.
of the controllers.
That, in and of itself, is a design flaw.
miss-contact, thanks for 1M
God's gift to chicks
I live in West Hollywood. I *am* a masturbating bear, you insensitive clod!
That's asinine.
Being able to shift to neutral is a required safety feature. Because all drive-by-wire vehicles are recent in design, you will not find a single one that doesn't allow shifting to neutral at any speed and is legal to sell in the US.
Furthermore, you realize you just made the claim that people tried to "turn the key off" and were unsuccessful? What kind of world do you live on? Anybody who tried to turn the key off would have found themselves moving at highway speeds with dramatically decreased steering.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I have a camry. Sometimes when I tap the accelerator after coasting or while stopped it unexpectedly accelerates harder than I expected despite pressing the pedal just a little bit, forcing me to take my foot off the pedal to avoid rear-ending the car in front of me. Thus, unintended acceleration. The cause is the neural network that "learns my driving style", which is what the car salesman told me was a feature of the car. Anyone who's worked with neural networks knows that sometimes, they aren't always right...
I mean really, how do I verify this though...? When someone complains "the car accelerated unintentionally" how do we know they didn't just have my experience, which is really minor.
Don't know the cause, but to fix it, push down on that third pedal. It disconnects the engine from the wheels.
You don't have one? Oh... Hmm... Evolution at work. Better luck next time!
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A sociometric badge (commonly known as "sociometer") is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have built several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.
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Group Media @ MIT
http://groupmedia.media.mit.edu/
Reality Mining (@ MIT) defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.
The original Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest mobile phone projects attempted in academia. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.
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I'm just wildly speculating here, but I think it's the same fifth force that's causing Pioneer to slow down and Voyager to speed up.
I'd rather be dealing with a hard-to-turn car at a constant-but-reducing rate of speed than a car I can steer just fine as it accelerates uncontrollably.
Because then I CAN STEP ON THE BRAKES AND THEY'LL HAVE EFFECTIVENESS.
Have you ever tried it? In any sane car (and I except 2 tonne SUV monstrosities) you don't need power steering to steer effectively except at very low speed.
Brakes might be more of an issue, but even after turning off the engine, there is usually enough stored potential energy in the servo reservoir for a minute or two of braking.
( 0 - 1 ) mod 8 = 255 mod 8 ? Could also be some lazy ass not properly checking the sign of a return value (-1 often usually means error), and then passing it to another function as an unsigned value. Funny that people often think that dsp / computer engineers have less pressure to be legally responsible for the breakages caused by their broken code. If a wall fell over and killed someone because the engineer messed up the decimal point, then there would definitely be some legal action.
Every motorcycle I've seen made in the last 30 years has had a kill switch on the handlebars. It just shuts down the bike's entire electrical system and stops the engine. It's intended as a safety feature if you're in a situation where you don't want to have to take your hands off the controls to reach the key. Also, as I understand it, if the bike's crashed, but the throttle's wedged on, all you have to do is hit the Big Red Switch, rather than trying to reach the key while the bike's hopping around because the rear wheel's making intermittent contact with the tarmac.
Seriously - an Off switch within emergency reach of the driver - how complex a concept is that?
OTOH, what are these cars doing with such massive embedded systems in them? I've seen numbers in the tens of millions of lines of computer code being bandied around as indicators of their size and complexity - WTF does a *car* need all that computing power for? I've driven dozens of cars without a single microchip in them - they started, they stopped, they did everything you'd reasonably expect a piece of personal transport to do. What does adding all that complexity get you, apart from a car only officially licenced and approved dealers can work on because nobody else has the diagnostic software...? Oh wait...
Never mind.
And you should still be able to force it into neutral. If you hold down the "Start" button, it kills the engine.
Two or three years ago, when the first two cases were reported (strange enough two cases with the same car type in two weeks, and then nothing for years), a representative of Daimler Benz claimed that on _all_ cars the brakes are about FOUR times stronger than the engine. Including a 400 horse power Mercedes. The only problem is that you have to stop to a stand still _immediately_ because over time the brakes heat up and become useless. So stopping if your car starts accelerating from 70 miles is no problem. But if you try to keep it at 70 mph even though the engine tries to accelerate, you destroy the brakes in a short time.
Years ago when I was a young geek my dad was out in his boat and got chucked out when he hit a wave. The boat circled him for a while until he got a hand on the fuel hose and tugged it loose.
So the boat went back to the home workshop and acquired a reed switch and a magnet on a short length of rope. The idea is that the ignition won't work unless the magnet is attached to the body of the outboard motor. The magnet is attached to you.
So I think every power vehicle should have a convenient way fo switching it off. You should have to actively do something to keep it running and if you jump out or have a seizure it should just stop.
Most cars will creep forward on the torque converter when in gear with no throttle input. I think that is wrong too. The default should be for gentle braking.
Maybe the handbrake in every car should have installed below it a low tech kill switch which the driver and all passengers can reach.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Just make the ECU cut injection on hitting the brake switch with the car still running. It takes some programming not to make the car stall so you can't just use a mechanical switch, but it's trivial.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And if common sense RTFM, then it would know there are overides, even on these more complex cars (where you really should RTFM). Like holding down the "Start" button until the engine shuts off (just like your PC).
"This Corolla comes with Spontaneous Drag Race Mode standard, making it the most exciting car in its class!"
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's the cruise control software. Pay the man his one million, please. Not that he needs the money, mind you.
+1 I lost my power steering belt in South Dakota, and I didn't bother replacing it until Chicago (it was a Sunday and a lot of auto shops were closed). At freeway speeds there isn't much more effort required to steer, turning at a stop sign is quite a bit more difficult, but still do-able.
Here's a concept. If a drive-by-wire system must be installed, find an analog solution instead of having it controlled by software. Computers are great and all but they shouldn't have this level of control on something that can so easily cause mayhem. The technology might be there, but the quality control isn't.
Ultimately this problem isn't that mysterious. Toyota made a mistake and tried to cover it up instead of admitting they had a serious flaw and taking the appropriate steps. It's all greed and individual ass-covering within the company. Defective throttle controls are only a symptom.
Furthermore, I'd guess that probably nobody here except me has ever experienced an "uncontrolled acceleration" scenario, let me tell you that it is on of the most terrifying thing you can imagine, and it's impossible to react flawlessly. Everybody considers themselves a good driver (feh) but quick thinking under a life or death situation is completely different. The fight or flight reflex doesn't cover "shift into neutral and turn off ignition." You are not a professional driver, you are not the Knight Rider, you will probably crash before you get around to turning off the engine. It not stupidity, it's just the way our brains are built.
Drive stick.
If the accellerator gets stuck, press the clutch. Motor revs to max, hits the limiter (preventing damage to the motor) while you break and come to a stop.
You wanna kill the engine now in case the key is stuck as well or the start / stop button won't help? Put in a hight gear and let the clutch go abruptly while staying on the brake. The engine will be off immediately without too much stress to the drivetrain, motor, breakes etc.
I have never heard of any case of SUA in the nordic countries, which could be because there are none, or because they are too rare to occur given the lower number of cars.
brakes are disabled when the car is off!!!!
That has already been shown to be a case driver incompetence, media distortion and concealed devices installed by an 'expert' witness to get the desired effect in court.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cjm_18.htm
"dramatically decreased steering".....agreed....my steering column locks when i turn my car off....
Rather than having brakes that would stop the QE2 or various drive-by-wire rules governing if or when you can shift into neutral, what we need is some way to disengage the engine from the drive wheels. Maybe some sort of lever or a pedal the driver could operate with their foot?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
We already have a solution - Cut the power when the break is pushed.
(copied from my previous post) An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
Have you ever tried it? In any sane car (and I except 2 tonne SUV monstrosities) you don't need power steering to steer effectively except at very low speed.
Yep. I had my coolant pump disintegrate while doing ... a wee bit over the speed limit on a highway. It had the effect of entirely disconnecting the accessory drive belt, which also drives the power steering. I pulled over as soon as I could just to prevent the engine from overheating, but I didn't even realize I'd lost power steering until my speed dropped down to around 40km/h. Even at that speed the car was easily steerable, but kept getting stiffer and stiffer as my speed continued to decrease.
It's got nothing to do with whether the car is "sane" or not - it's simple physics. You see the same thing with old cars that don't have power steering in the first place - the slower you're moving, the harder it is to steer. I had the unfortunate experience of learning to parallel-park in an old civic with no power steering; let's just say it wasn't an enjoyable experience, although the car handled great at highway speeds.
don't know of any car that does not have brakes strong enough to stop the car with the gas pedal floored. The engine would have to be many many 100HP to be stronger than the brakes. People are just to stupid not to depress the brake pedal hard enough... (just consider the stall speed measurement of an automatic transmission: the proicedure is to depress the brakes, floor the accelerator and note the attained RPM -- the car does not move... )
That explains everything- Microsoft must have been involved in the design of the car software.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
FTFA: The car in question switches off if you hold down the start button for three seconds.
But:
a) This isn't intuitive under panic
b) Switching off the engine is BAD - you'll lose steering/brake assist.
No sig today...
Losing steering and brake assist is better than crashing the car at high speed. Try it in an empty parking lot: Shut off the engine at 15-20 mph and you'll find you can still steer a car and stop a car with the engine shut off.
Apparently Woz is already one million dollars richer.
FWIW, nothing is intuitive under panic (sort of by definition). That's why you should learn not to panic.
There's a bigger problem than losing power steering when you turn the key. Many cars lock the steering wheel when the car is off, as an anti-theft measusure.
Dear Toyota
For Unintended Acceleration of some of your vehicles, I would suggest that you investigate each of the following conditions, as possible causes:
1. Strong radio transmissions (eg, from adjacent / nearby Police car, Ambulance or mobile
Amateur Radio station(s), some of which can emit ~100 watts of RF power, if necessary to maintain comms with others in their nets) can affect some cars' microprocessors.
2. I've seen warning / disclaimers on CPU & MPU documentation, to the effect that their manufacturers do NOT warrant their products for any systems / applications (eg, pacemakers or, I would suppose, automobile / engine control, etc.), that could cause death or injury to humans.
Perhaps, despite the best intentions of the makers of MPU's used in Toyota's vehicles, some will "just get stuck" and (I presume) need to be reset by a watch-dog timer / circuit.
This kind of thing happens all too often in the PC world, and could possibly happen (if less often) in auto. / engine systems.
3. If no other causes prove to solve these mysteries, I would might begin to suspect some form of misguided, rumor-based collusion, on the part of disgruntled individuals (eg, due to the Chapter 11 filing of General Motors, in recent year(s)), or others pursuaded by reports
And considering most cars have both power assisted steering and power assisted braking, you'll suddenly find yourself in charge of an unresponsive monster, with a handbrake as your only hope.
Now for someone who's driven a long time, and has used cars without these "features", I could probably handle it. But "newbs" would probably finding themselves panicking, unable to handle the car and crash it anyway, before bringing it to a safe stop.
Good thing you don't need to steer much at highway speeds, eh?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Not that long ago an Airbus plane flying from Brazil disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean due to uncontrolled acceleration.
Several years ago a BMW model that runs on an embedded version of Microsoft Windows screwed up so bad it locked the passangers inside the car, and people were blaming Microsoft for the mishap.
Problem can happen anywhere --- from bugs to deficiency in programming language (embedded programming included), to the lack of thorough verifications (verification itself is extremely complicated by itself), to node clashing within the network, to stampede problem, and so on.
Having 50, 60, all the way above 100 computers in a car or an airplane is always a disaster in waiting.
For more than 30 years I've told people that computers are not 100% proof, and should never be trusted when lives are at stake.
But are they listening?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Bear in mind that this isn't a *new* phenomenon directly related to embedded processors and fly-by-wire. About 20 years ago I was in a van with my Auntie when the same thing happened (her old van had a proper carburettor) what happened? A small twig had got under the bonnet and blown up near the throttle cable. When she accelerated full to overtake someone it dropped in place next to the linkage and wedged the throttle open. Luckily this was on the motorway so disaster averted.
If my lovely 65 year old Auntie can figure out to drop the clutch, go into neutral and use the brakes I don't know why anyone else can't!
P.S. Pulling the key is a really bad idea as you'll lock the steering which is basically asking to die at speed!
~Pev
Unintended acceleration is much less of an issue if you have a good old fashioned clutch pedal. It's interesting to see that most of the publicity about this problem has been in the US where recent figures suggest that only 10% of new car sales are for cars with a manual gearbox.
As cars move to using more advance technology with no physical "kill switch" (which is what a clutch is in some senses) such as electric motors I suspect there will be more and more bugs in the drive system where previously there were few issues. I'd suspect that many of the issues the auto industry are currently or about to go through have already happened in the aerospace industry where fly by wire has already been heavily scrutinized.
1) Make manual gearboxes obligatory.
If car "runaways", just press clutch to disconnect engine from wheels, pust stick in neutral, voila!
2) Make car key really break circuit and cut off ignition.
If car "runaways", turn the key to interrupt engine. This method has side effects - steering assistance will turn off. Braking assistance should work just long enough for emergency braking.
Nonesense, there's enough pressure in the reservoir to keep the assistance going for long enough to come to a safe stop.
I've twice lost engine power at over 60 mph and I'm still here.
Also, the faster you're going, the lighter the steering is, even without power steering. Unless you're making tight maneuvers at slow speeds you probably wouldn't even notice it was broken (again, speaking from experience).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My car has the best anti-unintended acceleration device invented. It's called a clutch.
Today it doubles as a great anti-theft device because the young punks trying to steal cars don't know what they are, let alone how to drive them.
Now get off my LAN/LAWN. :)
Don't consumer reports have a car? "including requiring brakes to be strong enough to stop the car even when the accelerator is floored." but they do. This seems to be the stupidity of the people who, when complaining they couldn't stop, say they've put both feet on the brake, then call the handbrake the "emergency brake" (as if that's supposed to be The Final Word On Brakes), then start sobbing about how, whilst going over 100mph with both feet on the brakes CALL UP THEIR HUSBAND ON THE PHONE!!!
Just don't turn it off all the way and thus engage the steering lock!
My dad used to repair cars / trucks for a living for about 30 years. He would never have owned one of these cars because he can foresee the consequences when something goes wrong.
He hates anything electronic on a car's engine / controls. There are good reasons for this, as some drivers have recently found out. Worse, though, he hates cars that are designed badly (never ask him to repair a Peugeot) or driven by idiots. Don't design cars that cannot be stopped / disabled / turned off / controlled in an emergency. By definition, in any emergency, that means even with the engine switched off (which should be easy to do from the driver's seat - easy from the passenger's seat being optional) the car should not be out of control (sluggish, not ideal, maybe but not out of control). If you change the normal engine-start interface, damn well provide an easy, obvious analog that can be used by the driver to cut power to the engine but not engage dangerous systems (e.g. steering-lock), and can't be overridden by the car (e.g. a STOP button next to the start button? Sod that "hold the start for X seconds" bullshit, it's completely unintuitive like "Start... Shutdown" on Windows and costs the driver vital seconds).
The *driver* of a car is the person *driving* the car, otherwise we'd call them the drivee. If you're an engine and the driver turns you off, then damn well switch off. If the driver brakes, then brake (and if you can do the sub-millisecond things that help him brake faster, do that, for as long as the driver brakes and not a second more, otherwise don't try to be clever). If the driver puts you into neutral, go into neutral. I don't like the idea of any car that can override a conscious decision on my part... the exceptions to this are emergency features (like airbags, seatbelts, ABS, etc. because I usually don't have a chance to *make* a conscious decision in those instances) but even in its absolute failsafe mode nothing should go wrong (ABS fails? Okay, brakes still work. Airbag fails? Okay, it doesn't explode in your face but just flashes warnings at the driver. Seatbelt fails? All you can do is warn the driver).
More important than design - as a driver, don't buy cars with these ridiculous "features" (the most I've had is a car that has ABS and power-steering, but if I turn off the engine - with a KEY! - the whole ECU turns off and everything is still under my control). Gears are mechanical linkages for a reason. Steering is a mechanical linkage for a reason (power **ASSISTED** steering). Brakes are a mechanical linkage (usually with redundant systems such as dual-braking-systems, handbrakes, etc.) for a reason. Engine ignitions are electrical but key-based ones directly control (via a physical connection) the vital power source that enables the engine to continue running and their failsafe mode unless you tamper with the cabling is engine-cut-out. What does the "drive-by-wire" give you that you didn't have before? Is it really so difficult to turn a key in a slot compared to carrying a fragile, expensive electronic gadget and having to press a button? Does it make it easier to drive? Does it make it safer to drive?
Even *if* the driver is a prat and is doing something incredibly stupid (over-revving), the car should not be overriding his decision without really, really good reasons (e.g. car will explode) and even then it should do the safest course of action (limit revs to their upper safety limit, warn driver, hell - even switch off the damn engine safely and let it coast to a halt is preferable to just exploding). I classify buying a car that doesn't recognise its place as a servant, not the master, as driver error anyway... if you *don't* know how, can't work out how, or actually find it impossible to safely control the car you drive in an emergency (e.g. switch off engine but leave key in, how to change into neutral in an emergency, how to slow yourself if the brakes completely fail, whether it has ABS or you need to pump brakes, etc.) - even if you've *never
Maybe people have been conditioned to panic rather than deal with problems.
There is no transmission or key on these cars, it is all done in software. Haven't you ever had a laptop lock up so badly that you had to unplug it and remove the battery? Or even had an iPod lock up to the point you had to wait for the battery to die (because you can't remove the battery)? That is exactly what is going on here.
Wrong. My Holden Commodore VY 2002 requires that I push the shift button to enter Neutral. I have, however, been successful in doing this on the F3 at 110km/h. Shifting from neutral to drive does not require the shift button, nor does shifting from D to 3 (it is a 4 speed gearbox).
Were Australias laws as you stipulate, the Aussiest of Aussie cars wouldn't be ADR approved. Sorry.
Why not just have some key combination to cut the power? I work with a lot of hardware that include some kind of reset or kill switch button, just put ctrl-alt-delete under the dash board to allow the passenger to kill the engine in situations like these. Or stop using software to regulare the stupid gas pedal.
did you forget to take your meds?
back in the day, sudden acceleration was caused by the driver next to you revving his engine.
Unintended acceleration? Usually gravity. Now gimme my million.
For finding a flaw which will easily cost the industry hundreds of millions in court settlements if left unfixed, with no documentation to go by and at the risk of being sued for negatively impacting your business when results leak to the public, you are only willing to pay one million dollars? Why don't you simply redesign the thing from scratch? That should only cost a couple thousand, if you're that cheap.
on-board computer running Windows Embedded.
The following code (indenting lost):
when compiled with a standards compliant compiler, will produce the (unexpected to many programmers) output:
See 6.3.1.8 in the C99 standard.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Ghosts in the machine. You see, random bits of computer code can clump together and form unintended actions. At least that's what I've read in this crazy book.
Just when your car accelerates out of control, and the brake doesn't work anymore, you think you are still coolheaded enough to do hit the [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Delete] keys under the dashboard ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
drunk car assembling
drunk driving
drunk slashdoting
How many different model cars have you driven lately? Sure, some have useful handbrakes, but many have "push on/push off" foot activated emergency brakes. Try modulating one of those.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm pretty sure that it's standard on all cars to have brakes that are more powerful than the engine. First of all, it's relatively easy, compared to adding horsepower. I've tried it in several cars including high and low power cars and have never had brakes that couldn't easily hold back the engine. 300 ft/lbs is a pretty powerful engine, but when spread between 4 wheels it's relatively little torque for even fairly modest brakes to handle.
However, that's assuming they are operating properly... If they're defective, doesn't matter how powerful they were designed for... I used to have a 300ZX with rather beefy brakes, and when the master cylinder started leaking the brakes got rather weak. I probably would have had a hard time holding back the engine in the 5 miles or so I drove it after noticing it but before getting it fixed.
Now, if the car computer can disable the foot and parking brakes, that's another matter entirely. Usually the parking brake is an entirely different system from the brake pedal, using a cable instead of hydraulics. Because there's no booster it can take significant effort to get a lot of braking force, but I'd expect you could overcome the engine with the parking brake unless there are mechanical issues, though some may find it difficult or impossible to apply enough force to a hand brake to overcome the engine, particularly if going down hill. So there still could be some cases, particularly with a computer in the mix, where strong brakes can't be operated effectively enough to overcome the engine.
Sean
What Toyota engineers should be looking for in their code sounds is a race condition.
thsi especially tru for "wimpy" cars that are not designed to be driven without assists... you could actualy drive and brake with older cars more or less normaly (maby under som sweat), modern car brakes without assist feel like a brick and you can do shit about it
I am pretty sure that turning the ignition key off would remove the power on most petrol cars, and thus reduce the acceleration, diesels are a bit different, and also if the brakes/steering are electrically actuated then your a bit screwed, but these things have mechanical backups right? you know in most industries a nice hefty push button kill switch is located somewhere convenient, in-case things go a bit pair shaped.
Drive by wire, stop it!
I just bought a brand new new car, its a hyundai Tiburon. There is this nice braided stainless steel cable between my throttle body and my foot. This is a brand new 2009 model sports car.
I lift my foot, car slows down. There is your solution.
step 1 :profit.
wheres my freaking profit dammit!
Its a recipe for disaster using pure electronics to control the speed of an engine. In a device that often weighs over a ton, that can cause massive and greivous bodily damage. Resistors fail. Motors lock up. Drive MOSFETs get latched on, wires short circuit, capacitors short circuit or explode.
To be honest, i also wonder why these people dont work out to turn the damn ignition off, put the car in neutral, and push on their brakes with all their might. I understand that vacuum assist brakes dont work well when you have a wide open throttle, but they still work.
As i understand, there is NO physical device that prevents someone from turning the damn ignition off!!!
remembers. AUDI = Accelerates Under Demonic Influence. Old stuff.
The problem is that, in order to find a solution, you must first be able to reliably reproduce the problem.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I've done the opposite before - I put my foot on what I thought was the accelerator but was actually the brake. The car didn't go faster so I pressed harder and nearly planted my face on the steering wheel! I can easily understand how the more unfortunate case would happen for a few seconds (which is plenty enough time to have disasterous results).
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
Wouldn't it be simpler if you just stopped driving and left it to people who are able to work the pedals properly, rather than messing their functionality up for the rest of us?
If you have a car that has an automatic transmission, putting it into neutral while driving is a bad idea and it wouldn't surprise me if ALL automatics stopped the driver from doing so. The reason is that auto gearboxes have an oil pump that's driven by the engine. When you stop driving the gear box from the engine and start driving it from the wheels, the gear box quickly heats up and I suppose could even seize with potentially nasty consequences.
Try Googling "why can't i tow an automatic car" or something like that
Nonsense. No such rapid heating occurs.
The pump on an automatic transmission is driven directly by the torque converter shell, which is driven directly by the engine crankshaft.
So, the only way to stop the pump is to stop the engine. Shifting to neutral does not do that.
Even if the engine were stopped, the transmission doesn't suddenly lose all of it's lubricant - there is still fluid in the bearings and bushings and you're safe to coast for many many miles. The rules about not towing an automatic without the engine running specify a limited distance, not that you can't do it at all.
Putting moderation advice in your
Geez, for how many car analogies I see on here you geeks sure don't know much about how they actually work. The advantages of throttle by wire is 100% for fuel economy and throttle response. By separating the throttle butterflies from the accelerator and actuating them electrically or hydraulically, the throttle butterflies can be fluttered very quickly in real time based on a ton of sensory inputs to counteract intake bad intake resonance and turbulence and smooth power delivery. More accurate fuel/air delivery results. Even more electronic trickery is coming into play to improve emissions and make more power per unit of fuel. Variable valve timing is just about standard now, and variable intake runner length and exhaust butterflies are becoming more and more common.
That's all on the engine side. There's plenty of code also necessary to run all of the chassis advancements that have become near-ubiquitous over the last decade. Traction and stability control systems are getting to be standard. These take into account wheel speed sensors at each wheel, throttle and steering position sensors, yaw and pitch sensors in some cases, etc. It's a lot of computing.
Then throw all of the safety systems into the can of worms... Now we're seeing lane departure systems, rain sensors, adaptive cruise control, parking sensors, and plenty more where that came from.
These are all good things, so let's not be luddites and beg for the good ol' days just yet. The systems are good, they just need to work right. Seems some manufacturers have it figured out, some don't. Hell, there are plenty of motorcycles out there on the street with ride by wire throttles, and more and more manufacturers are being forced to go that route for emissions purposes.
As for the notion that brakes (god I hate it when people spell that "breaks"...) should be able to bring a car to a stop from speed and at WOT, that's just ridiculous. Even race cars can't do this. Hell, just under normal use I've heard the stories of race bar brakes exploding from heat and stress. A brake is just a device used to convert mechanical energy into heat energy. They cannot dissipate infinite amounts of heat any more than your OEM heat sink cannot handle your processor being overclocked to twice its speed. Most cars nowadays have an abundance of power. Keep that power applied and clamp on the brakes and they'll quickly heat up to the point that they're ineffective (assuming a vehicle already in motion at a decent speed when the brakes are applied).
It seems it affects Audi drivers.
Four Sprung Pork Technic!
I've been wondering for quite some time if this could actually be caused by EMF. the use of emf filters in electronic circuitry has been on the decline for a good number of years to save the extra buck or two, and nowadays people have all sorts of EMF-producing devices (bluetooth/cellphones/dvd players/wiis/lard hadron colliders/whatever) inside their cars. Could it be someone's buying cheap dvd players from biglots or chinese haxors on ebay that are producing signals that interfere with the digitally controlled aspects of the acceleration system?
or, maybe we can blame law enforcement for the use of radar, and maybe some radar shielding or duct tape or aluminum foil wrapped around the bumper would solve the problem.
That would look pretty sexy.
fhn
Ford made the safest vehicles in the world in the 70s.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
Ford Taurus (I have a SHO) automatic has that, at least 1986-1999, a good many of those years during which it was the #1 selling car in America. It's e-brake is a pedal (allowing much easier engagement since you have much more leverage stepping on it), and has a pull lever to release it like a hood popper, although the lever never needs to be pulled because the parking brake automatically pops out and the pedal won't lock down once the car is shifted into gear (meaning you can even use the pedal for slick drifting moves etc). I suppose it's also more convenient for right-hand amputees...
>>minding your own business at a red light and suddenly .. doing 60 mph in a couple of seconds
On the bright side your 0-60 time is world-class
My guess is that force caused the unintended acceleration.
TZ
Well here's a hint.
ELECTRONIC, DRIVE BY WIRE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE AS SAFE AS A THROTTLE CABLE!
A throttle cable is 100 years old, has been tested for every contingency, provides completely accurate feedback as to the state of the control (as in, you can tell if it is getting sticky, or if it is stuck with utter accuracy).
Drive by wire? Welcome to millions of lines of code, which changes multiple times per year (updates for various issues flashed at the dealer), and which is completely revamped for every new model of car, and every new generation of a model!
It's *absurd*.
There is *no reason* for drive by wire, except:
1) to save car manufacturers $10 per car
2) to enable remote disabling of cars!
That's it! It's all about saving tiny amounts of money, at massive risk to consumers.
Hell, it's bad enough that ABS is on cars, which increases braking distance (all circumstances!), sometimes by a factor of 3x (gravel, deep snow)! It's bad enough that car manufacturers replace a proper differential, with "electronic differential lock", which means the car wears out your brakes, creating an inferior, fake diff, which can even prevent people from climbing gravel hills a standard diff has no issues with!
I own a $35k VW, and its braking and handling was INFERIOR to a TWENTY YEAR OLDER CAR, until I disabled ABS, and installed a real diff into the same. Worse, that new VW is a turbo, and *TAKES OFF LIKE A ROCKET* when commanded.. but again.. has inferior braking and handling ability?!
There is not one single electronic control system on a car, that provides *ANY* compelling reason to use it, when compared with the disadvantages.
That is, unless you're a GREEDY car company, that wants to REDUCE THEIR COSTS by integrating electronic control systems into cars.
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This is from a new york times story: "Of the 12,700 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration consumer complaints analyzed [about unintended acceleration] by The Times, the Ford Motor Company had the most, about 3,500. Toyota ranked second, with about 3,000 complaints, but those were linked to far more accidents — 1,000 — compared to 450 crashes for Ford. All told, from 2000 through 2009, Toyota had one speed-control crash complaint per 20,454 vehicles sold in the United States. Ford had one complaint per 64,679 vehicles. Honda had one per 70,112 and G.M. one per 179,821." Even if you're a sceptic this figures suggest there is a problem!
I'll consider myself fortunate that I couldn't afford anything better than a piece of shit when I first started driving. You quickly learn how to handle situations where the engine stalls at any speed (76 Volare), or the clutch cable breaks (79 Colt), or the throttle freezes wide open (90 Jetta), or you lose the accessory belt. Although many people panic there is no reason to. Power steering and power brakes are power *ASSIST*. They still work whether there is power or not. Depending on the design you will get more or less reserve assist on the brakes, but certainly enough to stop the car easily if you don't panic and pump them. Even after that they will still work but with greater effort required. If the car is accelerating independently of the pedal and you don't feel comfortable shutting the engine off then by all means, put it in neutral. Depending on the vehicle you might blow the engine, but hey, it's better than killing someone.
I figure its out there, floating in the distant recesses of space. and it somehow is only effecting certain types of toyota's and audi's. We've seen this in Maximum Overdrive people - the solution is simple! Blast it out of the sky!
People who don't know how to put their transmissions in neutral. Now, where's my prize money?
And what is doing the three second count? How much do you want to bet that it's a subroutine somewhere, not a hard counter? Add in that it's three seconds if the car is moving and just a single press if it's not and I would bet money that it is just a request to the computer to please turn the car off if you feel like it.
I'm still trying to figure out what the point to these keyless ignitions is. I rented a car with one a while back and it was kind of cute that I didn't have to put the key in but didn't really save anything. In fact, I like having keys out of my pockets while driving so I wound up sticking the key in this little niche on the dashboard anyhow.
You need to exercise a little.
I've had the engine turn off while driving and yes non-assisted steering requires a bunch more effort - though only at low speeds, you don't turn sharply at highway speeds.
Perfect riposte to my claim that only Ford make safe cars and all Fords are safe. Except that isn't what I said at all. In fact it isn't remotely like it, is it?
Seriously, what the fuck has that got to do with drive-by-wire versus mechanical? Try reading more than one word before replying if you don't want to broadcast what an utter fucking imbecile you are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Lemme try. A plume of "gas" from a bystander's back (a pedestrian maybe) gets into the manifold. hence the sudden acceleration.
My million dollar please.
That the main problem is the American press being influenced by the Government trying to create mass hysteria? The Government DOES own quite a large stake in GM.
If these cars are drive-by-wire then I'd be suspecting that the potentiometers and/or positional encoders that are used to read the throttle position are failing (or starting to fail) as potentiometers and encoders do.
Can anybody in the know verify what sort of technology is used to actually read the throttle position in cars these-days (not for the TPS sensor so much - but for the drive-by-wire setup)? I'm hoping it's not potentiometers because the resistive layer can wear through on those with age causing unreliable behaviour. Even if they're using rotary or optical encoders, they can have dodgy reliability problems when they age (grease/lubricant starts to age) etc. Who hasn't had a stereo where the volume control has started getting flaky after a few years?
I'm sure that the manufacturers have thought of simple things like this, which makes me think that there's either people are making this stuff up, or there's something screwy with the car's control software or electronics. If it's a software error then, as another poster has already pointed out, no amount of pontificating is going to solve the problem without giving us access to the source code.
Of course, it could be something more sinister. Perhaps the CAN bus command to signal 100% throttle to the ECU happens to be easy to trigger with a particular type of noise? Again, nobody is going to be able to figure that sort of stuff out without some serious insider knowledge..
I hope they do figure this out though as my car happens to be a reasonably recent model and is drive-by-wire. Although I'd like to think I'd have the presence of mind to kill the engine or throw it in neutral if there were any problems, until you're put in that situation it's really hard to know how you'd react.
"Seriously, what the fuck has that got to do with drive-by-wire versus mechanical? Try reading more than one word before replying if you don't want to broadcast what an utter fucking imbecile you are."
lol.. that was so venemous and uncalled for that it was funny.
Drive by wire is a product of two 'driving' forces - hybrid-drive technologies, increasing user interaction quality and feel, and more efficient and emission-friendly fully-computer controlled operation.
What should a gas pedal do? It is the device where the driver inputs the amount of acceleration desired from the engine. In an ideal system the amount of power delivered would be a linear progression through the range of the pedal, but that can't be achieved when the pedal actually controls the angle of a butterfly valve in the throttle body. It can be achieved elegantly when the pedal is interpreted by a computer as 'deliver this much power', and the engine management system complies.
In addition, with a 'direct pedal linkage', a mechanical component such as the throttle body is directly controlling airflow, and the computer has to 'react' to the input of the pedal, which is read indirectly with throttle position sensors and airflow sensors, and then computer detects with oxygen sensors how well it did in trying to inject the proper amount of fuel. With a by-wire system, all fuel and air inputs can be operated in tandem for efficient and clean combustion when the computer controls everything by wire and known combustion mapping tables.
With a hybrid, of course, the pedal won't be directly controlling the gasoline motor at all, the car could be running off electric, eh?
Car and Driver looked into how well a car could stop with the accelerator pinned, and at highway speeds it took only 80 extra feet to stop for a 540bhp Mustang. Less powerful cars had a smaller difference in stopping distances. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept In the end, the solution is to not panic, and have been trained in what to do in this particular crisis. I think this recall has caused many many people to think about what to do if they ever are stuck in a car with the throttle stuck, which is a good thing.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Even my SUV monstrosity drives fine without steering assistance. At highway speed you barely need to turn the wheel anyway and the effort would on par with holding a glass of water as opposed to driving with the pinkie.
Unintended acceleration is often caused by slipping or miscounting the number of steps on your ladder.
In 1981 or so I had wet snow from a 17 inch snowstorm pack up on the top of the engine of a 63 Valiant and block the mechanical throttle from returning via the return spring. It stayed stuck where I had last put it. So a "mechanical linkage between the throttle body and the pedal" is not fool proof. Not that I am a fool.
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Clearly, it is the Pioneer Effect.
I just read a little bit about the CAN protocol and it seems incredibly unlikely that there would be any way to accidentally inject a message onto the bus from a (random) noise source. I'm feeling a bit better about that now, but while digging for info I did read a completely unsubstantiated claim that the drive-by-wire setup in the toyotas at least uses a dual-rail potentiometer to sense the accelerators position.
If that's true, it sounds at least a little bit worrying. I know the dual-rail aspect provides some redundancy, but it probably wouldn't take much (a faulty air-con unit leaking a bit of dirty water onto the pot for example) to trigger a 100% reading.
I'm also wondering if there's a possibility of failure at the other end of the chain (eg. throttle butterfly mechanism sticking). If it happened on the actuator side rather than with the sensor, the ECU would probably have less of a chance of sensing (and correcting) the problem...
Anyway, who knows. It's all speculation without having access to the actual cars involved as well as their hardware and software specifications....
What about the TPS? or the ECU?
Is there a stepper motor that controls the throttle body?
If the ECU hit a fault it could somehow open the stepper motor and cause unwanted acceleration...
Problem Exists Between Petal And Chair
My money is on Modified Newtonian Dynamics...
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
"what are these cars doing with such massive embedded systems in them?"
They must be running Microsoft software:
http://www.microsoft.com/auto/default.mspx
I am pretty sure millions of lines code also include navigation, radio and other non-critical systems.
You can steer and brake the the car without the power assist, you just need to put more force into it. The parking brake isn't going to do much for you.
It's also usual for cars these days to come equipped with ABS. ABS has the job of preventing the wheels from locking up while stopping, which may be going against the driver's wishes in these cases.
Also, while most cars should have brakes that can overpower the engine, that may not be the case if they are applied progressively and allowed to heat up excessively before they are fully applied. It can take surprisingly little work to trigger a case of brake fade in a road car, and it doesn't seem unreasonable that this could happen in the circumstances described.
There is a REAL easy solution here.
Every care I have ever driven has a steering real that automatically "locks" if the key turns the engine off. This is presumably a security "feature". I am not sure how many potential car thefts this has prevented.
Anyway, if someone could simply turn the key, and turn the engine off, and maintain steering (abit ArmStrong steering and not power), the problem is solved. So long as the car is moving, no power steering shouldn't matter anyway. As someone grew up using standard steering, it was only a pain in the ass when you were stopped, for parking or something.
Of course this might shut down the breaks as well. Perhaps these guys need to make Redundant/Secondary/Axillary systems not dependent on power.
Either that or attach an Anchor and chain to the frame, and just have a button to "Drop Anchor"...
When at a stop while driving uphill a common technique is to use the left foot to control the brake and the right to control the throttle. When the light changes to green, you don't let off the brake until the throttle has been opened sufficiently to prevent the car from rolling backwards. If you don't use this technique then, when you lift your foot from the brake, the car rolls backwards! Note that this is done only in this particular circumstance and that, in general, it is dangerous to drive using both feet. This is a rare instance where it is unsafe to drive without using both feet.
With the proposed modified software, this will no longer be possible. So on a hillside stop your car may roll backward into following cars because any brake pedal pressure whatsoever will reduce throttle to 0. What is worse, pedestrians skipping between cars may be crushed. Please convince me I am wrong.
There are advantages to the "analog" feedback present in the drivetrain of older cars that lack software control.
The normal footbrakes work just fine without vacuum assist - it's not like they suddenly cease to function, you just don't get a boost from the engine so you have to push a bit harder with your foot is all.
I also drove a car with no PAS for many years (quite a heavy one in fact). PAS as standard equipment on cars is a relatively new phenomenon - people were manhandling vehicles without it for years. With the car moving forward you will barely notice the PAS pump has stopped unless you really pull hard on the wheel.
As several people have pointed out, people have been driving heavy cars without PAS for a long time, and even if it fails on you, the faster the car is moving the easier it is to steer. I bet you would be totally unable to determine whether the assist was working at highway speeds.
(and yes, I did drive a non-assisted car for nearly 10 years).
Obviously, not One of the Design Engineers at ANY of the Auto manufacturers thought to require an FAA Quality Controller that had gone through infinitely more rigorous testing than the proven long term reliability and cost effectiveness of the last generations of throttle cables had. Plus, to add insult to injury, when a cable Would Break all throttle bodies would close because of their redundant springs.
Just another case of an Engineer being let loose without any common sense safeguards.
but nobody noticed.
The answer is simple....Magnetic's
now where do I pickup my $1M?
The problem was introduced when software was inserted between the driver and the throttle. The amount of code and it's dependency on external sensors means that it is virtually impossible to test all possible scenarios - i.e. there are bugs in the code that can remain undetected right up to the point where the computer goes batshit and drives the poor passengers off a cliff.
If you really, really want to eliminate the software as a source of the problem, go back to a direct linkage between pedal and throttle - no more drive-by-wire.
The simple answer is: The reason for unintended accleration is the first idiot who decided to put electronics between the accelerator and the engine. This is by far the stupidest design decision I have ever witnesssed. S/he and everyone else who have participated in this moronic scam should be jailed for manslaughter or murder. IMHO There should be no "fly by wire" in any automobile ever. PERIOD!
The website is sort of flaky, not even having a real setup yet for this contest, or whatever, and very unclear too about what the rules are (right now, none) as well, what are you supposed to describe, the problem toyota had or the problem that people complain about the pedal getting stuck or what???
Talk about just getting people to go on your website for no reason, other then maybe to download the latest malware....???
Automatic transmissions make people stupid. They train people on the idea that "gas means go" and "brake means stop" without giving them the tools (mental and mechanical) to deal with exceptional situations.
GM looked like tools up until Toyota claimed that distinction.
People often have difficulty in panic situations. Some drivers use both feet.
It seemed to be pretty well settled that the problem with the Audi 5000's in the 1980's was due to placement of the pedal cluster. In these cars, the gas and brake pedals were shifted left relative to their location in typical, large American autos. Investigators had found that in many cases the gas pedals were bent out of shape and the air-conditioning cut-off switch under the pedal broken - and the driver saying "I was pressing as hard as I could on the pedal and it kept going faster!" There was some finding that most of the drivers in the accidents had their first Audi, within six months of ownership, and had previously driven a large American car.
So the problem was ergonomic, and Audi did a terrible job handling the complaints and addressing the issue. Their sales tanked for a decade.
By the way, Car and Driver magazine did a test at the time and demonstrated that braking "horsepower" is always higher than engine output, assuming the brakes work. They did several tests where they took cars up to 60mph and then held the accelerator down while braking. In every case the car came to a stop - eventually.
well, that particular model _might_, but my wife's Toyota, with a similar ratcheting foot e-brake, certainly doesn't.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Perfect riposte to my claim that only Ford make safe cars and all Fords are safe. Except that isn't what I said at all. In fact it isn't remotely like it, is it?
What you did however claim was that mechanical devices fail in 'safer, more predictable' ways than electronics, and indeed the Ford Pinto is a good counterargument to this, though I'm sure there are many more, such as the Ford / Goodyear problems a few years back, which also had nothing to do with drive-by-wire. You remain wrong, sorry. There have been so many mechnical problems with cars that have killed people in horrible unpredictable ways, while in contrast these drive-by-wire acceleration problems are so incredibly rare that they seem almost impossible to duplicate --- you are dissing drive-by-wire, but the fact is drive-by-wire has a fairly decent track record so far as compared to mechanical failure.
because, see, people are really talking about unintended acceleration, and in this particular branch of discussion, about the problems which would be caused by some proposed solutions. Car or truck doesn't matter, simply killing engine power when the brake is pressed causes problems.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
.... one to open the throttle and the other to close it. The idea has been used on motorcycles for many years. The all new BMW S1000 RR has a throttle by wire system -- where the throttle plate position is controlled by a computer in response to the rider's throttle hand -- but the second cable is still connected directly to the throttle plates and will override the computer to close them. This could be done in a cage (car) by putting a little intelligence in the throttle pedal that recognizes when the drivers foot is off the pedal which would cause the pedal to return to full up -- and pull on the second cable. As a side benefit, a sensor in the pedal could be an input to a data recorder, which could provide data about how many of these incidents are caused by driver error.
This is a bunch of nonsense, there is no need for any electronics in vehicles, especially drive by wire nonsense. Personally I have issue of a stuck throttle. Drivers side motor mount broke, engine came up and since the throttle linkage was mechanical (bar with pivot, similar to a z-bar on a clutch) the throttle went wide open adn stayed there due to the engine torquing away with a broken motor mount. It took me under a second to fix the problem, just turn the key off. The car had power steering at the time and it's no big deal for any healthy person to steer a car with power steering without the engine running when rolling down the road.
Simple fix, I converted the car to a standard cable throttle linkage and replaced the broken motor mount. With a cable the throttle will not open any more than idle in the event of a motor mount failure... Which is why they changed to cable throttle linkages in the early 60's and they're used then for decades with no trouble whatsoever. Personally I only drive older carbureted vehicles with no computers. They always start and always get me where I need to go safely.
I had an '81 Honda Civic that where the engine would occasionally take off running when I started it. But it had a manual transmission. I just pushed in the clutch, no uncontrolled acceleration.
Parking brakes are not emergency brakes as they are sometimes called. Using your parking brake to try to slow down a speeding car is the stupidest thing a person can do. It will result in losing control of your car and injuring yourself and/or other motorists.
the reason for "the cause of unintended acceleration"
is drunkenness. with all that ethanol going into the car,
i'd get light-headed too.
STOP making the cars DRUNK!
NO THEY AREN'T!!! How about not bothering to post unless you understand the concept in question???
At high speeds, steering without power assistance should be easy. It's only really at low speeds that power assistance is needed. Nearly all modern power assisted steering systems assist a lot less at high speeds than low speeds.
Ok, I'll take the blame. I did it. Now, please send me that $1M.
Ummm... this doesn't really make me financially responsible does it, cause otherwise that $1M might not go too far.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
And it is _not_ cut power to the engine when the brakes are used (which could cause unexpected changes in handling which might result in a net increase in accidents).
The solution is: A big, red, EPO button in every car!
Also good for electrical fires.
When in danger, fear, or doubt,
press Emergency Power (Off)/Out!
Of course, validating the winning explanation is the problem since the heretical Enlightenment placed barbaric experimentation over civilized argumentation.
Seastead this.
In addition to the human factors issues and plain old engineering common sense, here's some other things that would help mitigate the unintended acceleration problem. Maybe we don't have to do all of them, but one or two of the less expensive options might be practical and still save some lives.
1. watchdog circuit. there should be a separately engineered CPU and sensor system that just sits around making sure that the ECU is up and running, that's it responding to brake and throttle inputs sensibly, that the airflow through the intake (separately reported from the MAF) is in the right ballpark, engine speed is sensible given throttle opening, gear, and vehicle speed, and that the throttle servo is acting mostly linear and in a timely fashion to inputs, and that the user inputs are sensible given the velocity of the car. Any problems found should return the throttle to idle. if the throttle does not return to idle (based on MAF and engine speed) then cut off ignition. If that doesn't do it, cut off fuel. These cut-offs should be separate circuits and relays from normal operation. As I've described it, this is expensive, but a more modest system that monitors only throttle, brake, engine speed and only cuts off spark would still be helpful.
2. Full or nearly full throttle for more than 15 seconds is probably bad input. Sporty cars could have a competition mode button and low-power cars maybe 20 or 30 seconds is more sensible. Similar to this, nearly full throttle with no dither is a bad sign, as is nearly full throttle plus other input like shifting between auto and manual mode or attempts to downshift into redline or repeated quick up or downshift commands. This would probably be part of the normal ECU rather than a separate circuit. Additionally, the gas pedal should not report 0-100%, but more like 0-95% and then a little extra push to get it to 95-100%. The purpose being that a floor mat or other soft object will probably (though not for sure) only wedge the pedal with limited force, only enough to get to the detent. If the pedal *stays* at the detent (or other fixed position) for too long and the driver does not push past it (an act that would take intent) or back off then there is a very good chance of interference.
3. Linearity. Many manufacturers seem to be using throttle-by-wire to make it so that the throttle opens up faster in response to light pedal pressure and slower towards the end of the pedal travel. This gives a test drive impression of more power and torque than is actually there. However accidental input that just lightly presses the pedal now brings on almost the full force of the engine, giving the driver less time to react to the situation. Somewhat related, some recent automatic transmissions seem to have a high stall but a quick lockup. Again, this presents the illusion of more power earlier, but can surprise a driver. (I have personaly observed both of these problems in my own 2009 vehicle. It is just way too eager to get going).
4. Automatics in manual mode have hard stops for up and down shifts. Instead, they should have substantial detents that are used for normal up-down shifting (so that in normal usage they act the same as they do now) but when pressed beyond the detent the transmission shifts to neutral and engine power is cut. This is a mechanically simple thing and could inexpensively be a separate control circuit.
5. Why on earth do cars allow full throttle in reverse, neutral or park? I can see someone using it when stuck in snow or shallow sand, but this should not be normal operation and in non-forward gears, power should be limited unless specifically requested or as part of turning off traction control or only enabled when traction control detects snow or sand situations itself. Here's the subtle part. I don't just mean that the car should limit RPM while in reverse, neutral or park. That would be short sighted. I mean that plus the car should detect that something is wrong and not just resume full throttle the instant they
That's a good way to see if your clutch is bad, but a dumb way to see if your parking brake is good. Instead they should have been accelerating to 5 mph and be sure the emergency brake would stop the car in X feet.
What model Land Rover is that? Under what conditions will it lock out of neutral? is there a certain speed over which it wont allow it, or is it RPM based? It seems strange behaviour, are you sure it isn't a fault with your particular vehicle?
There is an in-depth explanation of why this is unlikely further up in this thread, but basically, a decent DBW system is very redundant, with multiple sensors compared and any variance causing a limp condition. Furthermore, the angle of the throttle plate itself and the volume of air coming by the MAF sensor is compared and again, if the values are implausible, the car goes into limp mode.
>On many vehicles the brakes can not stop a vehicle in this situation
For a basic reality check - have you *ever* seen published performance specifications or test results for any vehicle where the stopping distance from 60mph(100km/h) was more than 200 feet(60m)? No? Me neither.
To stop a 2-ton vehicle from 60 mph in 200 feet takes about 400 horsepower. If the brakes can apply the equivalent of 400HP to the wheels (actually more, since the stopping distance has friction with the road as a limiting factor), then the car *will* slow down when you press on the brake, regardless of the power being output by the engine. The braking force varies with speed, but not enough to matter for this calculation.
Of course, if your engine is racing at full throttle putting out 200 horsepower, and you're already doing 60 mph, it'll take longer than usual to stop - on the order of 10 seconds, rather than 4 seconds. If you wait until you've reached 120 mph before you decide to stand on the brake, it'll take 40 seconds to stop, and a distance of over 1/2 mile. I could see that being a problem, particularly with a panicking driver...
... which all seems incredibly complicated for something that replaces a piece of cable and a spring. Unfortunately, 'complicated' can lead to wierd boundary cases which can lead to potential failure. I'm afraid I just don't see the need.
That cable and spring might be simple, but it is far from reliable. There are countless people in this *very* thread that have had a throttle cable malfunction in a dangerous manner. It's yet to be proven that there are that many people in the entire country over the last 10 years, that have had a DBW system malfunction dangerously.
Well, I'd tell you but I just submitted it to Edmunds, I'll let ya'll know how the water feels in the Bahamas, where I'll be spending my retirement...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Not really, unless modern cars have some kind of electromagical fuel tanks that are somehow more resistant to collision. That was the problem with the Pinto, right? Fuck all to do with the throttle, brakes or transmission.
Umm, you mean it did have.
You're comparing one software error to all mechanical failures?
Looks like you're another one who can't read. I chose the Ford Escort as an example of an old mechanical car, probably because it was the first that came into my head, and that's probably because I used to own one back in the day. As far as I'm aware, it isn't the same as a Pinto so any mention of that is totally irrelevant. Certainly it hadn't exploded in the 15 years it was around before I bought it, and it didn't one year later when some piss artist rear ended it at a red light.
Just as well I didn't mention my pal's Opel Manta that crashed due to a faulty carbon unit. You'd probably be wittering about chemistry.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alcohol?
That's hilarious - you accuse me of hand waving, and link to a post that contains you doing exactly that - mentioning various factors that *you assume* might come into play, but nothing in the way of actual data or calculations. I see in another thread where you also ignored the test that Car & Driver did which showed that of 3 cars they tested (including one of Toyota's recalled models), all were able to stop from 100MPH with the engine at full throttle.
Since you claim in your other post that people are ignoring other factors (and provide a nice list of them) why not enlighten us with your knowledge? I'd be perfectly happy to post the spreadsheet I used for my calculations up on Google Docs, if you wanted to take a look at it.