Slashdot Mirror
Driver Trapped In Speeding Car At 125 Mph
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Guardian reports that Frank Lecerf was driving his Renault Laguna in Northern France when the car's speed jammed at 60mph. Then each time he tried to brake, the car accelerated, eventually reaching 125mph and sticking there. While uncontrollably speeding through the fast lane as other cars swerved out of his way, he managed to call emergency services who immediately dispatched a platoon of police cars. Realizing Lecerf had no choice but to keep racing along until his fuel ran out, they escorted him at high speed across almost 125 miles of French motorway, past Calais and Dunkirk, and over the Belgian border. After about an hour, Lecerf's tank spluttered empty and he managed to swerve into a ditch in Alveringem in Belgium, about 125 miles from his home. 'My life flashed before me,' says Lecerf. 'I just wanted it to stop.' His lawyer says Lecerf will file a legal complaint over 'endangerment of a person's life.'"
Glad nobody got hurt.
Turn it to "off" and the engine will lose power. The car will stop. Also, you can shift it in to neutral. Might not be the best for the engine at high RPMs, but it'll do the trick.
Seriously, I have trouble believing these "My car is stuck going fast and can't stop!" stories are anything other than failure to understand how to operate your vehicle.
I'm wondering if this should happen, wouldn't it be easier to turn off the ignition while the car is in motion or has that been removed as a 'safety feature'
why swerve into a ditch when it run outta gas?
And this car didn't allow it to be shut off or to be shifted into neutral to release power to the wheels? Swerving through traffic gaining speed was the answer?
Glad he didn't have a full tank or he might have broken orbit by now ...
Rubbish electrics, bound to happen.
Apparently French cars don't have ignition switches. Or gear shifts.
Do they make a car where you cant either turn the key off, or shift it into neutral or just pull up the emergency brake??? Also, if he was already stuck going 125 by the time he got ahold of the police, how did they ever catch him?? Im suspicious of this whole story.
I guess Renault Laguna don't include an ignition key as standard? I might have wanted to turn off the engine is the circumstances described.
Car wouldnt let him put it in Neutral, or Remove his keys? sure at 125 that would be dangerous, but so is driving at 125 in the first place, and he'd still have breaks, though they wouldnt be powered, and an E-Brake...
Or do modern cars not have ignition keys nowadays.
The most modern car I've ever driven is a 2002 Holden commodore, so I'm guessing the technology may have progressed a bit since.
The article mentioned that the car was adapted with controls for people with disabilities (probably hand controls for the accelerator and brakes).
Not only would this kind of modification introduce another point of failure in the system, the hand controls were probably not debugged and tested to the same degree as the traditional ones.
Change gears down. It's called engine braking. Change to a lower gear and your engine will either explode, or it will slow down. Either way, you'll stop.
Or how about the handbrake? You may skid, yes, but you will also slow down.
Got an ignition switch? Turn it off.
Got keys in the ignition? Take them out.
ProTip! if you're keen for a joy-ride, call the police first and pretend your car's gone crazy. Not only do you get to legitimately drive faster than you've ever driven before, but the police will also clear the roads for you.
Result!
If you're heading east at 125 miles per hour, and there's a police station 75 miles east of you, can the police from that station ever catch you, even if they take a 15 minute donut break?
The apparent inability to otherwise change gears in the car or turn it off sounds a bit more concerning. That would be pretty standard advice from the guy on the other end of 999/911.
Removing the key on my last car disabled the power steering and engaged the steering lock so probably not a good idea, however transmission to neutral should do the trick.
Sometimes you donâ(TM)t need to read the article....
Automatics still have a neutral gear. Most people don't use it, so I can understand a driver in a panic situation not thinking of it, but I would expect he would try it when stuck in that situation for an hour.
The engine transfers power through the transmission to the wheels. Disengage the transmission from the wheels by putting it in neutral.
The most exotic transmission I can think of is a CVT transmission. But can't that be put into neutral too?
I can buy that, in panic mode, a driver might be temporarily reacting to strange events and not thinking clearly. If you're still clueless how to shut the engine off with the key after an hour or so of driving, well, your cull is necessary for the betterment of the breeding pool. Can you say "Lawyer Up!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I've read elsewhere that his car was modified because he had a disability which explains all the problems with controls.
I assume that it has something to do with the modifications made to accommodate whatever disability he had, but why couldn't he shut off the engine? Is there something else in modern cars that prevent you from turning it off?
In an ignition system which requires a key to be inserted, you can just turn the key back to shut off the engine, as long as you are careful not to turn it all the way back and lock your steering wheel. I haven't tried it myself, but a driving instructor taught me this about 16 years ago.
All of them have an "N" setting that I've seen. It disengages the engine from the wheels. You'd need it for towing and so on.
TFS mentions that he crossed the border into Belgium. How does cross-border highway police jurisdiction work in Europe? Can the French cops follow him across, or do they have to call ahead and have Belgian cops waiting to take over?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Details Missing from the quoted article is this bit:
The Frenchman, who suffers from epilepsy and drives a specially-modified car that has controls on the steering wheel to operate the throttle and brake, has filed a legal complaint against the vehicle's manufacturer.
Source here.
Unless Renault did these modifications for him, I doubt he has a chance in hell of winning his suit.
I've never seen a car you couldn't force into Neutral even under heavy acceleration.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Because you missed the "adapted for disabled drivers" and "wasn't the first time the speed dial jammed".
Clearly not a stock Renault.
This is a car adapted for disabled people. RTFA before saying "hey, just do something."
But the article don't say what are the change from a regular car.
Yes, there are cars with no keys to turn off... Cars with automatic shifting gears that won't move to neutral unless the car is stop. And at 200km/h I wouldn't pull the emergency brake!!!!! Regarding the police catching him, I would say it's very easy, you know the police doesn't have to enter the highway in the same place the guy did?!?! It could easily be the guy catching up the police :p
According to TFA, his car is modified to accommodate a disability. It doesn't say what kind of disability, or what kind of modifications were made, but I wouldn't doubt that it has some other electronic way to control acceleration/deceleration.
125 miles of French motorway, past Calais and Dunkirk, and over the Belgian border.
'My life flashed before me,' says Lecerf. 'I just wanted it to stop.'
My, if a car were taking me at high speed to Belgium, I'd be scared to death, too.
Ezekiel 23:20
This was not a stock car. It had been modified for a "disabled" person who also had epileptic seizures. We don't know exactly HOW it was modified from the articles, but it could have hand controls and other things that really have nothing to do with a "normal" car and could have contributed to the problems.
It might also explain why he might have been unable or incapable of turning off the car or putting it into neutral.
I've never heard of a car that can't be switched to neutral while in drive.
(I used to do this occasionally going down an empty road (4 car/hr tops) on a steep hill. Usually got up to 35, which was enough to coast all the way to the stop sign at the top of a smaller hill.)
There's a possibility he didn't have one.
The Laguna featured a 'keyless' ignition system which, instead of a key, used a credit card style device to unlock the car and start the engine. -Wikipedia
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Also, if he was already stuck going 125 by the time he got ahold of the police, how did they ever catch him??
Simple, they just dispatch the police from the station where he is GOING TO BE instead of where he was. Besides, nothing is preventing the cops from doing 130 or even 150mph to catch up to him.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This song seems appropriate.
Has he not heard of Neutral. He could shift the car and pull off the road.
Pulling the emergency brake at 125 MPH is a REALLY bad idea. So is turning off the engine with the key, which locks the steering wheel. Shifting the car into neutral is the way to go.
While my sister was in the car as well. It was in an old car, too; mid-80 manufacture. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
What happened was this:
- The physical brake cable broke while on the highway
- The cable snapped around and managed to latch on to the throttle body, forcing the engine into maximum acceleration. Both pedals unresponsive.
This car was a manual, though, and the clutch still operated... so as he passed ~90 mph, he took it into neutral, which had the side effect of redlining the engine. The car was then shut off and coasted to a stop. No harm done, except to nerves. The mechanic had never seen anything like it before or since.
We didn't pursue a lawsuit.
A similar thing happened to me a few years ago in my father's ML 320. I had it on cruise control and hitting the brakes caused the engine to rev faster (it turned out it was a problem with the "brake light sensor" which meant the computer didn't know that you had applied the brakes, so the engine was compensating to maintain the cruise speed). By repeatedly tapping the brakes, the cruise controlled was deactivated. Once in a Ford Falcon '93 station wagon (my father's also) the brakes would just not work. Repeatedly jumping on the brake pedal made the car stop - I was later told the ABS system had failed. I believe all cars have similar fail-safe systems where tapping the brakes a number of times in quick succession can disable other systems such as ABS.
From the article -
"Lecerf has filed a legal complaint after his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers..."
(emphasis added)
One might infer from the article that the car is not factory stock, or that the driver isn't fully functional within the vehicle. Perhaps reading the vehicle's onboard computer will give some answers.
So after the latest Dice ad, I finally created an account on Reddit, and already read about this story there. Now I understand all the posts about Slashdot always being the last to the party. Can anyone recommend the best subreddits to subscribe to when trying to replace Slashdot news?
The Laguna has a computer-controlled semi-automatic parking brake; you can manually engage it when you're stopping the vehicle, of course, but it does more than that. It's designed to activate and de-activate for hill starts, eliminating the need for manual handbrake starts. That's not a bad idea, in my opinion, as the number of drivers in manual cars who roll back when the lights change is *staggering*, but unfortunately the computer appears to block use of the parking brake when in motion...
...the article addressed them (if you read between the lines).
The car was modified for disabled use and was apparently all-electronic control, including start/stop, gear, power, and brake. "Braking" accelerated the car from 100 km/hr to 200 km/hr. As I imagine the driver was familiar with the car, he may have tried using the other electronic controls--although after "braking" doubled his speed I imagine he was reluctant to do so for fear of what would actually happen. This is further supported by a Renault tech being in contact with the police who couldn't suggest anything more for the driver to do besides wait for fuel exhaustion.
The headline and summary is missing vital information: the car has been modified for disabled drivers. Hugh Pickens and Timothy have both practiced bad journalism/editorialism by bringing this article to Slashdot and hiding important facts within the summary.
Suggestions to shift to neutral, stop the engine and so forth are uninformed as the severity of the modifications are as yet unknown (not published).
The strangest things about this mythical story is that Renault is an anagram of Neutral.
The same thing happened to a driver in Oz awhile back.
Modern cars contain numerous independent systems which communicate using an internal bus. If one of those systems fails in a way such that it floods the bus with packets, no other system can get a message through.
If you happen to be on cruise-control at that time, there may be no way out of it. The signals from the steering-wheel computer [buttons] or brake won't get to the computer.
Here's some info that came from the Oz incident:
1) Modern cars don't have a direct key-switch - the computer starts and stops the engine. Turning the engine off is not guaranteed to stop the car. (This was tried in the Oz case.)
2) Some cars do not have direct shift capability; ie - it's "shift by wire": the shifter tells the computer what gear to be in. (Admittedly, I've never seen one, don't know if it's true.)
3) A driver is not strong enough to stop the car against the engine, especially since the engine can down-shift to get more power. Some "mythbusters"-style experimenters disagree with this statement, but their conclusions don't track with these incidents. Also, consider that the driver may be female, young, elderly, out-of-shape and otherwise incapable of braking with the full force of an "average" human driver.
I used to write the software for aircraft instruments, and one thing the hardware should always do is "fail safe". If you have a remote sensor such as a switch, in this case the brake light switch, you always have some mechanism to determine whether the wire is broken. If the remote sensor is on a communication bus, you always look for a "heartbeat" packet saying that the remote sensor is working properly. If something fails, the default action is to go out of cruise-control.
Car software is not safety certified (as aircraft systems are), and perhaps they should be. This will become more important as cars get smarter, and will be critical for self-driving cars.
Shift the car out of gear.
Sure the engine will race, but you'll lose speed quickly from drag.
Then get the car company to buy you another car or face a PR nightmare.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21462360 Self-driving car given UK test run at Oxford University...
As the AC above points out, they are testing self-driving cars at Oxford University.
Or as I like to call them "pedestrian and cyclist killing machines of death".
At least they don't run on horsemeat.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If I were speeding out of control, I'd rip that fucking "key" out of the dashboard in no time flat, slam the fucking tranny into neutral, reverse, etc ... leaving the fucker in peices on the road, and lastly, if none of that worked, steered for the nearest haystack I could find or swerved around, reduced speed and then into a field somewhere where the car would bog down to the point where it would stall.
If it happened to me and I couldn't turn it off I would start ripping out every fuse and relay I could get my hands on, one of them would be bound to kill it - I think.
Since I always drive stick shifts I would throw it into neutral, engine explosion hazard or not. Considering this thing is modified for his handicap I understand not everything I think of would be feasible. I had a difficult time driving a car modified for a paraplegic. I wasn't used to the hand controls and my feet got tangled in the pedal pressers when I tried to drive it normally.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
What car doesn't have one?
Idiot of the day...PUT THE GOD-DAMNED THING IN NEUTRAL!!! The rev-limiter will keep your engine from blowing up. Come to a stop, and turn the effing thing off!
Put her in neutral and get parked as soon as possible. pop the hood and pull all your spark plug wires. Thats the quickest way i can think of to prevent perminant damage. you could also i suppose cut the power line to your fuel pump... but then youd have to have a cutting tool.
man, Who ever thought up electronically controlled throttles? What a dumb idea. You dont need to electronicly control EVERYTHING!
Had there still been border controls between France and Belgium, that driver would be dead now.
A Renault engineer got on the phone with the guy and walked him through various attempts to stop the car, stop the engine, go into neutral, etc. I would hazard a guess that the engineer had him try anything considered safe (don't want to accidentally lock the steering wheel at that speed).
If the computer were sending commands to disengage the throttle but there was a mechanical problem or a bug in an electronic component the engine simply may not have responded to the command. Depending on the transmission design, at max throttle it may have refused or been unable to disengage and slide into neutral either.
I think this sort of thing highlights how important it is to have an alternate emergency cutoff, one not dependent on the electronic control systems. Something like a secondary switch contact in the on/off button that if held down for 15 seconds automatically cuts power to the fuel pump with a simple, dumb electronic relay circuit.
Of course if you've ever looked at the "security" or "design" of these in-car networks (CANBUS, etc) then you realize how awful they are. Think along the lines of your average cable company DVR. They are full of holes - eg a radio that had a bluetooth stack full of buffer overruns, allowing you to hijack its CPU, which cross-connected various supposedly segmented busses, giving you remote access to the ECU. The demo I saw just rolled the windows down or remotely flash the headlights, but you could certainly stop the engine, turn off traction control, unrecoverably crash the ECU, etc.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
If he is epileptic he should never be allowed to drive. French nuf said
WTF is it with all this fail engineering? The wheel locks when you PULL THE KEY OUT, not when you turn off the engine.
They did not catch him but speeded ahead of him. Figure their cop cars do at least 140MPH. Often times they have Porsches and the likes to be able to keep up.
If he was only driving a Tesla Model S he would have ran out of fuel in no time.
Damn you fossil fuel vehicles!
Cars with automatic shifting gears that won't move to neutral unless the car is stop.
Please, name one car that won't allow you to switch to neutral when in motion?
Is his disability being an idiot that can't find a way to stop a car?
WTF is a hypermarket?! It sounds awesome.
Do they make a car where you cant either turn the key off, or shift it into neutral or just pull up the emergency brake???
Also, if he was already stuck going 125 by the time he got ahold of the police, how did they ever catch him??
Im suspicious of this whole story.
That car model, the Renault Laguna, is especially made to be modded for disabled people. I don't know what kind of disability the driver has (the article doesn't say, although he did have two epileptic seizures because of and during the hectic drive).
According to the original article in French. The car only reached 125 miles per hour near the end of the journey.
Plus, I don't think it's a matter of catching up to him as much as it was a matter of waiting for him. They opened three toll booths for him. And the cops/poulets* used a supped-up Renault Megane to keep up with him (for how long it kept up, the article doesn't say).
note * Poulet means chicken in French. It's what we say casually when we say 'cops'. The word chicken in French doesn't have any of the same negative connotations that the same word has in English so it's ok to use. If you're an American visiting France and if you want to blend in, "poulet" is the word you should use when talking to a cop in France.
When i was going to sell my Citroen C2 1.4l 75 CV to a car dealer (to buy a Daihatsu terios 4wd), the car dealer said me: "oh shit! French electronics..."
Before knowing i had some electronics problems... (btw that engine is around since the 80s-90s)
I doubt there would be any easy access to the fuses from inside the cockpit. These are more often placed under the hood, and if you looked under the hood of a brand new vehicle, you see that there is a a solid wall of plastic with almost nothing user accessible. I'm fairly sure a least one recent car model doesn't even have an oil cap visible under the hood.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
That assumes either the gear shift is mechanically connected to the transmission, or the onboard computer which is currently making you accelerate actually responds when you change the gearshift and attempts to move to neutral, and it doesn't have software telling it not to move to neutral if the rpms are over a certain speed.
Yeah yeah, it "happened" to him 3 times and his driving license was cancelled since 2004 over speeding tickets. But sure, this is the car manufacturer fault if your modified car (gas and brake operated from the steering wheel) has a strange behavior.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Mine won't, if the engine is under heavy acceleration.
TrÃs drÃle. Next you'll tell the poor Americans to address the police as 'flics'.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Actually with most automatics you still should not tow them even in neutral as part of the transmission is still engaged. Sometimes it is considered okay to tow at very low speeds over very short distances.
Seriously
I don't know why manufacturers of modern computer controlled cars don't simply install a kill switch, either disconnecting the ignition like a motorcycle does, or mechanically shut off the fuel supply with a solenoid.
Hit the kill switch, engine stops. You still have all electrical power and control so just roll to the side of the road.
Solenoids to control shut off fuel are not even novel, my early 80s car has a solenoid to shut down the fuel supply at the carburettor when you turn off the key (anti run-on).
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Maybe the onboard computer had a
(puts Sunnglasses on)
race condition.
Eeaaaaaaayy
note * Poulet means chicken in French. It's what we say casually when we say 'cops'. The word chicken in French doesn't have any of the same negative connotations that the same word has in English so it's ok to use. If you're an American visiting France and if you want to blend in, "poulet" is the word you should use when talking to a cop in France.
Thankyou for that helpful tip. Over here we use Pig not Chicken. If you want to be respectful, use the full title, Muthafookin Pig.
We've seen this before.
There are practical and survivable methods to stop a car in this condition, including one I have personally used: veering onto the berm and applying the handbrake. Once there, the vehicle won't accelerate because the tires on the drive wheels, spinning with so much torque, will not gain purchase on the grass. It's analogous to releasing the clutch at high RPM on slippery roads.
But if we assume that's impossible for whatever reason, I've never seen an automatic transmission that wouldn't let you shift into neutral at speed.
I know this all too well.
Stupid, Slashdot.
http://dailytech.com/Mounting+Evidence+Casts+Doubt+on+Driver+in+Recent+Runaway+Prius+Incident/article17892.htm
Both Toyota and Audi have been accused of this before. In both cases, the DOT determined that the cars were not at fault. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/its-all-your-fault-the-dot-renders-its-verdict-on-toyotas-unintended-acceleration-scare-feature Car & Driver published a How To Deal With Unintended Acceleration in December, 2009 which involved testing cars, including a 540 HP Mustang which was able to be stopped in under 1,000 feet from 100 MPH with the accelerator held continuously to the floor. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-deal-with-unintended-acceleration
Look at the article linked in the /. post:
"Lecerf said that it wasn't the first time his speed dial had jammed but that Renault had looked at the car and assured him that it was fine."
Isn't this a dupe? Exactly the same thing was reported on /. a couple of years ago (just before Toyota's sudden-acceleration debacle), involving again a Frenchman driving a Renault.
Guess that The Guardian is as reliable as ever...
Yep, even cars with a CVT (such as the Prius, which also uses push-button start on many models) have a neutral "gear".
The problem is that the shifter control is electronic, not physical. I mean, there's a physical thing that you push around, but the actual control to the transmission is an electronic signal and must be interpreted by the car's computer. Given that the computer apparently was under the impression that "brake" meant "speed up", this message may not have worked.
Of course, that's weird in and of itself. On every production car I've ever seen, no matter how much electronics it has, the brake pedal *does* have a physical linkage to the calipers. You can use it when the car is completely turned off, in fact, though you have to push pretty hard once the power braking assist goes away. You won't get traction control and such in that state either, but it doesn't matter - the car will stop. The brakes should also be more powerful than the engine (especially on a car that tops out at 125MPH) so you should be able to stop even with the enging revving and in gear (this might cause the engine to stall at that speed, but that's perfectly OK in this situation even if the transmission might not like it).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Except on his car, with the hand controls, brakes are directly activated, even if running through some ABS nonsense. Even a Bugatti Veyron (1200 BHP) doesn't have enough power to overcome the brakes, when fully applied; press the throttle and brakes full on the car will stop, it will just take longer. Your straw-man drivers are also unlikely to be driveing a 1200 BHP car, and it does not take much braking power to overcome a 200 BHP engine. There is NOT "always more power"; an engine only has, within a few percent, what the manufacturer rates it to have.
Hand controls, OTOH require servo activation, not just assist, and if the servo electronics get confused, you may well need an assist
Let's see - which might be more valuable: the car, or your life? Put the car in neutral and let the engine blow up (or sit at it's rev limit).
How accessible was the fuse panel?
Mine is an 05, so granted not the newest thing available, but not ancient, it has two of those panels I can reach.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I know that, as a community, most of us do not RTFA before posting, but the amount of stupidity on display for this particular article is just amazing.
1) it's BRAKE, not break.
2) it's STEEL, not steal (as in a cable)
3) modern cars do NOT have keys, so you can not simply just turn it to the ACC or OFF position because there is no such thing
4) computers, which most of us love, control almost every function of a modern car, including what gear you are in, whether the engine is running or not, so on and so forth. if the computers are crashed/bugged out/in a loop/one of a million bugs came to the surface, the driver loses control over what the car can and can not do.
I've come to the conclusion that no one on this site can spell correctly AND no one here drives or has even heard of a modern car's features. I have no solution to the spelling part, but for the love of Jebus, watch a car show once in awhile. I suggest Top Gear (the original UK version, not the crappy US version). You will learn a lot about cars from that show, technology-wise. This is a tech site, right? Keep up on current (car) technology, you noobs.
First, the brakes are always strong enough to stop the car. Basic safety feature. Things may break though if you are on the gas at the same time. Second, whether manual or automatic, you can always put it in neutral, even if it may require some force and, again, you may break things. Again, basic safety feature.
This guy risked his life out of stupidity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Back in the day I had an RX7 that was prone to flooding. I got pretty good at pulling the fuel injector fuse, starting it and plugging it back in before the car stalled. If you had an extra few hundred bucks laying around you could also install a switch that would cut the power to the injectors from the dash. That might not be a bad idea on some of these newfangled cars -- a toggle switch with a direct method of killing the engine with no computers in the way. The RX7 also had a throttle that was prone to sticking, but it was pretty easy to pop it into neutral, pull to the side, turn off the engine, pop the hood and hose down the throttle assembly with silicone lubricant whenever that happened (That was a VERY fun car to drive!)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
we'll see with "self" driving cars. Anyone care to speculate?
Stuck throttle my ass.
It's not like he couldn't take it out of gear and stop the car.
These people are just looking for a cheap thrill.
If the engine if off you also disable power steering and power braking. In addition some cars actually lock the steering wheel so you can't evens steer manually if you turn the key to the off position. None of those situations is good.
The correct answer is to put the transmission in neutral. That may destroy the engine but the computer will probably prevent the engine from damaging itself, at least it will try to do so. Meanwhile, you will have several seconds to apply the brakes and steer to safety.
A whole new world of jobs just opened up before the man, F1, stunt driving, getaway driver...
People panic and their brains slow down as the car speeds up. The only solution is to have a large RED button on the dashboard labeled "Oh Shit!" At least they don't forget the car isn't driving for them.... couple more years and that'll happen - could be parallel parking accidents already are being blamed on the computer...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Same thing happened to me in high school, a hose got stuck under the accelerator. I just shut off the engine. His way of handling probably would have been more exciting.
Why don't we start arming cops with some highly directional EMP weapons? If the computer is fried, that's a fine outcome. Power's off, car isn't going anywhere anymore. No more OJ chase scenes, just nuke his electronics (not from orbit) and be done with it.
I guess if you had a pacemaker that might not be so hot, but then again 125mph isn't really a healthy speed either.
Clearly we're solving the wrong problem with the keys and neutral.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Had this happen to me in a 1972 Buick Regal. It had a butterfly valve that controlled the amount of gas it dumped into the carburetor. It was controlled by a cable that got stuck. I ended up doing +100 on I-85. I eventually figured out I could turn off the car to slow down, and crank it to speed back up!
Indeed, Welsh guitarist Deke Leonard says "Belgium is Poxy!" at the beginning of a live version of Romain (a song Martin Ace wrote about the Belgian cop who arrested them).
Why is someone with a seizure disorder even behind the wheel in the first place? Speeding or not, car functional or not, someone having a seizure whilst driving puts the rest of the public at risk.
This what I don't get. Shift the car into Neutral. Then coast or break to a stop.
You can do this on manual and automatic transmissions. Heck you can do it on a hybrid.
You may burn your engine out, but that is better than racing out of control.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What a fucking idiot you are.
Even in Europe, there is still a requirement that the steering wheel be mechanically attached to the steering rack, and the brake pedal be mechanically attached to the hydraulic brake system.
Nothing the computer can do can prevent the user from steering and stopping the car.
Brakes are ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS far more powerful than the engine. ALWAYS.
The one and only solution for this problem IN ALL COUNTRIES, you elitist Eurotrash piece of shit, is to STOMP ON THE BRAKE PEDAL AS HARD AS YOU CAN UNTIL THE CAR IS STOPPED.
PERIOD.
END OF FUCKING STORY.
I would install a toggle switch that would break connection to the coil. For you mechanics out there would this work?
Look for a made for TV movie called......"Runaway Car"...
Judd Nelson's performance as an annoyingly whiny passenger in is enough for you to root for the car to finally slam into an embankment.
I mean Judge Rheinhold, not JN. n/m
Dollars to donuts he was pressing the accelerator instead of the brake.
And even with stupid cars that don't let you turn them off because electronics is better than a key, stick it neutral. Sure you might blow the engine, but that sounds like it has higher survival chances. Of course if he really was stamping on the brake then and the engine was winning, then you want to do that before you destroy your brakes.
Surely if all the controls are malfunctioning you could still pull some fuses which would cut power to the computer and thus interrupt the engine?
I notice that his route was along the coast. Given that 125 mph can easily be fatal, and he had emergency services at hand, driving into the sea sounds like a good option. Or even a well ploughed field would do.
Disclaimer: I live in a remote area of Scotland. I suppose it is possible that northern France does not have endless miles of deserted beaches, peat bogs and convenient lochs. I've never been there, but maybe he should come to live here?
A Renault set a new world record
Greatest distance covered by a Renault between breakdowns
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-deal-with-unintended-acceleration
Bottom line, even in a Roush Stage 3 Mustang, the brakes were able to overcome the power of the engine and bring the car to a stop. Lower powered engines stop even faster.
last time i read an article like this the guy was faking it
Just another second banana
I believe this is due to the direction the fluid pumps; if towed, there is no fluid being pumped through the transmission, as it would circle the wrong. This was one of the nice things about Saturn's automatics: the pump direction was reversed so they were towable on all 4 wheels.
Put the PRNDL on N.
So, it's better than dying. Any cars brakes are designed to stop the car, even at full throttle.
tldr What could possibly cause your break to accelerate, and stick? Sounds like BS.
Kill the engine, dumbass. You can't go if the engine is off.
Maybe a stuck throttle in neutral would be a problem with your 69 SS Camaro... but today? Pretty much every car made has an ECU with a rev limiter that cuts the fuel and spark on an over-rev.
And, yes, if you're freaked out and turn the key to park and take it out, you'll lock the steering column, but since at least 1970, you can turn the engine off without locking the steering. Lock, Acc, Off, On, Start is the usual sequence.
And with the engine off, you can still steer: the engine will be driven by the drive wheels and turn the power steering pump, and probably create vacuum for the power brakes. And even if it doesn't you can still turn the wheels.. it's not like you're tryting to parallel park here.
And if you put your foot on the brake, it will stop.
So I call BS on the story.
Skynet.
The fuses inside your car operate the radio, lights, accessories, etc.
The fuses that operate the ignition coil, engine computer, etc, generally reside in the engine compartment.
He did call the police and it wasn't a "normal" car, but one adapted for disabled drivers. God knows what ugly hacks they made to his car to make it adapted and what important safety measures were ripped out of the car to do so. Renault has a rather good safety record compared to other cars in the same class and price range and this is not how a "normal" Renault Laguna would handle.
Presumably some form of throttle control/brake single lever control was put on the car to replace the pedals. If you use a single sensor system for that, you can't pick up if the sensor fails. What if the sensor for "decelerate" was broken? He'd be trying to wiggle the lever to get it to work, telling the control unit to accelerate the car every time he did so. This is why cars with electronic throttle control (most modern cars have that) are equipped with dual sensors and an elaborate sensor malfunction detection built into the software. Brakes are often electronically assisted, but still work on hydraulic power and in case of sensor failure, you can still stop the car with the basic hydraulic system connected directly to the pedal. I doubt very much that Renault modified this car for him, so if anything, he should be going after the company that did the modification.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I'm going to wait for Elon Musk to post the data logs before I believe this story. Clearly a hit piece on Renault.
Just my 2 cents, but nobody seems to have thought about it: what if the car wasn't gasoline but Diesel fueled? That would leave no 'ignition' everyone's talking about, and some types of Diesel engines can run without any 'help' if the fuel pump is not properly shut down when the driver 'turns the ignition of'. Combined with a completely electronic management system (including throttle and brakes by wire), you would wish they thought about installing a kill switch.
Get a tow truck. Hook up a platform on wheels. Throw a forklift on the platform. Drive next to runaway car. Use forklift to lift car.
use a second forklift on the other side if balance needed. (Or if it's a front or rear wheel drive, go in front / behind)
I guess we're finally there, starting with the microcontrollers in cars.
You still need neutral in some types of automatic car washes (those where one wheel engages in a small sled that pulls your car through the washing device)
LOL.
You mean "A neutral gear". What is it with Americans and writing "an" instead of "a" all the time?
Yes, and also for crazy things like when you're NOT MOVING in stationary traffic, when you are starting the engine and haven't yet started MOVING, crazy things like that...
Who are these idiots posting that automatics don't have a neutral gear? Do they even understand how a car works? Obviously not.
In the former East Germany (the communist part behind the Iron Curtain) disabled-driver special versions of the Trabant and Wartburg cars were designed by and series produced by the carmaker. The leg-less and arm-less facilities were not after-thoughts, but considered as part of the design from the ground up.
Those cars T. and W. were originally two-stroke engine powered environmental juggernauts, but at the very end of the 1980's they started to make them with imported 4-stroke engines, the same ones used in Volkswagen Polos of the capitalist West Germany. Soon after the german unification, the production of T. and W. cars was discontinued, because they had plastic superstructure and refused to rust away, which is not good for the frequent replacement based consumer-capitalist economy...
What is this 'key' thing you talk about? I guess it is some left over from the last century? Since long Renault uses key cards, no way to turn this card in any direction at all....
The reason is the pump in transmissions that circulates oil is on the mainshaft - the shaft that is coupled with the engine. In Neutral, only the countershaft turns, not the mainshaft. Without lubrication, stuff will get damaged.
Try the break instead of the gas/accelerator
Neutral
Emergency Brake
Turn off engine before it gets to 100mph
Nobody thought to turn the iginition off to kill the engine then back on to ensure steering column did not lock. Eating frog's legs must reduce your intelligence.
Yeah, probably. I think I like my old fashioned ignition key even more now. (Of course, the so-called state of the art push button ignition systems weren't even an option on my 12 year old Jeep.) Just turn that key to "Off" and a problem like this would have been simply solved.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Never get the cars with brands starting on "F": Ford, Fiat, "french"... My ranault (megane) was cery cell phone sensitive: When phone, placed on most suitable shelf, rang - idle RPM's were doubled. As well as fuel cunsumption. I had to switch the engine off to get rid of it. Renault cars (I drove three) were allways stuffed with electronics and it had allways been a source of troubles.
He could just turn the car off, except the stearing column would probably lock up since there is no safety to prevent it from locking while the car is moving.
Another option would be to put it in neutral.
In Belgium, CAR DRIVE YOU!
If I couldn't shift to neutral, my first thought would be to turn the car off. Surely there's a key or a button that can be pressed to kill power. Granted that's not the safest thing to do at 125 MPH, but I would have done so before having reached 125 MPH, it's safe enough to do so on a straight stretch of road where you don't need to rely so much on power steering, and it's safer than continuing to drive 125 miles at 125 MPH.
And the cops/poulets* used a supped-up Renault Megane to keep up with him (for how long it kept up, the article doesn't say).
note * Poulet means chicken in French. It's what we say casually when we say 'cops'. The word chicken in French doesn't have any of the same negative connotations that the same word has in English so it's ok to use. If you're an American visiting France and if you want to blend in, "poulet" is the word you should use when talking to a cop in France.
Thanks for the language lesson, frog.
sounds pretty straightforward
That car model, the Renault Laguna, is especially made to be modded for disabled people. I don't know what kind of disability the driver has (the article doesn't say, although he did have two epileptic seizures because of and during the hectic drive).
Epileptic seizures, and going 60 MPH (or 100 km/h as this is in Europe) or more. Twice. And still stayed on the road? Makes one wonder if there isn't any other modifications like lane-keeping there as well. Depending on the degree of epilepsy, but at that speed, say 30 m/s, one cannot be out cold for much more than a second before leaving the road.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Then how are you supposed to tow them? Do you have to get a flatbed truck?
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
If you're an American visiting France and if you want to blend in, "poulet" is the word you should use when talking to a cop in France.
If you're an American visiting France, you're not going to blend in. It is physically impossible for a foreigner to speak French without attracting hoots of derision from the locals. I don't care how good at French you were in school, unless you are bilingual and were brought up by at least one actual French parent speaking French along with English, you're not going to cut it.
This is assuming you were prepared to physically disguise yourself to start with, of course. It is generally possible to spot an American tourist from a fair distance before they even open their mouth (I say this as someone from the UK, the same thing applies to us).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Mr Lecerf was driving without a driving licence
http://www.courrier-picard.fr/courrier/Actualites/Info-regionale/Miracule-mais-sans-permis-de-conduire
Actually i was wondering as we had the Toyota break pedal story few years ago and we all know big companies have gud PR with the ability to change anything.
But, according to Mr Bernard Farret, Amiens (a French city) prosecutor, the driver had his license revoked few years ago.
You tow them with the drive wheels off the ground.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess he didn't think to TURN OFF THE CAR!!
... is John Broder. In his hands, this car would never have gotten out of the parking lot, let alone reached 125mph.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Next Renault Laguna model will come equipped with an eject button as an alternative escape in case of emergency situations like this one. Luxury models will also provide a passenger eject button which may also be handy in case the conversation gets boring or if your mother-in-law talk too much, or if you simply feel like having some fun. Worth every penny I would say.
"endangerment of a person's life"
People don't care about that in Europe unless you're in the political class.
Story as told to friends later: "I was zooming along and got caught—police started chasing me. So I called for help and said the car started speeding when I tried to stop. They decided to give me an escort instead of arresting me. But then I ran out of fuel, so I steered it off into the ditch to make it look like I was out of control. I disappeared before they finished examing the car for defects. Hahahahaha!"
I think the only sensible precaution everyone should take is to have a fuel cut off switch installed on your vehicle. It costs anywhere from $50-$100 USD and is not only a practical theft preventative, but it would solve this problem entirely. I would mention that the person installing the cut off, if he knows his stuff, will ask you the year of the vehicle, and if it's relatively new (~2000+), tell you it has sufficient anti-theft security. Just insist it's for other security considerations or as an auxiliary precaution to what comes standard.
As motor vehicles continue to move toward more computer-centric controls, this should be mandatory, and be a factory default option.
Similar events like the one in this article have made me take this precaution.
Turn ignition off. I've had my car's ECU fail and caused full throttle. Shut engine off. Brake and keep pressure on brakes until stopped to avoid using all the vacuum remaining. Easy.
Alternatively, take out of gear and let the engine blow up. Certainly better than hitting another vehicle head on at 125mph.
Fuckin' retard he was. Oh wait, they did say France.
Lots of things can cause seizures, and some of them can be treated. Where I live, a person can get a license if a doctor certifies that they have not had a seizure for a year.
It is a sad comment about our country that a driver's license is so essential that we tolerate more than 30,000 traffic fatalities each year. Seizures are a minor part of that bigger problem.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Are you in the United States? I am, in Tennessee as a matter of fact. We have several things, epilepsy among them, that can bar you from driving as you mentioned. The "reportable condition" is actually SELF reported. If I don't tell the DMV that I have epilepsy then there isn't really any way for them to find out. Now I agree 100% that someone who has seizures or passes out at random should not be driving. I personally think, and this will be quite unpopular, that if you have any kind of handicap that renders you unable to drive the vehicle as manufactured then you shouldn't be driving at all. However, this is America. We don't think about the welfare of others for the most part; it's all about individual freedoms. Even though us more rational folks know that driving is a priviledge and not a right, most don't agree. Why would they want to be singled out and denied their god-given right to drive which, because of our lack of public transport, would severely hamper thier ability to even have a job. Not everyone with epilepsy is on disability so many have to keep working. Outside of the big cities like New York, no car pretty much means no job. Before anyone can try and deflect blame onto the government for this, we would have to have multiple agencies talking to one another or all data in one location like a National ID. As we have seen on /. in the past that idea didn't go over too well for the obvious privacy implications. However events like this will have to be addressed simply due to the fact that your right to privacy might infringe on my right to live should you seize and strike me or my property. It's not an easy problem to fix and will not be remedied overnight in any case. Anyway you should redirect your outrage to another area.
That's why us engineer's have to engineer out "stupidity" as best as possible because the screwed up legal system and ineffectual political climate don't respond to problems fast enough so we basically have to cobble together some kind of hack to cover our asses. The thing is, no matter how hard we try we just can't engineer out stupid. If I made an electrical outlet that was a solid 6" of nonconductive ceramic with no holes(basically not an outlet) some jackass(or a kid) is STILL gonna figure out how to jam a fork into it and electrocute themselves. These drive-by-wire systems are the result of this. If you recall the Ford Explorer rollover thing several years ago, people called on the goverment to DO SOMETHING (TM) to save us from the ever so dangerous machines that these greedy profit driven corps were churning out. In response, the goverment somewhere around 2006ish mandated that all vehicles have anti-lock brakes, traction control, and for SUV's, Electronic Stability Control. To make these vehicles conform to those laws, auto engineers pretty much had to take away actual control from the driver. How exactly is traction control supposed to cut throttle when you've got the pedal jammed to the floor? Remove the cable or hard linkage, that's how. The side effect you are seeing now is vehicles that won't shut off, go into neutral, or stop when you command them to and there are no more manual backups to save you. I agree with several posters that the easiest fix would be a nice big old E-Stop button on the dash somewhere that directly cuts computer power when depressed. No relays, no microprocessors, or anything like that. A mechanical button in series with the power line from the fuse box that cannot refuse to operate (barring mechanical failure that is). And going back to my previous point, some idiot is still gonna figure out how to make that button not work when they need it. An engineer's job is never done!
I don't know about France particularly, but some jurisdictions issue licenses in some such cases because the epilepsy is either controlled by medicine, otherwise irrelevant to driving (e.g., seizures only while asleep), or simply so rare (epilepsy simply means "has had more than one seizure, ever") that it would be overboard to deny a license. Extra restrictions (e.g., reduced term of license) and/or requirements (e.g., medical supervision) are common, as might be expected.
Install an E-stop button inline with the spark plugs, place it tastefully within easy reach of the driver. No computer can override that...
1 - Hazard lights on ; horn blaring as often as possible.
2 - clutch down, out of gear. (I assume that you can do something similar in an automatic, though with 2 days of driving one in total out of 25 years, I'm not 100% certain. For sure it can be forced it into gear 2 or 1, because I've done that by accident. "Bye bye" to speed.)
3 - more horn and hazards
4 - handbrake as possible in between steering.
5 - come to a halt.
6 - kick car repeatedly as the engine revs itself to destruction.
FTFA : "his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers, "
OK, I take a lot of it back. Botched adaptation I suppose could do something like this. But what disabled-adapted vehicles I've seen in the past have also had the original controls accessible. It's not impossible, I suppose, that the adaptation would have rendered the control procedure above difficult or impossible, but then I'd still consider that a dangerously botched adaptation - at the design stage.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
ok maybe he couldn't shut it off if it was diesel, but what's wrong with neutral?
I have a friend who delivers high cost cars. He accepted one for delivery, drove out of EU manufacturer's works and while driving was told by phone to keep driving at a fixed speed and return to works and under no circumstances to brake (!) or make an attempt to try to stop, as he had been sent out of works without a "key" inside car. Note "inside car or in close proximity to car". Key was a fob for your pocket, the works inspector had it so car started and my friend could drive many miles without a key in the car.. Brake could only be used when he was back inside works track.
He was glad he was a well trained professional driver but say it was a ride he will never forget
Impressed, I am glad I have not got toe wealth to get that expensive make of car.
With this 'proximity key' as next technology, the ideas here about stopping by key use to neutral will soon be history.
The disabled car may have had the same type of proximity key fitted with the modifications made to it.
Regards Eion MacDonald
I call bullshit...~~ can't figure out how to select neutral or at least turn off the key? No way.
my thoughts exactly
The pump always turns with the engine. Putting an automatic transmission in neutral just decouples the input from the output and definitely doesn't lock the input shaft. The input turns at engine speed, the output turns at wheel speed. Maybe the input isn't turning at the speed it normally would, but oil is certainly still being pumped.
Putting it in neutral is a sure fire way to cause the engine to blow its gaskets and very dangerous fire.
What, the clutch wasn't working (manual) or the transmission wouldn't goto neutral? Admittedly, you'd smoke the engine, but better the engine than yourself.
It seems everyone here has forgotten about power steering. I see numerous references to "Steering Lock", however that's a totally different system. In most cars, when the car is off, the steering column itself will lock to prevent any turning of the wheel at all. This is a theft deterrent feature. Sometimes when the car is off you might be able to turn it left/right once or twice before it locks. THEN you have Power Steering, which is either hydraulic or electric. Either way, the car needs to be on for it to function. Hydraulic required a pump to be active, and electric is pure electrical motor assist. Hydraulic systems will still operate for a few turns once the car is turned off until pressure is lost due to lack of the pump running, electric power steering will cut out as soon as power is lost. The reason why you wouldn't want to just *TURN OFF* the car at 125mph would be you would lose power steering and lose total control of the vehicle. Let alone you would also most likely lose power brakes, and make it *MUCH* harder to stop. Essentially turning your car into a speeding bullet in which you have little to no ability to turn or brake. This is why it's Neutral only or bust, so you won't end up flipping your car. This same thing happened to me about 8-9 years ago .I was actually bringing my elderly grandmother back from visiting a relative, coming down a hill with a 7% grade that's a slow left hand turn for over half mile to 3/4 mile. It was my parents car, automatic. To save on the brakes I normally would downshift from "Drive" to "3" (It was a 4 speed auto and had gear selection of 3, 2, 1, or D). This is normal practice for cars. However in the shift, the onboard computer had a brain fart and the car shut off. I had no power brakes, no power steering, going down a 7% grade left hand turn. The only way to restart the car would be to pop it into Neutral and restart. The shifter was on the column, and at the time I had to use both hands with excessive force to keep the wheel turned to prevent smashing into the side of the road, not a option. I kept as calm as possible and managed to get to the bottom of the hill and managed to slam the brakes hard enough (pressing down as hard as i could for 30-40 seconds) to slow down enough to pull over and stop the car.
Come to find out the car had shut off on my parents like that once before, and once after this incident. A little after the 3rd time we got notice of a recall to reflash the onboard computer because of the very specifc problem where certain conditions it would cause the car to shut off. After the reflash, it did it one more time, and a few months later there was another recall stating the first recall didn't completely solve the problem. Fortunately we had already ditched the car. (2001 Mazda Tribute, same as Ford Escape if anyone is wondering).
So the man flying into the ditch my bet is the car running out of gas. As it sputtered, full power remained so he had access to power steering and brakes, and was able to slow down *SOME* from 125mph. When the cars engine finally shut off somewhere between 0mph-125mph he lost power brakes and steering, and was unable to control the car and ended up going off the road into a ditch, fortunately at a slow enough speed where he didn't sustain as much damage as he would have had it been 125mph.
If my car was moving at 125mph I don't think I'd want to get out. Being trapped within would not really be a pertinent part of the equation.
All of them have an "N" setting that I've seen. It disengages the engine from the wheels. You'd need it for towing and so on.
It's actually rare for a car to be towed in neutral. The recommended way is to lift the drive wheels and tow it in gear/Park. Towing a car in neutral is generally only done in the case of a rear wheel drive that you tow from the front because you can't reach the rear. The most common reason for this is that the car is on the highway and you are stuck going in the direction of traffic.