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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.'"
Article says "A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution." I'm pretty sure that those two options were tried.
From the article: "A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution." Of course I can't say with 100% certainty, but I'm guessing the Renault technician would have thought of all of your proposed solutions and more. It's important to note that his car had been "adapted for disabled drivers", which likely played some role in its malfunction, so conventional wisdom about cars may not be as applicable, depending on the modifications made. Also, he likely has various disabilities, given that his car is for disabled drivers, and that he "had two epileptic seizures" during the drive, so it's likely not necessarily a matter of him failing "to understand his vehicle's operation" as you say, so much as him being physically and/or mentally unable to take action. One last interesting note from the article: "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." That's probably where the legal complaint comes into play
Not all cars have a kill switch you can just shut things down.
And that's the problem right there then.
I call BS.
You can't get a car inspected in my state(TX) if it doesn't have a kill switch. They will flunk you right then and there if your key being turned off doesn't turn everything except accessories off. It's the first thing they check, turn car off then on, if they can't do that cycle you fail inspection.
Thanks to my Saturn ION 2007 for that...stupid ignition cylinder breaks and doesn't let you turn the car off.
Many newer cars don't need a key to start it - as long as your key is somewhere in or near the car, you can just press a button to start the car. And press a button to shut it off. This will work find under normal conditions (like your DMV inspection), but if the car computer ignores the "turn off car" button press while you're driving at speed, there's no way to force the car to turn off.
Maybe fly-by-wire cars need a failsafe physical switch that manually cuts power to the ignition system or fuel injector pump.
I call bullshit...
125mph maximum speed so he was driving for at least an hour...
In one hour you can't figure out how to select neutral or at least turn off the key? No way.
From TFA: "...after his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers...A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution."
Apparently, whatever adaptation was done did not include the ability to put the car into neutral (or that also malfunctioned). If the company couldn't figure out how to stop the car, don't blame the driver.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
The transmission is computer controlled. Trying to move it to anything is ignored if it doesn't make sense to the system. In fact that is the key thing, you have a misbehaving computer, however, you have to reason with this crazy machine to get anything to happen, which usually it will tell you, you are the one in the wrong here, hence why a lot of sane sounding things wouldn't work in this case. If the system was completely wonked, there isn't a thing a person could do that this system would respond to, such as turning off or going into a different gear or lack of gear.
It's like your car is saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm too busy pushing the accelerator to process your request to shift into neutral, please try again later."
Going into neutral with the gas pedal down is going to trigger an ignore signal from the system and thus the request to switch into neutral will not be dispatched to the transmission. Likewise with ignitions, having forward motion in a non-collision situation will have any request to disengage the engine ignored. Heck, some electronic systems won't care. If the car isn't stopped, collision or not, the system may very well ignore any request to disengage the engine.
The problem is that a lot of these drive by wire systems make a lot of bad assumptions about things and there really isn't a standard guide book on what to make sure does and does not happen, so it varies pretty wildly between systems. Some cars will allow you to switch to neutral, and neutral alone, while the gas pedal is down (never mind that the system is having a fault on requests to accelerate.) Some cars will let you burn through the break pads. The parking brake is always manual, so you'd figure someone would put a kill switch in there. Nope, pulling on the parking brake with the accelerator stuck will just get you some nice brake dust blowing out of your wheels. There are a ton of WTF thinking that goes into some of the programming of these systems.
Stuck accelerators can be cause by any number of faults, some of those faults are checked, some not. The ones that are checked, can try resets or allow you to stop the car safely. The ones that get missed cause this kind of crap where, no matter what you do, your car is now programmed to go as fast as it can in a forward motion and getting under the hood and pulling the plug to the system for a hard reset is the only solution.
There is a serious need for someone to come up with logical standard operating procedures for these types of systems. Airplane manufactures do it for their fly by wire systems so that the pilot always stays in control, even when the system would rather beg to differ on the matter. I haven't the foggiest idea on why this kind of thing eludes car makers.