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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.'"
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This song seems appropriate.
That's a phenomena specific to diesel engines. Diesel's don't use a spark to ignite the fuel mixture like gasoline engines do, they use the heat from piston compression. Thus, so long as vacuum pressure and fuel supply is maintained, a diesel can continue running without electrical power.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The Schengen Area agreement also contains rules concerning police crossing international borders when in pursuit of someone; I believe they keep going, but hand over to local police on the fly.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
...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 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.
It's called the Schengen Agreement, and while for most people it's the easy way to travel around Europe, a lot of it is about policing and criminals as well. Basically, yes the French police can cross borders into almost all neighboring countries (not the UK or Andorra I don't think).
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
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 was only driving a Tesla Model S he would have ran out of fuel in no time.
Damn you fossil fuel vehicles!
All the key does is telling the cars computer that the one having it is allowed to start it. The computer seized up, and the key was probably pulled to no effect. I doubt anyone capable of getting into a car would be dumb enough to not try that.
As for gears. There is probably no mechanical connection between the gear shift and the gearbox. The driver tells the computer what he would like to do, this time the computer had a lobotomy.
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)
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.
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.
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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.
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?