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A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Riders in Switzerland and New Zealand have reported the front wheels of their electric scooters locking suddenly mid-ride, hurling riders to the ground. The malfunction has resulted in dozens of injuries ranging from bruises to broken jaws. Lime pulled all its scooters from Swiss streets in January when reports of the incidents surfaced there. When the city of Auckland, New Zealand voted to suspend the company earlier this week following 155 reported cases of sudden braking, the company acknowledged that a software glitch was causing the chaos. The company claims that fewer than 0.0045% of all rides worldwide have been affected, adding that "any injury is one too many." An initial fix reduced the number of incidents, it said, and a final update underway on all scooters will soon be complete. "Recently we detected a bug in the firmware of our scooter fleet that under rare circumstances could cause sudden excessive braking during use," Lime wrote in a blog post Saturday. "[I]n very rare cases -- usually riding downhill at top speed while hitting a pothole or other obstacle -- excessive brake force on the front wheel can occur, resulting in a scooter stopping unexpectedly."
They use electronically activated brakes to keep people from using the scooters without paying.
who was stupid enough to decide to put the brake controls though computer/software???
There is nothing inherently wrong with using computer controlled brakes. This is done in all sorts of industrial automation.
However, with that said the Safety integrity level (SIL) is a well known specification used to asses failure levels and the consequence of said failures. And in order to meet the higher levels, you have to have all sorts of fancy analysis that predicts the likelihood of a failure, and provides mechanisms to mitigate that failure.
And I bet that these clowns haven't even considered such a thing and are producing a device that could potentially kill someone (EG sudden braking flipping the rider into the path of a moving vehicle).
As an example I am working on automated cranes used in places where people could be killed if a software/hardware failure occurs. In order to reach our required SIL level we require a safety computer that is physically separate (and runs independently) from the main computer and can shut down operations when it detects certain conditions.
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Here is what users of Lime Scooters have to say about this problem.
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