90% of the world's population probably have listened to the Beatles at some point in time. Not just could, but have.
You can find most out-of-the-way, obscure Beduin tribe in the middle of the Sahara desert, or the most distance Amazon jungle tribe, and discover they've traded with people for a battery power tape deck at some point, that they pull out once every three months for celebrations and get new batteries for every year. Seriously. The lucky ones have hand cranked or solar players, but plenty have batteries.
Sometimes they have a hand cranked battery charger for everything, or even a small gasoline generator. Just because they live in huts or whatever without electrical lighting doesn't mean they have no electricity.
And every single Amish person has certainly hear a Beatles song at some point. They go out on their own for a year or so when they become adults, and it, frankly, is impossible to spend more than 10 hours in public places without hearing a Beatles' song as background music.
In fact, 90% is probably a low estimate. 90% of people have probably knowingly heard a Beatles' song. Another 9% have probably heard one without realizing it.
Well, if he wanted to do that, why not make him play both Connor and Marcus, which would make more sense?
Obviously, Skynet couldn't have copied Connor's brain, just his body.
So 'Marcus' would still be some actual guy somewhere, who remembers having a different looking body, but you can handwave that by saying people don't really remember their body like that, or that Skynet did a slight programming change.
You could even make them look slightly different because Skynet made the copy solely from scant visual records. Maybe the wrong color eyes or something.
And, at the end, you have a fun issue of John Connor lookalike terminators.
I dunno, that movie was so silly and disjointed it's hard to figure out how it could have made sense.
Also, the SCC did the 'human copied into a terminator and forgets they're a terminator' plot first.
Christ, people seem unable to actually read what I write.
I want a rotating switch that rotates the same as a key. In the same place.
So that people can find it.
And we aren't 'going to standardize' on this, we, um, already did. Decades ago.
In 99.9% of every car ever made, you find the emergency cutoff on the steering column, or sometimes on the dash directly to the left of it. It is a rotating switch that is you turn counter-clockwise to disable the engine. That is where they are.
They're posing as a 'key' right now that also is where you start, stop, and secure the car if you remove it, but I have no problem if that functionality goes away. The emergency cutoff, however, is a safety feature that must remain.
And if all other functions of it go away, if you can operate the car without even knowing where the emergency cutoff switch is, it's even more important to keep it in the standard location and operated the standard way. So that people aren't looking for it the very first time during an emergency. (Which this article rather proves, as these cars have the ability to cut the engine...and the drivers did not know how to do it!)
I have no problem with anything else the car makers want to add. If they want to add a big red button with a molly guard somewhere else that does the same thing, fine by me. Put on the middle of the dash for all I care. (I recommend adding one where the backseat can get to it, that is activated and deactivated via the child-lock mechanism.)
But if there is anything in a car that we should standardize on by law, it's the location of a damn emergency cutoff switch so the driver can turn things off without having to figure out where it is. And, considering that almost every car throughout history already has it in certain place, one that the driver can find without looking, and the passenger can even reach, I think it's reasonable to standardize on it there.
And, also, it shouldn't be 'switch by wire'. It should be a nice mechanical thing that physically disconnects all electricity to all electric engines and gas pumps.
Essentially, there's no reason not to stay in gear. It's entirely a waste of time to shift into neutral, and a distraction in an emergency. Turn off the key, and then brake.(1) Or, hell, coast to a stop.
Also, all automatics that I've ever seen in my entire life have a 1st and a 2nd on the gearshift. Which you should not shift into until you've slowed to about 30 MPH or so for 2, or you will blow up your transmission.
In fact, there's not really much of an advantage to do it manually...by the time you've gotten slow enough to do that, the situation is mostly under control. Just totally ignore your gearshift. Cut engine, coast/brake to a stop.
1) Now, if the key won't turn, feel free to not deal with it and shift into neutral instead.
So if I start coasting down a hill with the car in gear, but without the engine operating, I should find myself with power steering. Likewise, if I do it with the car in neutral, I shouldn't get it.
I'll have to try that one day.
Anyway, anyone who runs out of power steering while trying to stop a car is not seriously trying to stop the car.
As I've said before, there are multiple kinds of distractions while driving.
There are eye distractions (tuning a radio), hand distractions (holding food), and concentration distractions (yelling at someone over a speaker phone, looking at a cop who pulled someone else over,etc)
A lot of regulations seem to be randomly concentrating on 'hand distractions' for no purpose I can make out. A better solution to those would be to provide drivers a place where they can safely put things, so only one hand is busy, instead of them attempting to juggle things. (And drivers can drive fine with one hand.) People need to set down their drink to eat their burrito.
Likewise, eye distractions can be reduced by more voice feedback in cars and more work on making controls people can operate without looking at them.
The biggest cause of accidents in cars, by far, is concentration distraction, where people could be concentrating on the road, there is absolutely nothing more important they're paying attention to. (The biggest reason is 'sleepy', in fact.)
Surveying doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It happens at a single point in time, which is fine for determining location, but sucky for determining distance.
Even things like driving on the inside or the outside of turns, which would be near impossible to determine via GPS, can amount to significant change in distance traveled. (Of course, this is nearly impossible for wheel measuring to get right either, as the wheels travel different distances on different sides of the car!)
I.e, 100% perfectly accurate GPS devices that figure out your position every five seconds will not give you 100% accurate distance. Whereas correctly calibrated wheels will. (And wear isn't as big an issue there as you seem to think. Calibrating every 1000 miles or so should be enough.)
If you're going to use lasers, though, they would actually be the best way to determine distance traveled. Just aim them at the ground, watch it go past, and, tada, you've solved all calibration problems involved in wheels. You can put them in the middle of the car, and you've solved the whole 'wheels traveling different distances' also. (As long as you're willing to accept 'how far the center of my car traveled' for 'how far my car traveled'.) Also you dealt with the skidding and whatnot of the wheels not moving.
The only problem would be stuff splashing down there over the optics.
I didn't say they needed a 'key'. I said the needed a switch that is operated the same way a key ignition is now, in the same place.
So people can find this never-before-used switch when their car is out of control and know how to operate it. Without looking.
No, it should not have any sort of protection on it. The number of people who randomly reach though their steering wheel and bump the key off currently is near zero, and I don't see why it would increase with a switch instead.
The key falling out is, indeed, an actual problem on really shitty cars, but not actually relevant if there's a switch without a key.
However, in either circumstance, the car can be stopped by putting it in neutral to retain power steering and braking, or by turning off the ignition.
Except in these Toyotas, where you can't actually put the car in 'neutral' without computer consent, which they won't give if you're driving down the road.
And, likewise, you can't cut the ignition unless you know the secret of holding the button down.
The problem here isn't out of control cars. Cars occasionally have weird errors. Throttles get stuck open, pedals get stuck down, whatever.
It's that no one trapped in these cars can actually figure out how to recover from these problems. Yes, we've always had morons unable to figure this out, who drive miles down the highway without being smart enough to turn off their car.
But now we're got perfectly rational and intelligent people saying "Okay, I shifted to neutral, and the car kept going, so that didn't work. And I push the 'engine' button to turn it off but, um, it kept running. Um...okay...I'm out of 'things to do when your car is driving by itself'."
A highway patrol officer should know how to take the car out of gear
Gears are controlled by computer, you cannot actually change gears, even though you think you are.
hit the brake
Which will rather quickly burn off. Which happened in this case. (A cop responding to the situation saw the brakes 'on fire', although I suspect they were just smoking.)
pull the parking break
He had that on. He rather quickly had no functioning brakes at all.
kill the ignition
He did not know how to do that, as apparently to force the ignition off you have to hold the start button down for several seconds.
This isn't some stupid user error. This is a car that sometimes gets stuck on full throttle for whatever reason(I think the floor mat explanation is nonsense, but we'll see), which is bad enough, but people are dying because people in the car can't figure how to turn it off
Like you said, a highway patrol officer does know what to do in a runaway car. He did what he could, and it didn't stop.
If the brakes can't hold back the little bit of torque any currently-produced Toyota can muster, the vehicle is probably unsafe to start with.
OTOH, there are a hell of a lot of people driving around with unsafe brakes.
Hey, morons. When your brakes make noise, they need looking at! Any noise! Brakes are not supposed to make noise! In fact, they needed looked at a few thousand miles ago, before they started making noise! Noise is bad!
Presumably current model-year Toyotas still have good brakes, though.
Really, all drivers need to have the various contingency plans in mind at all times.
What drivers need to do is practice in empty parking lots. I wish the government provided some sort of practice area, and I wish that assholes turning donuts didn't result in the police thinking that you driving around and braking randomly wasn't for some good purpose.
When I was at college, I had the good fortune of finding an empty, huge, out-of-the-way parking lot, and testing out my car in it, both in the rain and otherwise. I know roughly how my car can corner on wet ground, I know how to turn into a skid, I know how to stop my car with the accelerator floored, I tried all that stuff.
Good thing I did...anti-lock brakes do not behave like I expected to behave. (I expected them to be near-instant on and off, not the half-second pulses they actually are.) If they had ever come on and I hadn't experienced before, I'd probably think something was wrong with my brakes.
Seriously, that should be part of driver's ed. An actual government course where you test each thing. And the course should remain open for adults to sign up for and use, because cars change.
No, it shouldn't have a button...it should have a 'key', or, rather a switch that turns like a key. In the same place that keys normally are, on the steering column. Same amount of mechanical force to turn as a key.
I think we should mandate this by law. And that it be a mechanical disconnect for both gasoline and electrical drive systems. Where it physically disconnects the gas intake or distributor voltage, and it flips a switch that stops electric power from getting to the electrical engine. And both these should fail safe to the 'nonworking' position.
Car manufacturers, of course, would be free to leave this in the 'on' position, and implement whatever other ignition system they wanted on top of this. But that switch should be right there, ready to be rotated counter-clockwise if someone needs to disable their damn car from working in any manner until the switch is turned back.
In all the cars I've driven, if you cut the engine while it's still turning, you keep power steering.
I used to think that, I though that my power steering was operating off the movement of my wheels. Because it seemed to last as long as I was going forward.
Now I'm not so certain. I think what's actually going on is, like you said, all you can do with a stopped engine is make small corrections or the car stops anyway from losing momentum.
So a small reservoir of pressure would be more than enough to cover you until then.
One day, I need to find a hill with a slope and go down it in neutral with the engine off...and see if I magically gain power steering and braking halfway down. Or, safer, cut the engine, stop the car with the brakes, and see if I have power steering left to turn the wheels while parked.
We're talking about a situation where the car is out of control here. We're not making right hand turns from a stop or anything. How much hard steering are you doing?
Seriously, on a car with a stopped engine, if you use up all the power steering pressure before you use up all the forward momentum, wow!
Same with power brakes. It is astonishing that someone can be going fast enough that their hydraulic assist can run out before the car is, in fact, stopped. Not as impossible as braking, someone going 120 mph downhill might, in fact, run out.
Which isn't that important, as you can still stop the car using non-powdered brakes, but whatever.
Erm, what are you talking about? Automatics can switch to neutral, and back, just fine while being driven.
I can even switch to neutral, cut the engine off and turn it back to the start position, flip back to drive, and recover, aka, a 'push start' like on the old manual transmission, although you have to 'push' the car at 20 mph or so, so it's not actually plausible to do by hand.
Granted, I've never tried it with a 'full open throttle', but that's because I, like most people, do not normally drive that way, having to obey laws of physics that govern how fast we can turn corners.
But all this is wrong, anyway, as switching to neutral is entirely the wrong thing to do in this situation. The correct thing to do is to turn the damn engine off and leave it in drive, so the engine will slow you down.
Of course, the poor saps in this story don't have a fucking ignition key, instead having to hold a button down for several seconds. (Holding a button down while driving an out of control car? Yeah, I'm sure that's doable.)
Indeed. All these people are talking about switching to neutral and braking and stuff.
Due, if your car is out of control, the very first thing you need to do is turn the engine off. For several reasons.
1) With your engine off, but car in gear, the engine operates as a brake on the car, slowing you down.
2) If your engine is redlining, the last thing you need do for it is switch it to neutral and thus entirely disconnect it from the drive system, allowing it to run as fast as possible, and possibly, blow up. Granted, a secondary concern to running into people, but still a concern.
3) It is at least slightly possible that something has gone horribly wrong under your hood, like a fuel injection that has blow up, and thus you don't want to continue, you know, sending gasoline up there, just a general rule.
Also, you shouldn't need the emergency brake to stop the car. Once you put stop the engine, normal braking should be more than enough. Emergency brakes are dangerous to use while driving, as you can end up spinning randomly. (Good luck getting out of a spin the emergency brake put you in.)
Now, WRT to these people, one of the problems is that their ignition is not key operated. They have to hold down a button to cut the thing off mid-run. A good idea for a computer, a mind-bogglingly bad idea for a car.
I think the government should mandate that all cars can be switched off via a 'switch'. (Which a key would count as.) They can, if they want, also turn on and off some other way, but somewhere close to the driver's right hand, where a key would normally be, there needs to be a thing they can grab and twist to make the damn car stop working, period. Mechanically stop working, cutting off gasoline and disconnecting electricity.
I once had the joy of a passenger knocking the transmission from drive to neutral while driving down the road. Incidentally, the reason you can do that without pushing the button is precisely so that you can put the car into neutral if something goes wrong. (And not worry about overshooting into reverse.)
Sounds fine, until you realize I was on cruise control, and my car apparently was built before they realized 'Hey, if the cruise control is on, and the car is not in gear, perhaps we shouldn't accelerate as hard as possible to attempt to impossibly reach that speed.'
Coping with a coasting car on a non-busy interstate is easy. Dealing with it while you're trying to figure out why your engine is about to explode is something else.
Considering that cars are not turned on when parked in driveways, it seems unlikely that any sort of computer control could vaguely be at issue.
Yes, the computer could have spontaneously turned the car on, and then spontaneously opened the throttle wide, but that seems incredibly implausible.
And, also, a stuck throttle shouldn't result in the car catching on fire anyway! It is very hard to blow up a car by running the engine. You essentially need the cooling system to fail. (And cars do not have 'cool-by-wire'.)
So, really, if you're looking to blame drive-by-wire, you're needing to postulate at least three serious failures, all at once. And at least one of them has to be mechanical.
A much simpler explanation is what BoneFlower said, a spark setting off leaking vapors, either gas or hydrogen.
I'm frankly astonished that someone thinks a car with an electric engine is operated in some other way than electric wiring. WTF.
What other way could it possibly operate? Please, someone explain to me a non-'fly-by-wire' way to control the speed of an electric motor.
Oh, wait, I got one: The electric engine is on full the entire time, and has some sort of mechanical braking slowing it down that you move away with the gas pedal?
So you'd have to replace the mechanical brake every five minutes of operation. Ford wins an award for 'Worse engine design in the entire history of mankind', narrow beating out the styrofoam-and-paper-engine-block internal combustion engine.
Of course the irony there is such an absurd design would result in even more random acceleration.
I guess he could be assuming that the gas engine was still directly controlled by the gas pedal, which demonstrates an amazingly poor grasp of how hybrid cars work, but at least is within the realm of physics.
Except that the GPS does not measure 'distance traveled'.
It measures change in location, which is not the same thing at all. If I get in my car and drive five miles, I will probably end up 4 miles or less away from my house as measured by GPS. Roads are not straight. If it took me 5 minutes to get there, I drove at 60 mph, not 48 mph.
Now, the GPS tries to check location often enough that it is moderately correct, and tries to guess based on what road you're on. (I.e., it assumes you drove on a road instead of driving straight.)
But the inherent inaccuracy of GPS combined with the polling rate, and the inability of maps to include every twist and turn in the road, mean that it's never going to be as accurate as actually measuring how far the wheels traveled, which will exactly match the distance traveled. (Barring any fictionless movement like hydroplaning and skidding, but that's just silly nitpicking.)
The problem with measuring via the wheels, is that we're actually measuring via the axis, and people do not recalibrate their rotation calculation to the wheel diameter when their wheel changes size. If people would calibrate them, they'd be much more accurate than GPS.
Well, no, it can't really work like that in the Terminator universe.
If all trips were to another timeline, sending someone back to 'stop' the terminator in the first movie makes no sense. That terminator ended up in a universe where he won. You'd end up in a copy of that universe, which you could defeat it, but the 'original universe', where the terminator managed to kill Sarah Connor, still exists. (Or, more confusingly, Kyle could have ended up in an different copy of his past, and have no other terminator to fight.)
Trying to make sense of terminator time travel rules is pretty hard. They don't really make a lot of sense.
For it to work, you have to believe there's some sort of 'fated timeline', with time traveling humans and a Skynet losing the war. That no matter what, Skynet ends up happening, and ends up making a time machine.(Strictly speaking, we don't know who invented the time machine.) So we just essentially have an infinite number of loops until, at some point, we end up in a stable universe without some terminator running around in the past.
In fact, the premise requires that someone besides Connor original led the rebellion, as he couldn't have existed until someone else send Kyle Reese back. (Or possibly John Connor had a different father to start with.)
Incidentally, the last episode of the SCC had John end up in a future like that, so it is canonically possible for such a future to exist. Likewise, it had two people from the future running around who remembered different futures and they didn't know which future was which. (In fact, they came to the wrong conclusion, thinking they had just stopped the thing one of them remembered from happening when in fact they caused it.)
This raises an interesting idea: The T-100 from the second movie and the one from the third movie might, in fact, have been the 'same thing' from different timelines. In the T1 and T2 timeline, (1997 Judgment Day), a T-800 got sent back to kill Sarah, with Reese sent back to stop it. And a T-1000 got sent back to 1995 to kill John, with a reprogrammed T-800 to stop it.
In the T3 timeline (2004 Judgment Day), perhaps the same T-800 got sent back to kill Sarah, like before, but this time Skynet has a bit more information (There's a lot more computer information about the location of people saved in 2004 than 1997.) And, apparently, more technological advancement, so perhaps (the new) Skynet has a T-X instead of a T-1000, and instead of attempting to kill John in 1995, attempts to kill his lieutenants. And an T-800 is sent back to stop it...perhaps the 'same' T-800.
It's worth mentioning it's called a T-850 in T3 for some reason, but if technology is further along, as it clearly is, maybe it just has a different model number.
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Well, no, I haven't, but a hybrid wouldn't work that way anyway, because the wheels aren't hooked to the engine.
90% of the world's population probably have listened to the Beatles at some point in time. Not just could, but have.
You can find most out-of-the-way, obscure Beduin tribe in the middle of the Sahara desert, or the most distance Amazon jungle tribe, and discover they've traded with people for a battery power tape deck at some point, that they pull out once every three months for celebrations and get new batteries for every year. Seriously. The lucky ones have hand cranked or solar players, but plenty have batteries.
Sometimes they have a hand cranked battery charger for everything, or even a small gasoline generator. Just because they live in huts or whatever without electrical lighting doesn't mean they have no electricity.
And every single Amish person has certainly hear a Beatles song at some point. They go out on their own for a year or so when they become adults, and it, frankly, is impossible to spend more than 10 hours in public places without hearing a Beatles' song as background music.
In fact, 90% is probably a low estimate. 90% of people have probably knowingly heard a Beatles' song. Another 9% have probably heard one without realizing it.
Well, if he wanted to do that, why not make him play both Connor and Marcus, which would make more sense?
Obviously, Skynet couldn't have copied Connor's brain, just his body.
So 'Marcus' would still be some actual guy somewhere, who remembers having a different looking body, but you can handwave that by saying people don't really remember their body like that, or that Skynet did a slight programming change.
You could even make them look slightly different because Skynet made the copy solely from scant visual records. Maybe the wrong color eyes or something.
And, at the end, you have a fun issue of John Connor lookalike terminators.
I dunno, that movie was so silly and disjointed it's hard to figure out how it could have made sense.
Also, the SCC did the 'human copied into a terminator and forgets they're a terminator' plot first.
AT NO POINT DO I WANT A KEY.
Christ, people seem unable to actually read what I write.
I want a rotating switch that rotates the same as a key. In the same place.
So that people can find it.
And we aren't 'going to standardize' on this, we, um, already did. Decades ago.
In 99.9% of every car ever made, you find the emergency cutoff on the steering column, or sometimes on the dash directly to the left of it. It is a rotating switch that is you turn counter-clockwise to disable the engine. That is where they are.
They're posing as a 'key' right now that also is where you start, stop, and secure the car if you remove it, but I have no problem if that functionality goes away. The emergency cutoff, however, is a safety feature that must remain.
And if all other functions of it go away, if you can operate the car without even knowing where the emergency cutoff switch is, it's even more important to keep it in the standard location and operated the standard way. So that people aren't looking for it the very first time during an emergency. (Which this article rather proves, as these cars have the ability to cut the engine...and the drivers did not know how to do it!)
I have no problem with anything else the car makers want to add. If they want to add a big red button with a molly guard somewhere else that does the same thing, fine by me. Put on the middle of the dash for all I care. (I recommend adding one where the backseat can get to it, that is activated and deactivated via the child-lock mechanism.)
But if there is anything in a car that we should standardize on by law, it's the location of a damn emergency cutoff switch so the driver can turn things off without having to figure out where it is. And, considering that almost every car throughout history already has it in certain place, one that the driver can find without looking, and the passenger can even reach, I think it's reasonable to standardize on it there.
And, also, it shouldn't be 'switch by wire'. It should be a nice mechanical thing that physically disconnects all electricity to all electric engines and gas pumps.
You still get some slowdown even in automatics.
Essentially, there's no reason not to stay in gear. It's entirely a waste of time to shift into neutral, and a distraction in an emergency. Turn off the key, and then brake.(1) Or, hell, coast to a stop.
Also, all automatics that I've ever seen in my entire life have a 1st and a 2nd on the gearshift. Which you should not shift into until you've slowed to about 30 MPH or so for 2, or you will blow up your transmission.
In fact, there's not really much of an advantage to do it manually...by the time you've gotten slow enough to do that, the situation is mostly under control. Just totally ignore your gearshift. Cut engine, coast/brake to a stop.
1) Now, if the key won't turn, feel free to not deal with it and shift into neutral instead.
Ah, that makes even more sense.
So if I start coasting down a hill with the car in gear, but without the engine operating, I should find myself with power steering. Likewise, if I do it with the car in neutral, I shouldn't get it.
I'll have to try that one day.
Anyway, anyone who runs out of power steering while trying to stop a car is not seriously trying to stop the car.
As I've said before, there are multiple kinds of distractions while driving.
There are eye distractions (tuning a radio), hand distractions (holding food), and concentration distractions (yelling at someone over a speaker phone, looking at a cop who pulled someone else over,etc)
A lot of regulations seem to be randomly concentrating on 'hand distractions' for no purpose I can make out. A better solution to those would be to provide drivers a place where they can safely put things, so only one hand is busy, instead of them attempting to juggle things. (And drivers can drive fine with one hand.) People need to set down their drink to eat their burrito.
Likewise, eye distractions can be reduced by more voice feedback in cars and more work on making controls people can operate without looking at them.
The biggest cause of accidents in cars, by far, is concentration distraction, where people could be concentrating on the road, there is absolutely nothing more important they're paying attention to. (The biggest reason is 'sleepy', in fact.)
Surveying doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It happens at a single point in time, which is fine for determining location, but sucky for determining distance.
Even things like driving on the inside or the outside of turns, which would be near impossible to determine via GPS, can amount to significant change in distance traveled. (Of course, this is nearly impossible for wheel measuring to get right either, as the wheels travel different distances on different sides of the car!)
I.e, 100% perfectly accurate GPS devices that figure out your position every five seconds will not give you 100% accurate distance. Whereas correctly calibrated wheels will. (And wear isn't as big an issue there as you seem to think. Calibrating every 1000 miles or so should be enough.)
If you're going to use lasers, though, they would actually be the best way to determine distance traveled. Just aim them at the ground, watch it go past, and, tada, you've solved all calibration problems involved in wheels. You can put them in the middle of the car, and you've solved the whole 'wheels traveling different distances' also. (As long as you're willing to accept 'how far the center of my car traveled' for 'how far my car traveled'.) Also you dealt with the skidding and whatnot of the wheels not moving.
The only problem would be stuff splashing down there over the optics.
I didn't say they needed a 'key'. I said the needed a switch that is operated the same way a key ignition is now, in the same place.
So people can find this never-before-used switch when their car is out of control and know how to operate it. Without looking.
No, it should not have any sort of protection on it. The number of people who randomly reach though their steering wheel and bump the key off currently is near zero, and I don't see why it would increase with a switch instead.
The key falling out is, indeed, an actual problem on really shitty cars, but not actually relevant if there's a switch without a key.
However, in either circumstance, the car can be stopped by putting it in neutral to retain power steering and braking, or by turning off the ignition.
Except in these Toyotas, where you can't actually put the car in 'neutral' without computer consent, which they won't give if you're driving down the road.
And, likewise, you can't cut the ignition unless you know the secret of holding the button down.
The problem here isn't out of control cars. Cars occasionally have weird errors. Throttles get stuck open, pedals get stuck down, whatever.
It's that no one trapped in these cars can actually figure out how to recover from these problems. Yes, we've always had morons unable to figure this out, who drive miles down the highway without being smart enough to turn off their car.
But now we're got perfectly rational and intelligent people saying "Okay, I shifted to neutral, and the car kept going, so that didn't work. And I push the 'engine' button to turn it off but, um, it kept running. Um...okay...I'm out of 'things to do when your car is driving by itself'."
A highway patrol officer should know how to take the car out of gear
Gears are controlled by computer, you cannot actually change gears, even though you think you are.
hit the brake
Which will rather quickly burn off. Which happened in this case. (A cop responding to the situation saw the brakes 'on fire', although I suspect they were just smoking.)
pull the parking break
He had that on. He rather quickly had no functioning brakes at all.
kill the ignition
He did not know how to do that, as apparently to force the ignition off you have to hold the start button down for several seconds.
This isn't some stupid user error. This is a car that sometimes gets stuck on full throttle for whatever reason(I think the floor mat explanation is nonsense, but we'll see), which is bad enough, but people are dying because people in the car can't figure how to turn it off
Like you said, a highway patrol officer does know what to do in a runaway car. He did what he could, and it didn't stop.
If the brakes can't hold back the little bit of torque any currently-produced Toyota can muster, the vehicle is probably unsafe to start with.
OTOH, there are a hell of a lot of people driving around with unsafe brakes.
Hey, morons. When your brakes make noise, they need looking at! Any noise! Brakes are not supposed to make noise! In fact, they needed looked at a few thousand miles ago, before they started making noise! Noise is bad!
Presumably current model-year Toyotas still have good brakes, though.
Really, all drivers need to have the various contingency plans in mind at all times.
What drivers need to do is practice in empty parking lots. I wish the government provided some sort of practice area, and I wish that assholes turning donuts didn't result in the police thinking that you driving around and braking randomly wasn't for some good purpose.
When I was at college, I had the good fortune of finding an empty, huge, out-of-the-way parking lot, and testing out my car in it, both in the rain and otherwise. I know roughly how my car can corner on wet ground, I know how to turn into a skid, I know how to stop my car with the accelerator floored, I tried all that stuff.
Good thing I did...anti-lock brakes do not behave like I expected to behave. (I expected them to be near-instant on and off, not the half-second pulses they actually are.) If they had ever come on and I hadn't experienced before, I'd probably think something was wrong with my brakes.
Seriously, that should be part of driver's ed. An actual government course where you test each thing. And the course should remain open for adults to sign up for and use, because cars change.
No, it shouldn't have a button...it should have a 'key', or, rather a switch that turns like a key. In the same place that keys normally are, on the steering column. Same amount of mechanical force to turn as a key.
I think we should mandate this by law. And that it be a mechanical disconnect for both gasoline and electrical drive systems. Where it physically disconnects the gas intake or distributor voltage, and it flips a switch that stops electric power from getting to the electrical engine. And both these should fail safe to the 'nonworking' position.
Car manufacturers, of course, would be free to leave this in the 'on' position, and implement whatever other ignition system they wanted on top of this. But that switch should be right there, ready to be rotated counter-clockwise if someone needs to disable their damn car from working in any manner until the switch is turned back.
In all the cars I've driven, if you cut the engine while it's still turning, you keep power steering.
I used to think that, I though that my power steering was operating off the movement of my wheels. Because it seemed to last as long as I was going forward.
Now I'm not so certain. I think what's actually going on is, like you said, all you can do with a stopped engine is make small corrections or the car stops anyway from losing momentum.
So a small reservoir of pressure would be more than enough to cover you until then.
One day, I need to find a hill with a slope and go down it in neutral with the engine off...and see if I magically gain power steering and braking halfway down. Or, safer, cut the engine, stop the car with the brakes, and see if I have power steering left to turn the wheels while parked.
Nonono.
If you kill the engine you should not shift to neutral.
That way the engine drag will slow you down.
Yeah, I'm getting confused too.
We're talking about a situation where the car is out of control here. We're not making right hand turns from a stop or anything. How much hard steering are you doing?
Seriously, on a car with a stopped engine, if you use up all the power steering pressure before you use up all the forward momentum, wow!
Same with power brakes. It is astonishing that someone can be going fast enough that their hydraulic assist can run out before the car is, in fact, stopped. Not as impossible as braking, someone going 120 mph downhill might, in fact, run out.
Which isn't that important, as you can still stop the car using non-powdered brakes, but whatever.
Erm, what are you talking about? Automatics can switch to neutral, and back, just fine while being driven.
I can even switch to neutral, cut the engine off and turn it back to the start position, flip back to drive, and recover, aka, a 'push start' like on the old manual transmission, although you have to 'push' the car at 20 mph or so, so it's not actually plausible to do by hand.
Granted, I've never tried it with a 'full open throttle', but that's because I, like most people, do not normally drive that way, having to obey laws of physics that govern how fast we can turn corners.
But all this is wrong, anyway, as switching to neutral is entirely the wrong thing to do in this situation. The correct thing to do is to turn the damn engine off and leave it in drive, so the engine will slow you down.
Of course, the poor saps in this story don't have a fucking ignition key, instead having to hold a button down for several seconds. (Holding a button down while driving an out of control car? Yeah, I'm sure that's doable.)
Indeed. All these people are talking about switching to neutral and braking and stuff.
Due, if your car is out of control, the very first thing you need to do is turn the engine off. For several reasons.
1) With your engine off, but car in gear, the engine operates as a brake on the car, slowing you down.
2) If your engine is redlining, the last thing you need do for it is switch it to neutral and thus entirely disconnect it from the drive system, allowing it to run as fast as possible, and possibly, blow up. Granted, a secondary concern to running into people, but still a concern.
3) It is at least slightly possible that something has gone horribly wrong under your hood, like a fuel injection that has blow up, and thus you don't want to continue, you know, sending gasoline up there, just a general rule.
Also, you shouldn't need the emergency brake to stop the car. Once you put stop the engine, normal braking should be more than enough. Emergency brakes are dangerous to use while driving, as you can end up spinning randomly. (Good luck getting out of a spin the emergency brake put you in.)
Now, WRT to these people, one of the problems is that their ignition is not key operated. They have to hold down a button to cut the thing off mid-run. A good idea for a computer, a mind-bogglingly bad idea for a car.
I think the government should mandate that all cars can be switched off via a 'switch'. (Which a key would count as.) They can, if they want, also turn on and off some other way, but somewhere close to the driver's right hand, where a key would normally be, there needs to be a thing they can grab and twist to make the damn car stop working, period. Mechanically stop working, cutting off gasoline and disconnecting electricity.
I once had the joy of a passenger knocking the transmission from drive to neutral while driving down the road. Incidentally, the reason you can do that without pushing the button is precisely so that you can put the car into neutral if something goes wrong. (And not worry about overshooting into reverse.)
Sounds fine, until you realize I was on cruise control, and my car apparently was built before they realized 'Hey, if the cruise control is on, and the car is not in gear, perhaps we shouldn't accelerate as hard as possible to attempt to impossibly reach that speed.'
Coping with a coasting car on a non-busy interstate is easy. Dealing with it while you're trying to figure out why your engine is about to explode is something else.
Considering that cars are not turned on when parked in driveways, it seems unlikely that any sort of computer control could vaguely be at issue.
Yes, the computer could have spontaneously turned the car on, and then spontaneously opened the throttle wide, but that seems incredibly implausible.
And, also, a stuck throttle shouldn't result in the car catching on fire anyway! It is very hard to blow up a car by running the engine. You essentially need the cooling system to fail. (And cars do not have 'cool-by-wire'.)
So, really, if you're looking to blame drive-by-wire, you're needing to postulate at least three serious failures, all at once. And at least one of them has to be mechanical.
A much simpler explanation is what BoneFlower said, a spark setting off leaking vapors, either gas or hydrogen.
If we followed KISS when building cars, you'd get about 12 MPG.
I'm frankly astonished that someone thinks a car with an electric engine is operated in some other way than electric wiring. WTF.
What other way could it possibly operate? Please, someone explain to me a non-'fly-by-wire' way to control the speed of an electric motor.
Oh, wait, I got one: The electric engine is on full the entire time, and has some sort of mechanical braking slowing it down that you move away with the gas pedal?
So you'd have to replace the mechanical brake every five minutes of operation. Ford wins an award for 'Worse engine design in the entire history of mankind', narrow beating out the styrofoam-and-paper-engine-block internal combustion engine.
Of course the irony there is such an absurd design would result in even more random acceleration.
I guess he could be assuming that the gas engine was still directly controlled by the gas pedal, which demonstrates an amazingly poor grasp of how hybrid cars work, but at least is within the realm of physics.
Except that the GPS does not measure 'distance traveled'.
It measures change in location, which is not the same thing at all. If I get in my car and drive five miles, I will probably end up 4 miles or less away from my house as measured by GPS. Roads are not straight. If it took me 5 minutes to get there, I drove at 60 mph, not 48 mph.
Now, the GPS tries to check location often enough that it is moderately correct, and tries to guess based on what road you're on. (I.e., it assumes you drove on a road instead of driving straight.)
But the inherent inaccuracy of GPS combined with the polling rate, and the inability of maps to include every twist and turn in the road, mean that it's never going to be as accurate as actually measuring how far the wheels traveled, which will exactly match the distance traveled. (Barring any fictionless movement like hydroplaning and skidding, but that's just silly nitpicking.)
The problem with measuring via the wheels, is that we're actually measuring via the axis, and people do not recalibrate their rotation calculation to the wheel diameter when their wheel changes size. If people would calibrate them, they'd be much more accurate than GPS.
Well, no, it can't really work like that in the Terminator universe.
If all trips were to another timeline, sending someone back to 'stop' the terminator in the first movie makes no sense. That terminator ended up in a universe where he won. You'd end up in a copy of that universe, which you could defeat it, but the 'original universe', where the terminator managed to kill Sarah Connor, still exists. (Or, more confusingly, Kyle could have ended up in an different copy of his past, and have no other terminator to fight.)
Trying to make sense of terminator time travel rules is pretty hard. They don't really make a lot of sense.
For it to work, you have to believe there's some sort of 'fated timeline', with time traveling humans and a Skynet losing the war. That no matter what, Skynet ends up happening, and ends up making a time machine.(Strictly speaking, we don't know who invented the time machine.) So we just essentially have an infinite number of loops until, at some point, we end up in a stable universe without some terminator running around in the past.
In fact, the premise requires that someone besides Connor original led the rebellion, as he couldn't have existed until someone else send Kyle Reese back. (Or possibly John Connor had a different father to start with.)
Incidentally, the last episode of the SCC had John end up in a future like that, so it is canonically possible for such a future to exist. Likewise, it had two people from the future running around who remembered different futures and they didn't know which future was which. (In fact, they came to the wrong conclusion, thinking they had just stopped the thing one of them remembered from happening when in fact they caused it.)
This raises an interesting idea: The T-100 from the second movie and the one from the third movie might, in fact, have been the 'same thing' from different timelines. In the T1 and T2 timeline, (1997 Judgment Day), a T-800 got sent back to kill Sarah, with Reese sent back to stop it. And a T-1000 got sent back to 1995 to kill John, with a reprogrammed T-800 to stop it.
In the T3 timeline (2004 Judgment Day), perhaps the same T-800 got sent back to kill Sarah, like before, but this time Skynet has a bit more information (There's a lot more computer information about the location of people saved in 2004 than 1997.) And, apparently, more technological advancement, so perhaps (the new) Skynet has a T-X instead of a T-1000, and instead of attempting to kill John in 1995, attempts to kill his lieutenants. And an T-800 is sent back to stop it...perhaps the 'same' T-800.
It's worth mentioning it's called a T-850 in T3 for some reason, but if technology is further along, as it clearly is, maybe it just has a different model number.