As a lot of people have said, apparently this car had no rapid, intuitive way to disengage the drive mechanism if the central computer stopped behaving. So none of that old-fashioned stuff that'd work your or my vehicles will work because the controls in the cockpit just ask the computer nicely instead of directly pushing bits of metal around to do the job.
That was a big safety issue with electric cars, which is that an electrical fault could cause the car to instantly go to full power. They generally have a prominently placed kill switch which triggers a heavy duty circuit breaker; I can't see why hybrids or any other drive-by-wire design should not have similar.
An impact into the ground is all but assured because the correction required of the pilot is completely unintuitive (exactly opposite of all training); requiring input which pilots know would classically make the problem far, far worse.
Unless, of course, the pilots spent their youth playing Tornado. Those aircraft had the nasty aerodynamic 'feature' that if you got into a tailspin, they couldn't get out in the conventional manner (by using pitch-up and rudder-out). Instead you had to pitch IN to the turn and essentially do a wing-over to get the plane aerodynamically stable again. Just hope to god you're high enough above the ground...
Your suggestions definitely improve things a lot, but there's still the potential for some physically very small fault to cause an arbitrarily large misbehaviour in the vehicle as a whole. I think I could probably tolerate it if the critical components were sealed 'smart' units which communicated metadata as well as raw measurements, giving a much more controlled failure mode.
At some stage, electronics will become more reliable than cables, statistically-wise. But I don't think we're there yet. And socially, it's going to cause dramas when we do get there. Think of the debate about automated cars. Thousands of people worldwide die in car crashes every day due to human error but the moment someone dies in a car driven by a computer, all hell will break loose.
If anybody wants to continue to hold that view, I would love to see some citations of credible studies.
I don't have any idea what training he received but you claimed he was "highly trained in offensive and defensive driving tactics". I stand by my statement that anyone aspiring to the level of "highly trained" should know several ways to deal with a stuck accelerator, especially if (as claimed by Toyota) it was simply being held down by a floor mat.
That if the cable gets wet, it has little effect on the car or its behaviour. On the other hand, otherwise-insignificant physical faults can be hugely amplified, even without significant mechanical failure occuring, if they cause electrical faults.
This is so people can feel important when they rev their noisy engine and/or signal a street race. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the Highlander includes the automatic throttle feature.
Sadly true. There was a big section of an article I read on the GM Volt about how they had the ICE running at a constant speed for maximum fuel efficiency, but they were going to change it to vary RPM with the car's speed and acceleration "to make it sound more like a normal car". Gah.
You and the parent can believe all you want, that does not make it true.
Let us take that case that got the Toyota floormat recall started, the Lexus that was going 120MPH on a San Diego freeway before it crashed. The car was driven by an off-duty CHP patrol officer and vehicle safety inspector. He was highly trained in offensive and defensive driving tactics.
And yet he was unable to reach forward with his right hand and pull the floor mat off the pedal? And this highly trained officer did not consider turning off the ignition, or pulling the car out of gear? I call shenanigans.
Shifting to neutral, steering, and braking in a coordinated fashion seems like a simple operation until you throw the iPod, cell phone, coffee cup, navigation unit, screaming kid, makeup, and stupidity into the equation.
Ignoring all that shit until the current emergency situation is over should be part of every driver's education. I bet there's a significant proportion of accidents which are due to the "driver was changing the radio station while drinking coffee and masturbating" factor.
I have to say that the decline in manual transmission driving has really diminished people's driving abilities. It's one thing that the there's an acceleration issue. It's another thing to not consider putting the car in neutral when something like this is encountered.
If the cable goes, I can replace it fairly cheap. It's much more expensive to replace the more exotic parts.
Also, if the cable gets wet, you have a wet cable. If the leads to the potentiometer have cracked insulation and get shorted out by dirty water or contact with metal, you have a hard open throttle. I know which I'd rather have.
This is why drive-by-wire stuff is scary. Power assist is fine, but if your hydraulic power steering loses pressure you can still steer the car (even if the steering is much heavier). Vacuum-assisted braking has enough storage to last 2-3 brake pedal pushes, and after that the brakes still function even if they too are much heavier. Antilock braking is scary enough even though it's comparatively failsafe. Handing over complete control of any further automotive function to a computer is goddamn terrifying.
Interesting. In Australia our design rules for road vehicles stipulate "within 10% for speeds over 40km/h" or something. That's one of the main arguments about speed cameras with stupidly tight tolerances here - you can think you're doing 100km/h in a 100km/h zone and actually be doing 110km/h, even if your speedo is within ADR specifications, but you can be booked for as little as 5km/h over the limit if they feel like being douchebags.
You need more +insightful. Note also that the shitty TV-Weekly-$13.95-a-week box that the second group are trying to install Linux on barely functions with Windows either and is probably being reinstalled with Linux because it fried its own hard drive to try and escape from the pain of existence.
I've always hand-picked components for my PCs to ensure that specs match, they're all compatible, they're not bargain basement dodgy hardware. I've never had any real hardware issues with Windows, and I haven't had any with Linux for the last 2-3 years either. I've always thought these three things were interrelated in some way.
While I agree with the rest of your sentiment, when it costs $400 for Windows 7 and it costs $400 for a new mid-level consumer box, I think it pretty much CAN be both. If it supports only new hardware, but the new hardware costs no more than Windows 7 would, then it's still a win for Linux.
(Disclaimer: I ran Ubuntu Fiesty then Intrepid for two years. Currently running Windows 7 RC at home, will switch back to the most recent stable Ubuntu when the Win7 RC runs out. I love Win7 but I'm not paying four hundred bucks for it when I could spend that money on beer. Wow... see what I did there? Linux = 'free' beer!:)
I had my first lines blow when the truck was only 7 years old
I somehow read that as 'I had my first line of blow when I was only 7 years old'. It's probably a good thing that I stayed home sick today. Damn you, bacteria!
Nothing I've ever driven in. My first car was a Mitsubishi Sigma station wagon (yeah the 1.8L engine, it was a slug and used as much fuel getting from 0 - 100km/h in about 12 leisurely seconds as my Supra does doing it in 7) and my second is a MA71 Supra. I've been driving the Supra harder than any car would deserve for the last 8 years and I've still never had a moment where I thought "that was the car's fault" rather than "that was MY fault, sorry baby, but you saved my ass and I promise not to do it again".
To calculate speed of dropping off 10 story building, we assume 2.5 metres per story (which is about average here in the UK), and use the equation v^2 = u^2 + 2as where initial velocity u = 0, acceleration a = g ~= 10ms^-2, and displacement s = 25m, so v^2 ~= 500 m^2s^-2 => v = about 22ms^-1
The difference between our estimates came in because I said roughly 4m per story whereas you chose 2.5, so I got a higher speed. In the name of science I thank you for checking my figures, peer review is what makes the system work.:)
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Oh, that was meant to be 'anti-China'? I was wondering wth this "chain" thing was... and I can see why they would want to tax gold farmers.
As a lot of people have said, apparently this car had no rapid, intuitive way to disengage the drive mechanism if the central computer stopped behaving. So none of that old-fashioned stuff that'd work your or my vehicles will work because the controls in the cockpit just ask the computer nicely instead of directly pushing bits of metal around to do the job.
That was a big safety issue with electric cars, which is that an electrical fault could cause the car to instantly go to full power. They generally have a prominently placed kill switch which triggers a heavy duty circuit breaker; I can't see why hybrids or any other drive-by-wire design should not have similar.
Sounds to me like the fail modes on that particular car model are tantamount to negligent homicide. Blech.
An impact into the ground is all but assured because the correction required of the pilot is completely unintuitive (exactly opposite of all training); requiring input which pilots know would classically make the problem far, far worse.
Unless, of course, the pilots spent their youth playing Tornado. Those aircraft had the nasty aerodynamic 'feature' that if you got into a tailspin, they couldn't get out in the conventional manner (by using pitch-up and rudder-out). Instead you had to pitch IN to the turn and essentially do a wing-over to get the plane aerodynamically stable again. Just hope to god you're high enough above the ground...
Your suggestions definitely improve things a lot, but there's still the potential for some physically very small fault to cause an arbitrarily large misbehaviour in the vehicle as a whole. I think I could probably tolerate it if the critical components were sealed 'smart' units which communicated metadata as well as raw measurements, giving a much more controlled failure mode.
At some stage, electronics will become more reliable than cables, statistically-wise. But I don't think we're there yet. And socially, it's going to cause dramas when we do get there. Think of the debate about automated cars. Thousands of people worldwide die in car crashes every day due to human error but the moment someone dies in a car driven by a computer, all hell will break loose.
If anybody wants to continue to hold that view, I would love to see some citations of credible studies.
I don't have any idea what training he received but you claimed he was "highly trained in offensive and defensive driving tactics". I stand by my statement that anyone aspiring to the level of "highly trained" should know several ways to deal with a stuck accelerator, especially if (as claimed by Toyota) it was simply being held down by a floor mat.
That if the cable gets wet, it has little effect on the car or its behaviour. On the other hand, otherwise-insignificant physical faults can be hugely amplified, even without significant mechanical failure occuring, if they cause electrical faults.
This is so people can feel important when they rev their noisy engine and/or signal a street race. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the Highlander includes the automatic throttle feature.
Sadly true. There was a big section of an article I read on the GM Volt about how they had the ICE running at a constant speed for maximum fuel efficiency, but they were going to change it to vary RPM with the car's speed and acceleration "to make it sound more like a normal car". Gah.
You and the parent can believe all you want, that does not make it true.
Let us take that case that got the Toyota floormat recall started, the Lexus that was going 120MPH on a San Diego freeway before it crashed. The car was driven by an off-duty CHP patrol officer and vehicle safety inspector. He was highly trained in offensive and defensive driving tactics.
And yet he was unable to reach forward with his right hand and pull the floor mat off the pedal? And this highly trained officer did not consider turning off the ignition, or pulling the car out of gear? I call shenanigans.
Shifting to neutral, steering, and braking in a coordinated fashion seems like a simple operation until you throw the iPod, cell phone, coffee cup, navigation unit, screaming kid, makeup, and stupidity into the equation.
Ignoring all that shit until the current emergency situation is over should be part of every driver's education. I bet there's a significant proportion of accidents which are due to the "driver was changing the radio station while drinking coffee and masturbating" factor.
I have to say that the decline in manual transmission driving has really diminished people's driving abilities. It's one thing that the there's an acceleration issue. It's another thing to not consider putting the car in neutral when something like this is encountered.
Or even just turn the keys off.
If the cable goes, I can replace it fairly cheap. It's much more expensive to replace the more exotic parts.
Also, if the cable gets wet, you have a wet cable. If the leads to the potentiometer have cracked insulation and get shorted out by dirty water or contact with metal, you have a hard open throttle. I know which I'd rather have.
This is why drive-by-wire stuff is scary. Power assist is fine, but if your hydraulic power steering loses pressure you can still steer the car (even if the steering is much heavier). Vacuum-assisted braking has enough storage to last 2-3 brake pedal pushes, and after that the brakes still function even if they too are much heavier. Antilock braking is scary enough even though it's comparatively failsafe. Handing over complete control of any further automotive function to a computer is goddamn terrifying.
Interesting. In Australia our design rules for road vehicles stipulate "within 10% for speeds over 40km/h" or something. That's one of the main arguments about speed cameras with stupidly tight tolerances here - you can think you're doing 100km/h in a 100km/h zone and actually be doing 110km/h, even if your speedo is within ADR specifications, but you can be booked for as little as 5km/h over the limit if they feel like being douchebags.
Wow. O.o I bow to your superior Middle Earth lore. Well played!
So you probably meant 'Arwen'? ;)
...sorry, I'm in an irritatingly pedantic mood today. :P
Unless you were referring to Eleanor, daughter of Samwise Gamgee?
Only 'alf a silver', that's cuttin' me own throat that is!
I came here to say this exact thing. I guess little Timothy will be alright after all. :)
Linux has great hardware support. Ergo, if your hardware isn't great, it is not supported.
A real Scotsman would support this hardware.
Or to put it another way...
Stane: Tony Stark could support this hardware IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
Hardware: But... I'm not Tony Stark, sir.
You need more +insightful. Note also that the shitty TV-Weekly-$13.95-a-week box that the second group are trying to install Linux on barely functions with Windows either and is probably being reinstalled with Linux because it fried its own hard drive to try and escape from the pain of existence.
I've always hand-picked components for my PCs to ensure that specs match, they're all compatible, they're not bargain basement dodgy hardware. I've never had any real hardware issues with Windows, and I haven't had any with Linux for the last 2-3 years either. I've always thought these three things were interrelated in some way.
Which is it? It can't be both.
While I agree with the rest of your sentiment, when it costs $400 for Windows 7 and it costs $400 for a new mid-level consumer box, I think it pretty much CAN be both. If it supports only new hardware, but the new hardware costs no more than Windows 7 would, then it's still a win for Linux.
:)
(Disclaimer: I ran Ubuntu Fiesty then Intrepid for two years. Currently running Windows 7 RC at home, will switch back to the most recent stable Ubuntu when the Win7 RC runs out. I love Win7 but I'm not paying four hundred bucks for it when I could spend that money on beer. Wow... see what I did there? Linux = 'free' beer!
I had my first lines blow when the truck was only 7 years old
I somehow read that as 'I had my first line of blow when I was only 7 years old'. It's probably a good thing that I stayed home sick today. Damn you, bacteria!
Wait 'til you hear "roll and rock"!
Nothing I've ever driven in. My first car was a Mitsubishi Sigma station wagon (yeah the 1.8L engine, it was a slug and used as much fuel getting from 0 - 100km/h in about 12 leisurely seconds as my Supra does doing it in 7) and my second is a MA71 Supra. I've been driving the Supra harder than any car would deserve for the last 8 years and I've still never had a moment where I thought "that was the car's fault" rather than "that was MY fault, sorry baby, but you saved my ass and I promise not to do it again".
Yeah I heard last time lithium ions weren't positive, all HELL broke loose.
Just wanted to check this out:
100kmh^-1 = 27.78 ms^-1.
To calculate speed of dropping off 10 story building, we assume 2.5 metres per story (which is about average here in the UK), and use the equation v^2 = u^2 + 2as where initial velocity u = 0, acceleration a = g ~= 10ms^-2, and displacement s = 25m, so v^2 ~= 500 m^2s^-2 => v = about 22ms^-1
The difference between our estimates came in because I said roughly 4m per story whereas you chose 2.5, so I got a higher speed. In the name of science I thank you for checking my figures, peer review is what makes the system work. :)