The article mentions he's epileptic and the car is modified for disabled drivers. I'm guessing its got an automatic transmission.
When it mentioned he had two seizures during the situation, I'm actually wondering if he was having a seizure and the whole time and depressing the accelerator without even realizing it.
You don't generally have a non-stop seizure for over an hour, and you certainly don't make phone calls to the police while you're having one.
Electronic engine stops do not operate while the car is in-gear and moving - for safety reasons as doing a full engine shutdown by accident by knocking the button could have catastrophic results
I'm not sure if all the people who recommend the kill switch/take out the key option have thought through what would happen if you did that in a vehicle travelling at high speed where you couldn't change gear/brake/throttle first.
It would be instructive to see a stunt driver or someone actually do this, but I can't imagine it ending well.
I can't see why not, motorbikes have had this sort of thing for over thirty years and even brand new bikes with all the whiz bang electrickery & dual
clutches, etc STILL have a manual kill switch that cuts the ignition.
I wouldn't recommend hitting the kill switch on a motorbike going 125mph if the clutch isn't working...
I think it is way past time for us (as in every country on Earth) to pass laws that ban any further manufacture of vehicles that lack a mechanical key switch and mandate that any existing vehicles be modified by the manufacturer to comply with that law within six months, or else those vehicles are no longer allowed to be driven on public roads.
And who, pray tell, would be paying for these modifications?
It is one thing to put forth a requirement on future vehicles but it is another thing to expect that all existing vehicles be modified.
Or even better you could just press down on the clutch pedal to completely separate the engine from the transmission and then just let friction or hills gradually slow you down.
Yeah, I'm sure the driver, police and Renault engineers in this case never thought of that one.
If you want a fun experience try driving a motorbike with a broken clutch cable. You really need to time your gear changes down carefully. For bonus fun, have the front brake cable snap as well.
You know how if you yank on the handbrake (i.e. independent rear wheel brake) in a car you do a cool 180 degree spin (if you're lucky)? It's best to avoid that on a 'bike.
It's scary enough on a dirt bike going 20mph, Christ knows what it would be like at 125mph. And if it was all electronic so that you lost control of clutch, brake and throttle together you really would have to hope for a long steep hill.
And, no, sliding against the central reservation isn't an option.
Not to mention that the brakes in all cars are more powerful than the engines. A couple of years ago after the claims that Toyota's were accelerating on their own, Car and Driver decided to take several cars out, get them up to 100 mph and then hit the brakes while keeping the throttle floored. Every car stopped just fine, even the modified Mustang Cobra that had 700 HP was able to stop, albeit it took a few hundred feet.
All of these incidents are people who simply don't know how their vehicle operates.
That's fine if your throttle and brakes are working properly. If when you apply the brakes the car's computer instead speeds you up, that option is out.
And as many other people here have pointed out, the car didn't have a conventional key, and pressing the on/off button didn't work either.
Not all cars have a kill switch you can just shut things down.
And that's the problem right there then.
Car designers obviously don't watch enough James Bond films. The rocket/nuclear missile/whatever launch computer always has a big red "abort" button. Mind you, it's generally linked to some sort of self-destruct sequence, so maybe it's not entirely a good idea.
All the people here saying "why didn't he just shift to neutral" should first read TFA. It was a vehicle modified for a disabled driver, evidently something went wrong that couldn't be over-ridden manually due to a design error.
Hey, give the guy a break - those high-class hookers are expensive!
If you've got three hundred million dollars, I seriously doubt that paying for hookers is a problem. You can take this in either of two ways, I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
At that level, you don't really have "friends" in companies that have got rid of you. I don't imagine anyone working at RIM/Blackberry would risk any contact with him at all. I certainly wouldn't in their shoes.
Because the "experimental GPS tracking ribbons" still work when you take the battery out, man! You need to keep your phone in tinfoil if you want to keep your privacy
By the time you read about it on Slashdot, it's a billion years past any market relevance.
Shock news, slashdot isn't a real time source of insider info for all the armchair stock jockeys who've doubled their money by buying Apple a decade ago and think they're Gordon Gecko.
If sure if someone sent all 3 of them a $25 gift card to Applebees they'd abdicate willingly.
I know that slashdotters find this hard to believe, but Blackberry have a strong customer base, albeit they're not the top dog any more. Just because they're unfashionable compared with Apple/Android from a techy point of view, in places like the UK Blackberries are the phone of choice for teenagers because they are the best for texting.
If he's left the company why shouldn't he cash out his shares?
You have an awfully romantic view about business leaders if you think they let sentiment about being a "founder" get in the way of making money. It probably turned out that from a tax planning point of view, that was the right thing to do at the right time.
If he was still an employee, fair enough, he'd have to tow the party line.
You could just about put some text into it. It's like looking at the source code to Word for DOS 5 and saying "Is this any good to anyone?" No. Not really. Maybe 20 years ago, but now it's so obsolete we don't even use the program itself, let alone the code that makes it, and haven't for 15 years.
But wouldn't it be educational for someone who was going to write a word processor to see what you could achieve with 640K RAM and 720K floppy disk storage limits?
Another way of putting it is that "no one outside professionals who want to actually publish their work gives a damn."
You can pretend that everything is just published on the internet and printing is just something old people do all you like, it is simply not the case yet.
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The article mentions he's epileptic and the car is modified for disabled drivers. I'm guessing its got an automatic transmission. When it mentioned he had two seizures during the situation, I'm actually wondering if he was having a seizure and the whole time and depressing the accelerator without even realizing it.
You don't generally have a non-stop seizure for over an hour, and you certainly don't make phone calls to the police while you're having one.
Electronic engine stops do not operate while the car is in-gear and moving - for safety reasons as doing a full engine shutdown by accident by knocking the button could have catastrophic results
I'm not sure if all the people who recommend the kill switch/take out the key option have thought through what would happen if you did that in a vehicle travelling at high speed where you couldn't change gear/brake/throttle first.
It would be instructive to see a stunt driver or someone actually do this, but I can't imagine it ending well.
I can't see why not, motorbikes have had this sort of thing for over thirty years and even brand new bikes with all the whiz bang electrickery & dual clutches, etc STILL have a manual kill switch that cuts the ignition.
I wouldn't recommend hitting the kill switch on a motorbike going 125mph if the clutch isn't working...
I think it is way past time for us (as in every country on Earth) to pass laws that ban any further manufacture of vehicles that lack a mechanical key switch and mandate that any existing vehicles be modified by the manufacturer to comply with that law within six months, or else those vehicles are no longer allowed to be driven on public roads.
And who, pray tell, would be paying for these modifications?
It is one thing to put forth a requirement on future vehicles but it is another thing to expect that all existing vehicles be modified.
I know, let the free market sort it out!
Or even better you could just press down on the clutch pedal to completely separate the engine from the transmission and then just let friction or hills gradually slow you down.
Yeah, I'm sure the driver, police and Renault engineers in this case never thought of that one.
You know how if you yank on the handbrake (i.e. independent rear wheel brake) in a car you do a cool 180 degree spin (if you're lucky)? It's best to avoid that on a 'bike.
It's scary enough on a dirt bike going 20mph, Christ knows what it would be like at 125mph. And if it was all electronic so that you lost control of clutch, brake and throttle together you really would have to hope for a long steep hill.
And, no, sliding against the central reservation isn't an option.
Not to mention that the brakes in all cars are more powerful than the engines. A couple of years ago after the claims that Toyota's were accelerating on their own, Car and Driver decided to take several cars out, get them up to 100 mph and then hit the brakes while keeping the throttle floored. Every car stopped just fine, even the modified Mustang Cobra that had 700 HP was able to stop, albeit it took a few hundred feet. All of these incidents are people who simply don't know how their vehicle operates.
That's fine if your throttle and brakes are working properly. If when you apply the brakes the car's computer instead speeds you up, that option is out.
And as many other people here have pointed out, the car didn't have a conventional key, and pressing the on/off button didn't work either.
Not being able to remove it seems like a pretty stupid feature. I can't think of any reason why it should lock in place.
You can't just pull the conventional key straight out of most vehicles either. It's not something you'd want to do accidentally.
Here is the dashboard, where are these "ON" and "ACC" that you're referring to?
Maybe he should have just pressed the "Eject" button.
Or he could just have engaged the anti-grav system, gone into warp drive or travelled back in time and not got in the car in the first place.
To me, an emergency brake is the guardrail... It will do a good job slowing a vehicle down, although the results definitely won't be pretty.
Unless you're an experienced stunt driver, this is more than likely going to end up with you crashing and dying.
I think it is self evident that in this case, it was a modified car (for a disabled driver) and something went wrong.
[*] And not, say, Paris, Texas.
Not all cars have a kill switch you can just shut things down.
And that's the problem right there then.
Car designers obviously don't watch enough James Bond films. The rocket/nuclear missile/whatever launch computer always has a big red "abort" button. Mind you, it's generally linked to some sort of self-destruct sequence, so maybe it's not entirely a good idea.
All the people here saying "why didn't he just shift to neutral" should first read TFA. It was a vehicle modified for a disabled driver, evidently something went wrong that couldn't be over-ridden manually due to a design error.
So, why does France issue Driver's Licenses to people subject to epileptic seizures?
They probably just pass it off as wild Gallic gesticulating.
Hey, give the guy a break - those high-class hookers are expensive!
If you've got three hundred million dollars, I seriously doubt that paying for hookers is a problem. You can take this in either of two ways, I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
At that level, you don't really have "friends" in companies that have got rid of you. I don't imagine anyone working at RIM/Blackberry would risk any contact with him at all. I certainly wouldn't in their shoes.
"it's human nature to expect that the people who fired you are know-nothing idiots who will drive the truck into the ditch."
And sometimes it's true. When they fired me on my past job I gave them two to three years. They folded after two years and six months.
But maybe if they hadn't fired you they'd have folded after six months.
Because the "experimental GPS tracking ribbons" still work when you take the battery out, man! You need to keep your phone in tinfoil if you want to keep your privacy
At last, the voice of reason!
By the time you read about it on Slashdot, it's a billion years past any market relevance.
Shock news, slashdot isn't a real time source of insider info for all the armchair stock jockeys who've doubled their money by buying Apple a decade ago and think they're Gordon Gecko.
If sure if someone sent all 3 of them a $25 gift card to Applebees they'd abdicate willingly.
I know that slashdotters find this hard to believe, but Blackberry have a strong customer base, albeit they're not the top dog any more. Just because they're unfashionable compared with Apple/Android from a techy point of view, in places like the UK Blackberries are the phone of choice for teenagers because they are the best for texting.
You have an awfully romantic view about business leaders if you think they let sentiment about being a "founder" get in the way of making money. It probably turned out that from a tax planning point of view, that was the right thing to do at the right time.
If he was still an employee, fair enough, he'd have to tow the party line.
You could just about put some text into it. It's like looking at the source code to Word for DOS 5 and saying "Is this any good to anyone?" No. Not really. Maybe 20 years ago, but now it's so obsolete we don't even use the program itself, let alone the code that makes it, and haven't for 15 years.
But wouldn't it be educational for someone who was going to write a word processor to see what you could achieve with 640K RAM and 720K floppy disk storage limits?
noone outside the print industry gives a damn
Another way of putting it is that "no one outside professionals who want to actually publish their work gives a damn."
You can pretend that everything is just published on the internet and printing is just something old people do all you like, it is simply not the case yet.
The 98 machine boots almost instantly and opening windows are instant
If you run it on a 2012 machine, you're probably right. It didn't on the hardware around at the time.