Runaway Toyotas! (and high-tech cars in general)

[Fuse 11]

From the L.A. Times:Toyota's runaway-car worries may not stop at floor mats

A fatal accident in San Diego raises the question: Might a vehicle's complex electronic features make it hard for drivers to react quickly when accelerating out of control?

The Saylor crash and others like it across the country, they say, point to a troubling possibility: that Toyota's ignition, transmission and braking systems may make it difficult for drivers to combat sudden or unintended accelerations and safely recover, regardless of their cause.

Toyota is not the only car company to be hit with reports of sudden acceleration, but the San Diego fatality, the massive recall that came in its wake and Toyota's position as the world's largest automaker have focused intense scrutiny on the company by federal safety regulators and others.

One remedy being considered by Toyota implicitly acknowledges what critics have been saying for almost 10 years: that the company's highly computerized engine control system lacks a fail-safe mechanism that can quickly extinguish sudden acceleration events, whether they are caused by floor mats, driver errors or even unknown defects in the electronic control system, as alleged in some lawsuits.

One possible remedy is to redesign the accelerator pedal to make it harder to get caught by a floor mat, he said. Another potential fix, he said, involves reprogramming the engine's computer to automatically cut power when a driver brakes while the gas pedal is depressed.

Such fail-safes are needed, auto experts say, because sudden acceleration can cause drivers to panic, diminishing their ability to take swift action -- such as shutting off the engine or shifting into neutral.

The smart's floor-mounted accelerator pedal is by design resistant to getting trapped under floor mats.
Shifting into neutral is a simple and consistent motion of the gear shift (in both Automatic and Manual modes): whack it to the right and shove forward until it hits the reverse-lockout gate. (In D, the rightward whack is just an instant's wasted motion, but in a crisis you have to assume the worst case).
And the ignition key will positively shut the engine -- and everything else -- down.

My only question is, what does the transmission do when you turn the car off while it's moving? Shift into neutral? Park? Stay in the same gear? (I don't suggest anyone try this at home, but if you already did it once, let us know what happened!)

In any case, this is probably a virtue of smart being one of the early-adopters of electronic controls (shift- and throttle-by wire): they knew they were doing something different, and were conservative in their implementation -- they didn't even put in a cruise control! Later designers took it for granted, and may have added their bells and whistles to the basic technology without thoroughly evaluating the implications.

-Rusty

[rfernatt]

I've accidentally shut my car down on the highway (my wife bumped the key) and everything was fine. I coasted to the side of the road, shifted the trans into P, turned the key all the way off, and then restarted. Everything worked fine and didn't seem to be any worse for the wear.