Another EV goes haywire!

Why not ban Cursitor Doom? There's nothing specific to electric cars that makes them any more prone to have their control systems go haywire than internal combustion-engined cars.

Taking out the ignition key usually seems to work when my ( internal combustion-engined) car decides to turn it's cruise control on. One has to wonder why the driver didn't try it.

Perhaps Cursitor Doom hasn't had to cope with a modern car yet. Mine is about ten years old, so it isn't all that modern, but it did come with all kinds of programmed bells and whistles

He like the attention, that's all.

On many (most?) cars, that would lock the steering.

Mines coming up to 20 years old. The central locking hasn't worked for years and one door won't lock at all. The dashboard display sometimes spontaneously starts using German, and the rear wiper has a mind of its own. It's a Citroen, of course.

"MG malfunctioned" is perfectly normal. That's not news.

I wish my MGs would have kept going at 15 MPH.

I did once make it from the top of Mt Tamalpias back home to my apartment in San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, with no clutch.

More likely "programmer designed."

The programmers that I know, mostly male, can type way faster than they can think.

Are you talking about MGs - or "MGs" (the ones made nowadays in China). Classic MGs rarely give any trouble provided they're maintained regularly. Perhaps it's harder to get the proper spares for them in the US.

My ICE car won't allow me to take the key out whilst it's in motion, Bill, and it's 20 years old. This is nothing new. Your car must be a bit like you: peculiar.

Perhaps not, but when they do go wrong, the results can be catestrophic because of the huge amount of energy in the battery. It's curious how Teslas have the propensity to burst into flame then lock all the doors. I suppose that *could* somehow happen with an ICE car, but I've never heard of such an incident involving one. And the charging infrastructure just isn't there. EV sales as a proportion of overall car sales are falling now in the UK and Europe because of all sorts of mounting concerns. I personally would give EVs another 10 years, so all the issues surrounding them can be ironed out. I for one certainly won't be wasting my money on one any time soon and by the time I am I'll probably be to old to safely get behind a wheel anyway.

I can't tell which URL the f****it Doom has pointed at, but this one does look like a massive software MFU. The police got him to throw his key fob out of the window and then do a hard reset by holding the ignition button in for 10s - the result was every indicator on the dash lit up. But the car kept on going. Unlike the usual foot on the wrong pedal game this one looks to be a car with software that was total crap (but then it was an MG so what do you expect?).

They finally stopped it by running him into a soft matched speed collision with a police van and then applying their brakes.

The car still tried to move forward but was constrained. They could only disable it by switching off the main supply and the repair man wasn't keen to do anything other than take it away on a trailer. The error messages in the log file ran into many pages. It is a pretty good example of why fly by wire isn't sensible in consumer grade items.

I always insisted on having physical interlocks when I was in the firing line for high powered lasers. I don't trust electronics not to glitch and I certainly don't trust firmware or software!

I do trust a big heavy physical beam stop with a huge heat sink especially when my padlock is locked on it and the key in my pocket.

ISTR the US lost a very expensive stealth aircraft due to similar coding problems or an unspecified and classified malfunction fairly recently and had to appeal to the public to help find its wreckage.

Software is usually the cause of such malfunctions in high end kit.

It was an MG, for Christ's sake!!! No one expects them to work without failure!!!

That's not unique to programmers.

He clearly does, who in their right mind would want to get attention for endorsing a string of fatuous ideas?

Didn't in mine. And you shouldn't have to take it out for long to reset the control processor.

Never owned one. I liked Peugeot's and the current car is a Merc (wife's choice). Citroens always seems to be a bit too idiosyncratic - one of my mates lost his when his garage put regular brake fluid into the hydraulic system, which utterly wrecked it (for all practical purposes - you'd have had to dismantled the car to replace all the individual parts that it wrecked and the car wasn't worth the cost of the labour involved).

If they could think, they wouldn't be working for John Larkin. The ones I knew, of both sexes, were pretty bright.

It's a Mercedes 180B. If it's peculiar, it peculiar in a positive way.

Internal combustion-engined cars have exactly the same amount of energy stored in the petrol tank, and have been invoolved i catastrophic fires since they were first introduced.

Ask any source of misleading information and they will repeat this story. It doesn't make it true.

The ICE car industry doesn't pay people to spread that partiuclar bit of misleading misinformation.

Yet.

Since they aren't, my only concern is where you got your misinformation. Perhaps you invented it.

So now we known what a gullible idiot would do.

You are driving a twenty-year-old car. Clearly you haven't got any money to waste. If your driving is as confused as your thinking, you shouldn't be allowed to control a shopping trolley, let alone a car.

It's been very well looked after. I have a lot of servicing and maintentance invested in it and I hate to waste anything (shadow of WW2 rationing) so I plan to run it for as long as it can safely keep going. I've been very pleased with it and nothing out there today appeals in the least.

And you couldn't afford it if it did.

Yeah, whatever.

Fair comment. But you could easily say the same thing about American manufacturing in that same period.

Where will you get gasoline? It's not like gas stations will be staying open for people like you. By 2040 EVs will be over 95% of the cars on the road, which means only 1 in 20 gas stations will be open. Soon after that, it will be none.