MG ZS EV X | | Photo by Chanokchon
And you thought your last software crash was bad
Brian Morrison ended up a prisoner in his own new MG electric car that wouldn’t stop. He could steer, but the brakes didn’t work, and he couldn’t turn it off. At one point he threw the car keys into the police van driving beside him, which had come to help, but even that didn’t stop the motor. This was not meant to be a self-driving car.
Tragedy was averted this time because it was 10:30 at night, the road was empty and the police had time to stop it. But what if this fault occurred in normal traffic and the EV drove through a red light, or a pedestrian?
By Rory Tingle at The Daily Mail:
I was kidnapped by my runaway electric car
Terrified motorist, 53, reveals his new £30,000 MG ZS EV ‘began driving itself’ after suffering ‘catastrophic malfunction’ – forcing him to dial 999 and crash it into a police van to get it to stop
Brian Morrison, 53, claims he was heading home from work at around 10pm on Sunday when his new Chinese-made fully electric car began driving itself at 30mph.
‘I have mobility issues, so I couldn’t even jump out – I was completely trapped inside the car going at 30mph.
‘So eventually three police vehicles arrived and were driving in front of me and behind me.
Mr Morrison said: ‘After trying to shut the car down, my entire dashboard lit up with faults, and then it all went away after a second and just had a big red car symbol that said “drive safely, stop driving immediately” or something.
After the car was forcibly stopped it still launched itself forward if given the chance. The RAC mechanic plugged in his diagnostic machine and declared it had “pages of faults” and wasn’t game to turn the engine on.
Before we thank our lucky stars that it worked out OK, we have to ask: how do we know this hasn’t happened before? It was the first time the emergency call centre had dealt with this issue, but if the EV had crashed and killed the driver before they could call, would the accident investigation squad even look for software bugs, or would they just say “they ran the red light”?
David says: “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out the window”.*
Coming soon to electric cars:
Photo: Marcin Wichary
Imagine if we brought 100,000 two-ton vehicles from a foreign adversary…
h/t Dennis
*A quote from Steve Wozniak.