Car in the kitchen

fivetide

Amazing story this.

Car apparently goes crazy, revving like mad and rather than turn the engine off the owner tries to put the autobox in park (presumably without any brakes applied) but when it gets to reverse it shoots backwards, across the road, through a wall and demolishes a kitchen.

Anyone else not quite sure about that story?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-25963780

andy111

Very common, usually elderly driver.

Conclusion is always they mistakenly floor the throttle thinking it is the brake.

Netwizard

Sounds like this might have happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine_runaway

unless they just messed up

dibuzz

Surely you would just leave it in neutral and use the handbrake then turn the engine off.
It sounds to me like she just panicked.

Stooby2

Pedal confusion. Not uncommon with elderly people and automatics. She probably still can't work out what happened.

forgotmyname

Probably got the tax disc reminder form and thought im not paying that much.. £260..

If the engine is revving above a set point wont that prevent it from going into gear? Some of my old autos used to have a rev limit where above that you couldnt move the lever.

Also rev the engine in gear it would stall if the revs were too high also.

Lum

Netwizard wrote: »

Sounds like this might have happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine_runaway

unless they just messed up

Or they own a Toyota:
http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences

(Yes I realise it's a Citroen in this story, but I don't believe for one second that the poor practices in the above article are unique to just one manufacturer)

Unintentional RTOS task shutdown was heavily investigated as a potential source of the [Unintended Acceleration]. As single bits in memory control each task, corruption due to HW or SW faults will suspend needed tasks or start unwanted ones. Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration.
A litany of other faults were found in the code, including buffer overflow, unsafe casting, and race conditions between tasks.