Electronics are developed to make a car safer and easier to control. But it can also lead to many frustrations, or worse, tragedies. What is more annoying then a button that doesn’t respond to your actions?! Now imagine this button is the way to turn of your engine when you are driving on the highway and your car starts accelerating and can not do anything about it. I refer hereby towards an earlier post: “To brake or not to brake”. This story is unfortunately not less then true.
If there is some kind of defect in your electronic system or anything else at your vehicle, it will be tested with a testing device to see what’s wrong. But what if your car had some serious malfunctioning issues and you don’t even get an error when testing. You can see what I am talking about at the next link.
Here they made a short somewhere in the electronic circuit of a Toyota car, making the vehicle uncontrollable and the outcome of the testing device was that the vehicle was in perfect shape. This is of course unacceptable!
In all new vehicles every pedal, every handle, every switch is fly-by-wire. This has some advantages like no damages of usage due to friction, mechanical forces and torsion. On the other hand, if your electronics are dead as a result of a bug in the program or maybe from a destructive electromagnetic pulse, you can start praying. For this reason I prefer a car that always still has a mechanical emergency brake to save your life when you are in great difficulty.
It is of course good that an electronic system is monitoring the entire car. This means measuring every parameter that has any kind of importance to insure smooth and safe driving. But developers of these systems must be aware of flaws not only in their program code, but also hardware glitches and disturbances, caused by vibrations etc.
On the next blog are some further interesting posts about automotive controls.
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