[SystemSafety] Yet another supposedly-runaway car

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 3/7/13 11:27 AM, Nancy Leveson wrote:
> It did happen 20 years ago. Remember the Audi experience in the 90's?

Yes, I do. I used it as an example in a talk I gave on a hazard analysis of charging electric road 
vehicles last year, to point out to engineers why we need to perform a hazard analysis of new public 
procedures involving potentially dangerous processes such as grid-electricity and 
ultra-high-capacity batteries in objects in public space which can move relative to one another. The 
car companies apparently hated that suggestion :-(

Those Audi 5000 incidents were allegedly about people using the brake pedal on a stationary car and 
having the car accelerate instead, and then hit people and things within a couple of seconds. The 
NTSB investigated and found nothing technically amiss (which of course doesn't mean that there 
wasn't something that was overlooked).

These incidents are different. They concern events that persist over minutes to hours during which 
the victim is often in communication with emergency services using a mobile telephone. Presumably 
those services could say "put the brakes full on; the car will gradually stop" or "turn off the 
ignition" or "force it out of gear / force the automatic-shift lever into "Park". In some cases, the 
emergency services have even had time to call up mechanics familiar with the vehicle and solicit 
their advice.

> This particular case is a little suspect although I don't doubt most of them.

I haven't looked at the video.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de