An electric car driver whose £80,000 Jaguar I-Pace “went rogue” on the M62 has told of his terror as he pressed the brakes and his car sped up, forcing him to swerve through traffic at speeds of up to 100mph. The Telegraph has more.
Nathan Owen, 31, was overtaking another vehicle on the motorway on Wednesday when his 2019 model apparently malfunctioned forcing him to lose control of the vehicle for around 35 minutes.
A major police operation was scrambled to bring the car to a stop with officers forced to close a stretch of the motorway and ram the vehicle after forming a protective convoy.
Mr. Owen, from Bolton, Greater Manchester, told MailOnline that he feared for his life during the ordeal which he likened to the Grand Theft Auto video game.
He claimed the car also malfunctioned in December, reaching speeds of up to 120mph, but that Jaguar had assured him it was safe after checking the car.
He now claims he will never get in a Jaguar or an electric car again.
The latest incident happened as he was travelling home from his first day as a crisis support worker with children in Ormskirk, Liverpool, on Wednesday at 2.30pm.
“The car literally just started speeding up,” he told the MailOnline.
“The speed was going towards about 100mph in the high 90s, going to 100. I thought this was a bit wrong.
“It came up on the dashboard saying there was a battery malfunction in my car. I kept trying to press the brakes but nothing was happening. So the next thing I thought I should do was call 999 and tell them what was happening.”
At least eight vehicles from Merseyside Police and Greater Manchester Police were forced to escort him down the busy motorway.
Officers closed off two lanes of the four-lane motorway as they tried to bring the Jaguar to a stop.
Worth reading in full.
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It wold be interesting to learn what the nature of the fault was. No doubt the manufacturer follows the requirements of ISO26262 re Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), and it’s subcontractors/suppliers of various sub systems, like the brake control unit etc.
A safety goal is a top-level safety requirement that is assigned to a system, with the purpose of reducing the risk of one or more hazardous events to a tolerable level.
[quote from Wikpedia article about ISO26262]
Which level of car accelerating out of control of the driver while the brakes aren’t working is tolerable?
If you delve into the standards you will come across the concept that there are different levels that clump together into numeric groups, usually 1 to 4. The classification is generally based on an x-y graph between severity and probability. 4 is normally the top end, but lower levels like 2 or 3 are usually acceptable as long as faults are capable of being over ridden by human intervention. E.g. you can ignore something, or switch it off etc.
The overall system approach is nothing new for electric traction though. There have been many changes on the mechanical side, like splitting the hydraulic arrangement between two pairs of brake so that one still works when the other fails, or in the past when many cars had cable operated hand brakes (rare these days on new ones) and so on.
“The latest incident happened as he was travelling home from his first day as a crisis support worker with children in Ormskirk, Liverpool, on Wednesday at 2.30pm.”
The job pays well then.
Very, very early start and early finish or don’t the children go to bed?
I dunno, what if it was aliens?
Seriously though, everybody knows that when the aliens finally choose to make contact it’ll be by taking remote control of an electric car. My money’s on Tesla drivers being at highest risk.
I know someone who does a similar job – its a 24/7 service and she often starts at 5 am. So yes, early start. As an ex-godawful-shifts-worker myself, I would cut the guy some slack on that at least.
Exactly what I was thinking, HP. Crisis support worker though? Plus an £80K car too – most likely a company car.
Guess No 10 must be stuffed full of crisis support workers and also crisis support workers supporting crisis support workers in crisis.
Just a word of caution, I was tangentially involved in a case about 20 years ago when a bloke driving a 40 tonne artic down the M1 claimed he couldn’t slow down. Motorway closed, police, stingers, all sorts deployed. Heroically the police managed to stop it.
Fast forward a few weeks & the driver was certainly investigated if not prosecuted, he had some form of Munchausen’s by proxy.
This new occurrence looks genuine, but so did the truck initially.
20 years ago, there were a lot less self-this and self-that functions in cars. When there’s a computer in the car which can cause it to accelerate and decelerate according to some program and whose actions can only be overridden by sending control signal to this program, you have a recipe for disaster that’s sooner or later going to happen. People who design these Frankencars usually excuse themselves by pointing out that their computers statisticall malfunction less frequently than human drivers actually controlling the car in some non-overrideable way. But that’s a flimsy excuse because human ‘malfunction’ is technically unavoidable while automata malfunction would be, weren’t these being programmed by humans prone to malfunctioning. And human input can never completely be removed here, only the driver of the car can be rendered completely helpless.
I wonder whose fault it is when a driverless car crashes into you.
Must be yours. Computers don’t fail. /s
Ormskirk is in West Lancashire, not Liverpool.
The headline should read computer-controlled vehicle and not electric vehicle. The vehice in question happened to be electric but software malfunctions can effect ICE cars as well.
Yes but ICE cars stop when computers malfunction, because the computer isn’t controlling drive and brakes.
Hmm, yes partly. I had a 2013 Skoda which had an annoying habit of engaging the anti-lock braking system if you did an emergency stop from just a few miles per hour – something like 5mph. So if I rolled slowly up to a roundabout and saw another car coming like a bat out of Hell from the right and slammed on the brakes the ABS computer would let the car slide out into the path of the oncoming rather than just stopping the wheels. Nasty. Scary. I learned to drive the machine accordingly.
Only if the car was built in this way and there’s no reason why it has to.
If it happened to an ICE car, it wouldn’t be reported on this site. Dailysceptics’ admirable campaign against net zero has blinded them to the benefits (and inevitable eventual dominance) of electric vehicles.
That’s why I wrote computer-controlled car. That it happened to have an electric motor was essentially coincidence. Apart from that, just like wind mills, EVs are old technology which has been tried and discarded in the past already.
I thought that too – even non-electric cars apparently have all sorts of computer gubbins these days (I drive an old car that has pedals, steering wheel, engine and not much else) which could in theory go wrong – cruise control springs to mind, also that lane drift detector thingummy – but then I don’t remember ever hearing of cars stuck in cruise control at 70mph so perhaps it’s never happened.
Some below are saying it wouldn’t be reported in the DS – well maybe, but I imagine it would be newsworthy for other outlets if such a thing happened.
This story just reaffirms why I would never want to take a ride in a driverless car. Imagine if the guy had a high speed collision and took out other motorists with him, or if he’d been driving with kids in the back? Thank goodness it was a safe outcome for all concerned.
So he definitely wasn’t flashed by a speed camera doing 100mph and decided to make up a story about the car losing control to get out of it then?
Must be a nice job for a 31yo to running about in an 80k motor. With an early afternoon finish. Where do I apply?
Blimey, Nazi Faeser is actually acknowledging that Leftard terrorism does exist. But this is one hell of a costly stunt by the Antifa mob in Germany, which is presumably why she couldn’t resort to blaming the ”far-right” for a change;
”After an arson attack on an electricity substation knocked out power to a Tesla factory along with tens of thousands of residents outside Berlin, the country’s far-left interior minister has issued a rare warning against left-wing extremism and its growing threat.
Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) referred to the attack on the Tesla factory in Grünheide telling the Rheinische Post newspaper: “Overall, the potential threat posed by left-wing extremism remains high.”
“The increased radicalization in parts of the violent scene in recent years has stabilized at a high level. The inhibition thresholds for attacking political opponents and the police with great brutality have fallen,” she warned.
On Tuesday, suspected left-wing extremists from the “Volcano Group” set fire to a high-voltage pylon in the Oder-Spree district, releasing a letter that police believe is authentic, taking credit for the action directed at Elon Musk and his company.
As a result of the attack, several villages within Berlin and the Tesla plant saw their power cut, with the Tesla factory still unable to resume production. Tesla has already estimated the damage to go into the hundreds of millions, with some experts stating it will cost up to €1 billion.
Since last Thursday, around 100 left-wing activists from the “Stop Tesla” and “Robin Wood” groups are occupying the forest near the Tesla factory.”
https://www.rmx.news/crime/germany-after-tesla-factory-hit-in-terror-attack-far-left-interior-minister-warns-of-rising-left-wing-extremism/
Who is really behind this terrorism? An unknown environmental group? I don’t think so. Who benefits from it?
“…crisis support worker…”
Physician heal thyself.
I was involved in the market leading company for Liquid Natural Gas marine transport safety systems for 25 years The design of these systems had to comply with the functional safety standards of IEC 61508 standards at 4 levels and ISO 26262 (ASIL) is derived from this IEC standard. As system inputs and outputs become more complex, the potential failure modes increase exponentially. Software systems at the core of control make prediction of consequence of a single failure difficult and the more likely catastrophe is a combination of mulitiple failures. This is why the highest level of IEC 61508, SIL4 used in Nuclear safety systems still use hundred plus year old technology ( relays) in their scope.
My guess is unless there is far more data logging built into the Jaguar Electronic Control Unit than the minimum required, the cause of this failure will remain at best conjecture.
There was a similar approach to railway systems over the same period of time, which I worked on.
The first Ariane 5 rocket launch failed because 2 different systems had not been integration tested fully with the parameters for the new rocket. The higher acceleration of the more powerful rocket meant that a particular software counter overflowed before a timer that inhibited its output had run down, as a result it generated an error code that was sent to the guidance system. The guidance system had not been designed to deal with the error in question at this point in the flight, it interpreted the error code as a command to gimbal all of the rocket motor nozzles to maximum deflection in one direction.
The rocket broke up from excessive aerodynamic loads at about the same time as the range safety systems detonated the destruct sequence to protect anyone outside the launch corridor.
The moral is that you have to exercise your code over the full range of possible conditions in all modes and with the full possible range of sensor inputs before you can have any confidence in its behaviour. I’m sure that the JLR software in this EV was not comprehensively tested in this regard.
It’s become common for vehicle systems to behave in unexpected ways, who would think that an outside air temperature sensor used to tell the driver what temperature it is outside the vehicle would also be used to control some exhaust emission devices? Most would think that the engine should sense the incoming air temperature itself, it’s important for combustion purposes, and use this value, but in fact it was possible for an incorrect air temperature reading to cause the particulate filter to block up because the ECU software believed that the temperature was outside the correct range to allow regeneration of the filter.
The Ariane 5 rocket launch failed because the specification had called for “shutdown of CPU” in case of any error, based on the assumption that software errors wouldn’t occur and that redundant hardware parts would take over for the ones which had been stopped. Part of the software came from the predecessor Ariane 4 and used a 16 bit counter for a temperature measurement which happened to work on the smaller rocket. The counter overflowed in the larger successor model. This was detected (that’s the part I really like best) by the Ada runtime which generated an exception. As per specification, the affected CPU was thus shut down and the spare system took over. Which ran the same software, hence, the same counter overflowed again. This was detected by … and so on. Repeat for all spares until disaster.
The reason you’re quoting is the one used by the official whitewashers.
I have quoted what I remember, perhaps the old brain has forgotten a bit. However whatever the fine detail the rocket motor nozzles did get pointed in a direction that led to a near-immediate structural failure from a combination of g and aerodynamic loads.
Were they operating to some arbitrary deadline? I honestly can’t remember that either. Rushing development often leads to failures, that is true of just about anything.
The nozzle deflections were commanded by the On-Board Computer (OBC) software on the basis of data transmitted by the active Inertial Reference System (SRI 2). Part of this data at that time did not contain proper flight data
[…]
The reason why the active SRI 2 did not send correct attitude data was that the unit had declared failure due to a software exception.
The OBC could not switch to the back-up SRI 1 because the unit had already ceased to function during the previous data cycle […] for the same reason as SRI 2.
The internal SRI software exception was caused during […] a data conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed integer […]. The floating-point number […] had a value which was greater than what could be represented by a 16-bit signed integer. This resulted in an Operand Error¹.
https://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/esa-x-1819eng.pdf
¹ Type of excpetion raised by the (Ada) runtime.
In the Daily Mail article there were a lot more pictures, and one thing that did seem to change was the colour of the wheels on the car in question.
i wonder if the fitment of an after market set has somehow confused the onboard computer system that the car was going slower than it should, or there was some other malfunction in it’s perception that skewed the way it handled the particular situation it found itself in?
I did wonder too about the bus that went through a shop window in London this week. I don’t know if it was electric though.
Paul Homewood suggested on his site emergency services were suppressing news of e-vehicle fires, so it may be possible these incidents are more widespread?
Anybody?
This whole story smells decidedly fishy to me.
In keeping with all things green, Net Zero is going “rogue” also and may have to be rammed off the road when reality strikes as well. ——–Will Reform be ones who ram it? Let’s see.
I don’t understand. Don’t EVs have an ignition off feature? Either there’s a fundamental flaw in the on/off mechanism, which I find hard to believe as I’d expect that to have a mechanical fail-safe, the driver was thick as f*ck, or there’s something not right about this story.
As much as I hate everything about BEVs (aside from the hugely enjoyable instant and constant torque), let’s remember that the drivetrain is likely irrelevant in this case.
The problem is all the BS “driver aids” which aim to take over decision making. This is a problem in most modern cars, regardless of whether they are ICEs, BEVs, or Hybrids.
We do real journalism on Daily Sceptic, correct?
Or, alternatively, the Save the Planet Virtue Signaller Mr Owen is just an attention seeker.
Good to know “the cuts” have not extended to “crisis support worker with children in Ormskirk, Liverpool” because he can, apparently, afford a very expensive car.
Glad no one was hurt.
I ask two questions:
1) Would you be reporting this if the vehicle wasn’t electric?
2) How many times have you reported news of dangerous faults in petrol or diesel cars?
Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten ?????
£80 grand of scrap!
Brilliant Exposure of the Scam…. but also very Scary! we should gift one of these Jags to every Net Zero Cartel member for Christmas
Most cars today are “fly by wire” and do not have any mechanical connection between the accelerator pedal and the fuel injection. This is digitally controlled by a computer. Also most cars have cruise control which is a computer controlled speed. Both methods of speed control could malfunction, no different than an electric vehicle. Something doesn’t sound right about this story. How on earth, if the car suddenly speed up to 100 mph could the police have organized so quickly?