September 26, 2016 at 11:19 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
Gary Varga (9/26/2016)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
...I especially hate the newer keyless entry that doesn't have a backup. When there's an issue with electronics, I can't open some doors. That seems fundamentally unsafe.Are you sure that there isn't a hidden backup? My wife's keyless car actually has a key hidden in the fob. You have to dismantle the fob but it is there.
That only works on the driver's door. At least in multiple models.
On our Prius, if you lose power, you cannot open the rear hatch, at least not without disassembling a panel. Guess where the battery is? Inside the hatch compartment. There are terminals in the front engine compartment, but if you happen to park in a garage, head first, as most people do, you cannot get jumper cables to reach. At least in the Prius, you can open the passenger door without power.
In BMWs, you can open the driver door, but without power, or with a failed actuator, you cannot open the other doors. I cannot believe this is a safe condition for the car.
Now, that's actually a bit disturbing. Knowing a bit about Lithium-based batteries, if the car is in an accident that causes the car to lose power and the battery has suffered the right kind of hit to cause it to burn profusely, as such batteries will (and it really doesn't take much penetration), then not being able to open the doors to quickly escape the ensuing inferno creates a death trap especially for kids in their car seats in the back seat.
Heh... and you thought gasoline was dangerous. I've seen Lithium fires that have burned down steel reinforced cement pillars and have quickly burned through the 2" thick steel hulls of experimental submarines. A friend of my Dad was kill by a partially discharged Lithium battery that exploded on what seemed to be a rather insignificant impact at a Navy Test Facility. Another episode occurred where the 18 inch concrete slab on a test bunker (about 40' by 40') was physically moved from it's original position when a Lithium battery exploded at another Navy Test Side.
Tell Elon Musk he can go to hell if he thinks I'm going to drive such a bomb or hang one of his whole-house batteries on my wall. 😉
--Jeff Moden
September 26, 2016 at 2:54 pm
Jeff Moden (9/26/2016)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
On our Prius, if you lose power, you cannot open the rear hatch, at least not without disassembling a panel. Guess where the battery is? Inside the hatch compartment. There are terminals in the front engine compartment, but if you happen to park in a garage, head first, as most people do, you cannot get jumper cables to reach. At least in the Prius, you can open the passenger door without power.In BMWs, you can open the driver door, but without power, or with a failed actuator, you cannot open the other doors. I cannot believe this is a safe condition for the car.
Now, that's actually a bit disturbing. Knowing a bit about Lithium-based batteries, if the car is in an accident that causes the car to lose power and the battery has suffered the right kind of hit to cause it to burn profusely, as such batteries will (and it really doesn't take much penetration), then not being able to open the doors to quickly escape the ensuing inferno creates a death trap especially for kids in their car seats in the back seat.
I suspect Steve described that a bit sloppily - that he mean to say the doors coudn't be opened from outside without power or with no working actuator, but they can be opened manually from the inside. Unless of course a door has a "child lock" which can be set to disable manual opening from the inside, which combined with electronic only opening from outside which delivers the problem you describe, but I've never come across a car with that insane bit of design stupidity.
My current car is all electronic locks, all openable from inside without any electric power, one door openable from outside without electric power and only that door has a child-lock to prevent manual opening from inside, each electronic fob incorporates a mechanical key for the one door that accepts it. This appears to be a pretty common design over here, except that the number of doors the ley opens varies from one to three. Of course it doesn't permit the trunk to be opened without electric power, which I think is crazy, but at least that doesn't mean that the doors designed for people are unopenable.
Heh... and you thought gasoline was dangerous. I've seen Lithium fires that have burned down steel reinforced cement pillars and have quickly burned through the 2" thick steel hulls of experimental submarines. A friend of my Dad was kill by a partially discharged Lithium battery that exploded on what seemed to be a rather insignificant impact at a Navy Test Facility. Another episode occurred where the 18 inch concrete slab on a test bunker (about 40' by 40') was physically moved from it's original position when a Lithium battery exploded at another Navy Test Side.
You won't get me into a car which uses a large lithium battery, unless it is very carefully protected from being badly hit or even suffering too much acceleration.
Tom
September 26, 2016 at 3:08 pm
Tom, I wish I were sloppy. My X5 had a bad actuator in the passenger side. My daughter was in the car, we had power, we stopped. We could pull her handle from the inside, front seat. The lock button by the window (on the top) would raise, but never unlock the door. She had to crawl across the seat to my side.
Imagine an accident. My side is crushed, we need to get out the passenger side. We've lost power. We can't get out the passenger side. Hopefully we can break a window.
The door locks appear to be unlock by wire in some sense.
That is disturbing.
The Prius is not like this. You can open door locks from the inside with no power. I haven't checked other cars, but many do not have a way to open from the outside, other than the driver door. Not even the trunk.
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September 26, 2016 at 11:54 pm
I'm struggling to see the point of keyless ignition. I go walking in the hills and live in fear of getting the fob wet. Batteries and moisture do not play well together and finding out that your fob has shorted out 150 miles from home in the middle of nowhere does not apeal.
It's a labour saving device for the pathologically lazy
September 27, 2016 at 12:48 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
Tom Gillies (9/26/2016)
Some additional factors which we should consider when judging our black box are:*) The risk - lashing the helm or using self-steering gear on a yacht is fairly low risk when you are out of sight of land.
*) The consequences - Are you prepared to suffer the consequences of failure? And in particular, survivability - you cannot learn from a failure if you do not survive it!
*) The alternatives - It may be that there are no realistic alternatives.
And accountability.
Yes. And accountability.
I think I had kind-off included that in "consequences" but maybe it _should_ be separate. Not just accountability as in "Someone will be held accountable" but also "feeling accountable". I expect we can all think of situations (both inside and outside technology) where people evade, or try to evade, "accountability". Establishing a culture of "responsibility" and "accountability" will go a long way to improve the reliability of black boxes.
Tom Gillies LinkedIn Profilewww.DuhallowGreyGeek.com[/url]
September 27, 2016 at 6:32 am
When it comes to black boxes, the business cannot easily reveal their trade secrets or in Google's example, show people how they can game the system with their search engines. The same also applies to data. There is such thing as data products. How you take data in it's rawest form, transform and aggregate it to it's final form is no different than any other manufacturing plant that is producing a product from shoes to food. You won't see any of those companies easily sharing their entire process to the world, especially their competitors who may want to know how you do it.
The counter: Yes, it's just data and algorithms -- ingredients and recipes. While you can certainly make an argument that you must know what ingredients are in what you eat because it can potentially impact you in a negative way, how could you do the same for data products? Do we need data labels on everything we purchase that tell you the calories (number of records), the fat (width of those records), and the list of ingredients (data sources used)?
September 27, 2016 at 12:57 pm
David.Poole (9/26/2016)
I'm struggling to see the point of keyless ignition. I go walking in the hills and live in fear of getting the fob wet. Batteries and moisture do not play well together and finding out that your fob has shorted out 150 miles from home in the middle of nowhere does not apeal.It's a labour saving device for the pathologically lazy
A year ago I would have agreed with you. In between then and now I had a job (not IT) delivering and collecting things in a rural area. I kept on driving a few hundred metres, ringing a doorbell, doing the real job and repeating. Even out there I didn't feel comfortable leaving the keys in the ignition. So now I can see a point for keyless ignition - but for delivery drivers, not for most car drivers (including me).
For most people and most situations I still agree with you. Keyless ignition and similar innovations create additional complexity and additional points of failure for limited real benefit. I can't help thinking that a lot of this "stuff" is going to cause problems in the 2nd hand car market in the future. Cars with functioning engines, safe brakes and suspension and acceptable (in the sense that it keeps the weather out and the people inside and doesn't have sharp bits to hurt people) bodywork will be rendered unusable/saleable because the windows don't open or close and the doors don't lock or unlock, and that's before you get to all the pollution control bits.;-)
Tom Gillies LinkedIn Profilewww.DuhallowGreyGeek.com[/url]
September 27, 2016 at 3:40 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
Tom, I wish I were sloppy. My X5 had a bad actuator in the passenger side. My daughter was in the car, we had power, we stopped. We could pull her handle from the inside, front seat. The lock button by the window (on the top) would raise, but never unlock the door. She had to crawl across the seat to my side.Imagine an accident. My side is crushed, we need to get out the passenger side. We've lost power. We can't get out the passenger side. Hopefully we can break a window.
The door locks appear to be unlock by wire in some sense.
That is disturbing.
Wow, that is amazing. Seems to me to be really terrible design. I'm surprised there are no safety regulations preventing it - or maybe no, as you're in the USA where any regulations requiring safe design are regarded by a lot of people as malicious government interference with business's rights to make profits unencumbered by safety considerations.
Tom
September 27, 2016 at 4:36 pm
The worst experience I had with a black box was with an instance of a rather ancient one: the automobile's automatic gear box. Fairly early on in the history of automatic gears, it became standard design to provide more than just basic "drive", "stop", and "reverse" positions, so that the drive position was replaced by several positions, for example positions "1", "2", "3" and drive where "drive" gave the box the ability to select 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th gear, "3" gave it the ability to select 1st, 2nd or 3rd but not 4th, "2" gave it the ability to choose 1st or 2nd but not 3rd and not 4th, and "1" force it to use 1st gear only. This was really useful for driving in mountain country with roads that were very narrow, very winding, and very steep, often with precipitous drops beside the road.
Sometime in the late 80s my employer insisted that I exchange my ageing company car for a new one; until then I had always had manual shift in all my cars, whether owned by my employer or owned by me or hired short term. But I'd occassionally driven cars with automatic shift when travelling with a colleague who was going to the same meeting or conference or whatever, or when borrowing a car when mine was being serviced. I decided to try a model with an automatic shift.
Quite soon I discovered, when driving from Applecross to Ardarroch via Bealach nam Bo (usually misspellt as Bealach na Ba because the OS bods who made the famous maps were pretty hopeless at Gaelic) that this automatic gear box didn't do what I expected. When the control was in the "2" position it was merrily changing up to 3rd and 4th - and it did the same in the "1" position. So engine braking was impossible, and I burnt quite a lot of brake material on that road. When I got back home I took it in to be repaired only to discover that this was not a fault: some clever designer had decided that he would provide a fuel consumption improvement by allowing the box to override the gear limit (aka the lock down) if it appeared that it could provide better fuel economy by changing up, and the manfacturer allowed it to happen without documenting it it the user manual (if it had been in the user manual I would never have had that model of car).
I got rid of that car as soon as my employer permitted; and I never took it driving in mountain country again. I've never had another car made by that manufacturer and never will; and I've never had another car with automatic shift, because after one manufacturer screwed up the lockdown like that I reckoned maybe another one will too.
This illustrates another problem with black boxes: if the supplier changes the goals without informing the customer, the customer will not be happy, and that will destroy trust not only in the black box but also in its manufacturer.
Tom
September 27, 2016 at 6:23 pm
TomThomson (9/27/2016)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
Tom, I wish I were sloppy. My X5 had a bad actuator in the passenger side. My daughter was in the car, we had power, we stopped. We could pull her handle from the inside, front seat. The lock button by the window (on the top) would raise, but never unlock the door. She had to crawl across the seat to my side.Imagine an accident. My side is crushed, we need to get out the passenger side. We've lost power. We can't get out the passenger side. Hopefully we can break a window.
The door locks appear to be unlock by wire in some sense.
That is disturbing.
Wow, that is amazing. Seems to me to be really terrible design. I'm surprised there are no safety regulations preventing it - or maybe no, as you're in the USA where any regulations requiring safe design are regarded by a lot of people as malicious government interference with business's rights to make profits unencumbered by safety considerations.
Yes, very upsetting. At the time, my daughter was coming back from oral surgery when the actuator failed. Very upsetting to have her crawl out.
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October 2, 2016 at 4:19 pm
TomThomson (9/26/2016)
Jeff Moden (9/26/2016)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
On our Prius, if you lose power, you cannot open the rear hatch, at least not without disassembling a panel. Guess where the battery is? Inside the hatch compartment. There are terminals in the front engine compartment, but if you happen to park in a garage, head first, as most people do, you cannot get jumper cables to reach. At least in the Prius, you can open the passenger door without power.In BMWs, you can open the driver door, but without power, or with a failed actuator, you cannot open the other doors. I cannot believe this is a safe condition for the car.
Now, that's actually a bit disturbing. Knowing a bit about Lithium-based batteries, if the car is in an accident that causes the car to lose power and the battery has suffered the right kind of hit to cause it to burn profusely, as such batteries will (and it really doesn't take much penetration), then not being able to open the doors to quickly escape the ensuing inferno creates a death trap especially for kids in their car seats in the back seat.
I suspect Steve described that a bit sloppily - that he mean to say the doors coudn't be opened from outside without power or with no working actuator, but they can be opened manually from the inside. Unless of course a door has a "child lock" which can be set to disable manual opening from the inside, which combined with electronic only opening from outside which delivers the problem you describe, but I've never come across a car with that insane bit of design stupidity.
My current car is all electronic locks, all openable from inside without any electric power, one door openable from outside without electric power and only that door has a child-lock to prevent manual opening from inside, each electronic fob incorporates a mechanical key for the one door that accepts it. This appears to be a pretty common design over here, except that the number of doors the ley opens varies from one to three. Of course it doesn't permit the trunk to be opened without electric power, which I think is crazy, but at least that doesn't mean that the doors designed for people are unopenable.
That's my point. If you can't open it from the outside without power in an emergency, your child strapped into a car seat dies because they can't get out of the car seat themselves and, if they could, they might not know how to unlock and open the door from the inside themselves. Even an unconscious adult would die.
--Jeff Moden
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