It's getting difficult for me to keep arguing for EU membership...

[Mich the Tester]

...when news like this comes out.

EU has secret plan for police to 'remote stop' cars - Telegraph

David Davis, the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, warned that the technology could pose a danger to all road users.
"I would be fascinated to know what the state's liability will be if they put these devices in all vehicles and one went off by accident whilst a car was doing 70mph on a motorway with a truck behind it resulting in loss of life," he said.
"It is time legislators stopped believing technology is a form of magic and realised that is fallible, and those failures do real harm."

Of course David, you're right, but there's worse. Switching the ignition off in a car that's going at motorway speed is absolutely lethal, in fact it's murderously stupid because the braking systems, the power steering and in many cars the adaptive suspension need the ignition turned on to keep the car under control.

Meanwhile;

The remote stopping and other surveillance plans have been signed off by the EU's Standing Committee on Operational Cooperation on Internal Security, known as Cosi, meaning that the project has the support of senior British Home Office civil servants and police officers.

So actually it's not just 'the EU'; it's a bunch of psychopaths in the British government and police too.

This all makes the argument for driving older cars even stronger.

[vetran]

it will be like handguns, our Olympics team will train in France and our SAS soldiers be prosecuted for having a handgun while the criminals will have their cars modified and the Police will race round 140mph collecting their curry without being sanctioned.

Add that to the obvious stupidity of switching the car off at speed and it will be fun.

[d000hg]

Have you read in any more detail? Would it just turn off power, or would it give you a warning first, etc? Is the plan to retrofit these to existing cars, or to new ones - so that the kind of problem you mention can be overcome? Disabling the accelerator pedal for instance, gradually over the period of a minute, would give you no alternative but to stop, but pretty safely.

[Mich the Tester]

it will be like handguns, our Olympics team will train in France and our SAS soldiers be prosecuted for having a handgun while the criminals will have their cars modified and the Police will race round 140mph collecting their curry without being sanctioned.

Add that to the obvious stupidity of switching the car off at speed and it will be fun.

I really think you have to be either a cretin or a psychopath or both to want to do something like this.

[Mich the Tester]

Have you read in any more detail? Would it just turn off power, or would it give you a warning first, etc? Is the plan to retrofit these to existing cars, or to new ones - so that the kind of problem you mention can be overcome? Disabling the accelerator pedal for instance, gradually over the period of a minute, would give you no alternative but to stop, but pretty safely.

All of these ideas are complicated; doing complicated stuff involves bugs, lots of them, so even if you're designed it according to your suggestion, this is dangerous. Plus, the person flicking the switch can't see the road from the driver's point of view of course unless you have 100% surveillance.

[d000hg]

Modern cars are already controlled by computers so exactly the kind of bugs you talk about can already exist.

If you get a minute while your accelerator pedal slowly stops responding, it doesn't matter what scenario you're in. That is time to pull off the road, especially if the car flashes a light telling you what's happening.

Note that this scenario happens probably a hundred times a day already, it's called breaking down. Clearly this isn't seen as a huge risk otherwise MOT checks would be far stricter, to try and eliminate the risk.

I'm not saying I am in favour of this by the way - simply that it could be done in a safe way, or with only minuscule safety issues. And you yourself are on record as not being terribly in favour of making everything perfectly safe

[Mich the Tester]

Modern cars are already controlled by computers so exactly the kind of bugs you talk about can already exist.

I know. So don't add more bugs.

And don't start me on what can happen when this stuff gets hacked (when, not if, because everything can be hacked). The criminals will make sure their cars are adapted anyway.

[d000hg]

It's not really even new functionality, a car might already have such functionality built in that can just be remotely activated. I am sure I've heard of such things.

[Mich the Tester]

It's not really even new functionality, a car might already have such functionality built in that can just be remotely activated. I am sure I've heard of such things.

No, but some luxury cars have an option to block them if they're reported stolen. I don't think that's a particularly smart idea either.

[Troll]

It's not really even new functionality, a car might already have such functionality built in that can just be remotely activated. I am sure I've heard of such things.

It would be pretty straight forward to remotely invoke limp home mode in modern fuel injected vehicles

There is no mechanical linkage between the accelerator pedal and the throttle valve with electronic throttle control. Instead, the position of the throttle valve (i.e., the amount of air in the engine) is fully controlled by the ETC software via the electric motor. But just opening or closing the throttle valve by sending a new signal to the electric motor is an open loop condition and leads to inaccurate control. Thus, most if not all current ETC systems use closed loop feedback systems, such as PID control, whereby the ECU tells the throttle to open or close a certain amount. The throttle position sensor(s) are continually read and then the software makes appropriate adjustments to reach the desired amount of engine power.

When the car goes into the limp-home-mode it is because the accelerator and engine control computer and the throttle are not talking to each other in a way that they can understand. The engine control computer shuts down the signal to the throttle position motor and a set of springs in the throttle set it to a fast idle, fast enough to get the transmission in gear but not so fast that driving may be dangerous

Whether or not it is a good idea is another matter

Software or electronic failures within the ETC have been suspected by some to be responsible for alleged incidents of unintended acceleration. A series of investigations by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) were unable to get to the bottom of all of the reported incidents of unintended acceleration in 2002 and later model year Toyota and Lexus vehicles. A February 2011 report issued by a team from NASA (which studied the source code and electronics for a 2005 Camry model, at the request of NHTSA) did not rule out software malfunctions as a potential cause.[3] In October 2013, the first jury to hear evidence about Toyota's source code (from expert witness Michael Barr (software engineer) found Toyota liable for the death of a passenger in a September 2007 unintended acceleration collision in Oklahoma