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

[Mich the Tester]

Business As Usual.

I fscking hate 'em

I hope you're not from Brazil.

[Platypus]

and the Police will race round 140mph collecting their curry without being sanctioned.

Business As Usual.

I fscking hate 'em

[xoggoth]

They do it Bait Car. Brill prog.

[Mich the Tester]

Should boost my second hand car business. Bring it on

Old jags by any chance?

[darmstadt]

Ah, I believe this was the ENLETS (European Network of Law Enforcement Technology Services) bollocks I was reading about last year and, yes, the theme has come up before. I can't be bothered searching all the relevant facts but I'll point out at the last conference there were 5 key points to work on until 2015 which were made by 3 countries, Great Britain, Netherlands and Romania which were:

- Automatic Number Plate Recognition
- Open Source Intelligence: basically information on the 'net' should be monitored and as an information source to be used and for the investigations to be carried out over the 'net'
- Signal Intelligence: More and more data is collected and must be evaluated. Better IT systems must be developed to cope with the flood of data and to process and evaluate it
- Surveillance: find and use the best CCTV systems
- Front Line Policing: developement of technology to stop vehicles (this is what is referred to in the article) (*)

Quite funny there is not mention of other EU working groups like CARPOL or CEPOL though which would help you or even Directive 2011/82. Still never mind, any newspaper starting with 'Daily' hates Europe and anything to wind up the masses is fair game :-)







(* personally I think its bloody stupid and will never get off the ground)

[Mich the Tester]

the point I was trying to make was the target market will just sidestep this by having their car modified, it might be of use with car thieves but I doubt it will be worth the danger of malfunction/inadvertent operation.

You're right.

[minestrone]

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.

Jesus wept, did you actually believe that sob story?

[DodgyAgent]

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



Whether or not it is a good idea is another matter

Just imagine if our wives and girlfriends had this technology to control us

[vetran]

the point I was trying to make was the target market will just sidestep this by having their car modified, it might be of use with car thieves but I doubt it will be worth the danger of malfunction/inadvertent operation.

[DodgyAgent]

...when news like this comes out.

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



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;



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.

Should boost my second hand car business. Bring it on

[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

[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.

[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]

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]

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