"Mark Lloyd" wrote in message
...
On 05/18/2018 12:01 AM, Diesel wrote:

[snip]

And this is one of the pitfalls of drive by wire systems being
implemented on your cars and trucks. You aren't in control, the
computer is. You're *asking* it to turn the wheel, apply the brakes,
increase fuel, etc. But you have no actual physical control over any
of those processes as you do on older vehicles. It's all controlled
by servo's now; which is under the control of the main computer
system; which can be exploited so that while your the driver, you
aren't the one driving.

Also you are at the mercy of the integrity of the sensors. I had an 1993
Golf Mark III - the first car I'd had with fuel injection, drive-by-wire and
an engine management unit. After it was about 6 months old developed an
intermittent fault which caused the engine to die just as I'd started to
accelerate out of a junction into traffic - which was more than a little
terrifying when it happened.

It was in the garage on several occasions while they tried to reproduce the
problem and then fix it. Each time it came back "cannot reproduce". One day
I got a phone call from an ecstatic technician - "I've found it and I've
fixed it". It turned out to be a worn throttle potentiometer which sensed
the position of the pedal so the ECU could ask for the required amount of
fuel from the injectors: the track was dirty and cracked. The part cost
about tuppence and the labour for all the hours of searching was horrendous.
Luckily I could produce an invoice from a couple of thousand miles earlier
which described a fruitless search for the cause, and this was invaluable in
claiming off the warranty, because after first reporting the fault, the car
had exceeded its manufacturer's warranty. With rather bad grace, the garage
and VW head office decided that faced with incontrovertible evidence that
the car had been in warranty when the fault was first reported, they had to
pay up.