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Capacitive controls could be the cause of a spate of VW ID.4 crashes (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by boem to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

that works how the article describes, where it will accelerate you to whatever the last cruise control speed was.

That's what the resume function does normally?

That is:

You switch on and activate cruise control
You've tripped it while active by pressing the brake

At this point cruise control is still "hot" and pressing resume will turn the cruise control back on, usually with a speed interlock so you can't activate it at a dead stop.

If the car has "one pedal driving" then inadvertent activation could be pretty surprising, and would require you to lift your foot off the accelerator and hit the brakes. Coupled with the rocket-ship acceleration of most EVs this could easily cause an accident I guess.

[–] Zron -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Never been in a car with such a feature, as it seems inherently dangerous to me.

Every car I’ve been in, when you accidentally disengage the cruise, you just hit cruise again and it re-engages at whatever speed you slowed down to, then you adjust back to what you want.

Having the car suddenly accelerate without deliberate input just doesn’t seem wise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Can confirm, my car has the following cruise control buttons:

On/off - res/+

Cancel - set/-

The on/off button arms or disarms cruise control entirely. With it armed and no speed set, set/+ will set the current speed as the target speed. With no speed set, the only other button that does anything is the on/off button, which disarms the system.

With a speed set:

On/off will still complete disarm the system

Cancel will remove the set speed, but keep the system armed

Tapping the brake will pause the cruise control

Res/+ will increment the speed by one mph, or resume cruise at the previous set speed if cruise has been paused

Set/- will decrement the mph by 1, or if held pause the cruise control until it's released.

One of set or resume will set the current travel speed as the new cruise speed, if travel speed is higher than cruise. I think it's res.

For the most part this works fine. I don't use the resume function, like you said it can be a bit harrowing if you're not certain exactly what speed is set, and my car is over a decade old - it doesn't have that feature. But, critically, it's not a fucking CAPACITIVE BUTTON, and I've never accidentally hit it once.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

But, critically, it's not a fucking CAPACITIVE BUTTON, and I've never accidentally hit it once.

Yeah. I use resume a fair bit because you can set it to the speed you want and if your cruising gets interrupted by a slow truck, or roadworks, or by passing through a town, you can just press it and the car will accelerate back up to the set speed. Not like a rocket, maybe a couple of km/hr per second.

But still, like you say, easily-triggered capacitive buttons for critical functions, holy shit that is a bad idea.