I have no first hand knowledge of this particular incident, but I am aware of someone who tried letting their Subie drive, and, when it headed towards a lane marker at an oblique angle, it of course veered towards the other one, and pinballed back and forth, until it eventually saw something in its line of sight (probably a tree, guard rail, or sign) causing collision avoidance to kick in and drag the car to a screeching halt. Fortunately, the pinballing didn't become so severe that VDC had to kick in to keep the car on all four, because various Eyesight functions would have disabled, and they would likely have headed headlong into the tree or guard rail that triggered the collision avoidance system to stop the car.
As for the reported incident, I've looked and looked, and I cannot find any other instance ever of:
- Adaptive Cruise Control failing horrendously and accelerating while not allowing disengaging via the numerous mechanisms that do so (tapping the brakes, hitting the disable button, it accelerating *at* something).
- Eyesight failing horrendously and causing brakes lock.
- Subaru's famed ridiculously accurate individual wheel brake control logic and modules failing horrendously.
- The various brake override mechanisms failing horrendously (various user interactions would regain brake control - the car WILL let you intentionally crash it if you want... and VDC engaging *will* disable Eyesight brake control as well (pg 36 Eyesight Manual))
- in conjunction with the steering's torque sensor failing horrendously (no matter where the car wants to point you, one can literally two finger turn the opposite direction)
- The steering motor failing horrendously in a locked position
- VDC failing horrendously and not responding to pinballing back and forth or not triggering the shutdown of other systems
AT THE SAME TIME no less. That's what the complaint is describing. Each of those systems simultaneously doing the wrong thing, in conjunction with severe failures of different, totally separate systems (eg: the brake booster and control is a different physical system than the electric steering rack). Heck, just lightly pressing the brakes disables ACC (until re-enabled) and LKA (until the foot is off the brake pedal).
BUT, sure, it
IS possible.
Seriously. Last week, our high speed connection to our data center went down because of a card failure at a massive ISP's NOC. One little card that circuits flowed through. Backup mechanisms didn't work because of the type of failure. The traffic didn't reroute as it should if the backups don't take over.
It was that once in a lifetime type of failure where nothing worked properly, and seemingly unrelated systems failed to address the failure.
It'll probably never happen again.
Is that what happened here? I've got no idea, because none of us have first hand knowledge of the event and likely never will. ??