Remember the Key Bridge collapse? With as eventful a year as 2025 has been, we wouldn’t blame anyone for forgetting that in March of 2024, container ship MV Dali plowed into the bridge across Baltimore Harbor, turning it into 18,000 tons of scrap metal in about four seconds, while taking the lives of six very unlucky Maryland transportation workers in the process. Now, more than a year and a half after the disaster, we finally have an idea of what caused the accident. According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s report, a loss of electrical power at just the wrong moment resulted in a cascade of failures, leaving the huge vessel without steerage. However, it was the root cause of the power outage that really got us: a wire with an incorrectly applied label.
Sal Mercogliano, our go-to guy for anything to do with shipping, has a great rundown of the entire cascade of failures, with the electrically interesting part starting around the 8:30 mark. The NTSB apparently examined a control cabinet on the Dali and found one wire with a heat-shrink label overlapping the plastic body of its terminating ferrule. This prevented the wire from being properly inserted into a terminal block, leading to poor electrical contact. Over time, the connection got worse, eventually leading to an under-voltage condition that tripped a circuit breaker and kicked off everything else that led to the collision. It’s a sobering thought that something so mundane and easily overlooked could result in such a tragedy, but there it is.
We’ve been harping a bit on the Flock situation in this space over the last month or so, but for good reason, or at least it seems to us. Flock’s 80,000-strong network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), while understandably attractive from a law-and-order perspective, is a little hard to swallow for anyone interested in privacy and against pervasive surveillance. And maybe all of that wouldn’t be so bad if we had an inkling that the security start-up had at least paid passing attention to cybersecurity basics.
But alas, Benn Jordan and a few of his cybersecurity pals have taken a look inside a Flock camera, and the news isn’t good. Granted, this appears to be a first-pass effort, but given that the “hack” is a simple as pressing the button on the back of the camera a few times. Doing so creates a WiFi hotspot on the camera, and from there it’s off to the races. There are plenty of other disturbing findings in the video, so check it out.
Sufficiently annuated readers will no doubt recall classic toys of the ’60s and ’70s, such as Lite-Brite and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and games like Mouse Trap and Toss Across. We recall owning all of those at one time or another, and surprisingly, they all sprang from the inventive mind of the same man: Burt Meyer, who died on October 30 at the age of 99. We have many fond memories of his inventions, but truth be told, we never much cared for Mouse Trap as a game; we just set up the Rube Goldberg-esque trap and played with that. The rest, though? Quality fun. RIP, Burt.
Last week, we featured the unfortunate story about a Russian humanoid robot that drunk-walked its way into “demo hell” history. And while it’s perhaps a bit too easy to poke fun at something like this, it’s a simple fact of life that the upright human form is inherently unstable, and that any mechanism designed to mimic that form is bound to fall once in a while. With that in mind, Disney Research engineers are teaching their humanoid bots to fall with style. The idea is for the robots to protect their vital parts in the event of a fall, which is something humans (usually) do instinctively. They first did hundreds of falls with virtual robots, rewarding them for correctly ending up in the target pose, and eventually worked the algorithms into real, albeit diminutive, robots. The video in the article shows them all sticking the landing, and even if some of the end poses don’t seem entirely practical, it’s pretty cool tech.
And finally, this week on the Hackaday Podcast was discussed the infuriating story of an EV-enthusiast who had trouble servicing the brakes on his Hyundai Ioniq. Check out the podcast if you want the full rant and the color commentary, but the TL;DL version is that Hyundai has the functions needed to unlock the parking brakes stuck behind a very expensive paywall. Luckily for our hacker hero, a $399 Harbor Freight bidirectional scan tool was up to the task, and the job was completed for far less than what the officially sanctioned tools would have cost. But it turns out there may have been a cheaper and more delightfully hackish way to do the job, with nothing but a 12-volt battery pack and a couple of jumper wires. Lots of vehicles with electric parking brakes use two-wire systems, so it’s a good tip for the shade tree mechanic to keep in mind.
Why do electric parking brakes even exist? What happened to their function as emergency brakes?
I don’t own a car with an electric parking brake: what is the driver’s expected course of action in case of brake failure?
Yeah, this feel completely unnecessary and defeats the point of an e-brake. I keep getting a nagging feeling that people who design cars (or parts of them) don’t actually drive cars.
Marketing Director: “You know, I bet we can increase sales by hiring a bunch of people who don’t drive and get them to design our cars!”
i just recently referenced it as an ‘e-brake’ on a vehicle forum, and one newer user questioned what i was even talking about.
that, and other defensive driving conversations in the past, as well as the ‘unintended acceleration’ fiasco, has led me to infer that the majority of the driving population has very little clue as to the function of the brake when a standard automatic transmissions parking pawl serves the purpose.
so given that few use it, or even have knowledge of it’s use, it makes sense from a manufacturing standpoint to minimize it further.
In UK English it’s always referred to as a handbrake, I think most Brits who’d not been exposed to the term before would assume that an ‘e-brake’ was an electronic handbrake.
The parking pawl is not very helpful in steep or low traction, it locks the transmission output, not the individual wheels. So if one wheel loses traction the other wheel is free to rotate. That’s why you must use the secondary brake system.
Parking brakes are not emergency brakes. They’re a redundant brake system to keep the vehicle from rolling while stationary, and do not provide very much braking force when the car is at speed.
And yet, that puny braking force can be the factor saving your guts in a tricky situation where your ordinary brakes fail.
Coming back from holiday in the summer of 1981 on the motorway (American: freeway, interstate) from Glasgow with my family I observed a car bowling along at 60 or 70 miles a hour with its brake lights full on. I remarked on this to my mother, who was the driver in the family. She replied that the driver had probably forgotten to take the handbrake off before setting out and added gloomily that he would find his brake pads worn out by the time he got home. No, she didn’t flash her lights or try to warn him: we were passengers in a taxi.
The handbrake doesn’t trigger the brake lights- more likely driver was “lightly” resting his foot on the brake pedal. My mother in law used to do that… and my father in law used to get mad about it “for no reason” other than the brakes needing to get replaced way, way too often.
I believe if you press and hold the parking brake button it will engage even at speed so that’s your fallback. Whether you’d find that button in an emergency is another matter as on my car pressing Park while stationary engages the parking brake so I never press the actual parking brake button and have no muscle memory for it.
Is it even possible to drift-park with an electronic handbrake?
see. this guy gets it.
I tried on a Renault Scenic 2 when I was a dumb kid.
Parking-brake engages automatically when switching the ignition off with the car stopped, or alternatively, you can press on the button, and the parking-brake will engage as long as the car’s speed is below a threshold.
But, a continuous press on the button will “gently” bring the car to a halt no matter its speed, using its ABS actuators and all 4 brakes.
I think that’s intended to be used as an emergency brake.
I’d rather recommend pendulum turns for drift-parking, even on cars that have cable-operated handbrakes.
“1967 is the year that the US federal government required the dual-circuit braking system in all newly manufactured cars” (google) so those of us that grew up long, long ago when there were still a bunch of older cars on the road kinda needed the e-brake pull-handle thing “in case.”
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You also (typically) had a manual transmission that you could use to slow down a bit too. I actually recall learning what to do if brakes fail during driver’s ed in the early/mid 90’s! I drove a 60’s era car for first 10 years of my life, although we changed it to a dual master cylinder for all the above stated reasons.
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The chance of a modern car’s brakes failing, both master cylinders, is (I guess?) about zero so you don’t need an “e-brake” anymore. I mean yeah I don’t think it was a bad thing to keep for legacy, but now it is called the Parking Brake.
…Which people don’t even use either. Throw it in park, jump out with the car oscillating back and forth. I got into an endless logical loop with my inlaw: “Why don’t you use the parking brake?” “I don’t need to” “Yea but… why not do it anyway it takes no effort” “I don’t need to” and so on.
ive never had a drivers license and i knew this little historical factoid. emergency breaks are a throwback to when things were more analog. the reason they started calling it a parking break was to differentiate it from the old system.
If you’ve ever had a chance to check a brake system over thoroughly you may have noted the subtle details of how the redundancy is built in, like having a separator at the bottom of the fluid reservoir with an outlet on each side, so if there is a leak in one half of the system, there is always a bit of fluid reserved at the bottom for the other half to still work.
But there are still single-point failures. The mechanical linkage to the master cylinder has a single cotter pin in it. The single vacuum line, if it fails, will suddenly make the brakes much harder to use, which most will mistake as an outright fail. I’ve even had a brake pedal break.
So despite the redundant brake system I still like to have that pull lever handy.
They are more fun when they go to the back wheels though. Can’t lock them up on the front wheel ones (Subaru).
Volvo does you one better and has dual brake hoses to each front caliper (cost is minimal, probably $20-50). Each half of the reservoir activates both front brakes, and one side of the rear brakes. This is so even if you lose a hydraulic circuit you retain much more braking capability (the rear brakes usually contribute very little, especially in an emergency stop situation) and the car will track much straighter under braking as both sides are active.
Nowadays the pin may have a clip integrated and a backup clip, or a sleeve that slides on capturing the pin.
Older Subarus (80s-90s?) had front secondary brakes. My late 90s early 2000s had them on the rear.
On the subject of redundancy trans atlantic passenger flights originally required 4 engines, then 3 (with a notable downside of increased noise and harshness as the third engine was attached to the hull) and now with fly by wire and increasingly powerful and reliable engines that you can have a twin engine .
The Flock video should be required watching for anyone in the US, Benn Jordan makes great videos.
Next they’ll put the controller in the brake unit and digitally tie it up further. That environment is just great for electronics, good for more service and junk. Do the parts gears etc. inside have their weak points? Little DC brushed motor, by using stepper even this battery hack would be much harder.