Death trap

[Paul McCann]

MY A6 all road just tried to kill me. For the last week I've been getting messages on my dash that various lights had blown , which they hadn't. I was driving home a couple of days ago when the electric handbrake warning light flashed up. In a split second the hand brake came on and the car switched off and the steering lock engaged. By pure luck I was only doing 30 mph on a quiet road. The car has been recovered to a garage and i'm waiting for it to be looked at. If this had happened on a motorway at 70 or on a bend I wouldn't be here now, i'd be dead or in hospital. Has this happened before ? My problem now is I don't trust the car and my girlfriend won't drive it again. I think I will end up with a massive bill to get the death trap back on the road with no guarantee that it won't happen again this time with fatal outcome. What can I do >

[Crasher]

I would say water in the left hand plenum chamber electrics box, it sends everything nuts. I am afraid this sort of scenario is going to become more common and more frightening as cars get more electronically controlled-welcome to the future! I keep screaming about automated cars like I have for 20 years about Dirty Diesel, autonomous cars WILL reduce road deaths caused by humans but the machines WILL make mistakes, we accept it when people kill people but we don’t accept it when machines kill people.

[pxr5]

I did have soemthing similar years ago on a brand new Ford Focus, it must have been 1999/2000. The car only had a few hundred miles on it and I was driving along happily when the whole thing just shut down. Not a stall as such, just loss of electrics. The steering wheel locked and all I could do was brake, all the dash lit up like a Christmas tree. Luckily, I was just approaching a roundabout at the time and the road was quiet. The car was recovered as it wouldn't start and I never saw it again. Ford did a full check and couldn't do anything with it, so I got another brand new one. Really scary though.