The front wheel certainly could have spun out of control for a brief period while accelerating from a stop at a light. The car didn't provide any feedback to indicate this was happening. I am certain I would not have heard it; the heater was on full, and there were two enormous pimped out rig pig trucks with fart cannons on either side trying to race to the next red light.
It is a stupidly dangerous, frustrating road filled almost entirely with full-tonne trucks, SUVs and cars on large risers. The civic design is so poor that something like 70’+ people speed dangerously to try to beat the endless series of poorly timed lights, often whipping through reds. There is an LRT going down the middle of the road, and the whole thing is the feeder to the freeway serving a pair of set of huge bedroom communities. Oh, and it was the first 20 minutes of rush hour.
So no, unless the car provided some form of tactile feedback, or an audible tone in the car, I’d never have known that the wheel had spun.
As to the “completely stopped responding” bit, that is an interesting one. See, the car was working just fine at 20kph for several blocks (as I *desperately locked for a way to escape the death trap road I was on, which had big cement walls an no turn-out lane.)
It wasn’t until I complete the left hand turn (incidentally taking me across the tracks) that the thing went dead. But only for an instant…then the speedo freaked out for a second (again) and the car went right back to 20kph.
There is no exaggeration or hyperbole there. Not even about the terrifying, terrifying road. (I only ever even drive that road anymore because the other links are all under construction.) My issue indeed is emphatically not with the computer itself. I think it did the job it is supposed to do.
My issue is with the lack of feedback. That computer should have told me that it was overriding my inputs. Loudly. And I take serious issue with and designer or engineer that allowed the creation of such a system without informing the driver that this sort of thing was even possible. (It is not how the system normally behaves.)
Let’s take ABS as a great example of a well done system. In every car I have ever driven, there is a universal signal (the pedal “pumping”) for informing the driver that the computer was overriding user inputs. This is good. This is proper engineering. It is a universal feedback system and – critically – it informs the driver when it is in use.
The trac computer in this instance declined to do anything of the sort. Thus my philosophising. Are we – as a society – comfortable with this? Is the burden of knowing when a computer is overriding a human – as opposed to mechanical or other error – on the human? What happened to the principles of good design that did things like provide a feedback mechanism for ABS?
As to make/model of car, I decline to answer. The last thing the Internet needs is another holy war about car manufacturers.