This page is mostly about interference to vehicle electronics other than the problem of radio-activated key fob failure. For that, see the page on RAKE.

Fylingdales

(The Guardian, 19 December 2002)

President Bush's son of star wars has neutralised its first targets in Yorkshire even before the British government has given the formal go-ahead for the RAF Fylingdales base on the moors to be used for the project. The upgrading of the security and surveillance systems at the base, in preparation for an onslaught of peace protesters objecting to the scheme, is knocking out the electrical systems of expensive cars. Visitors to the beauty spot of Goathland, where the TV series Heartbeat is filmed to portray an idyllic 1960s rural life, have found themselves trapped among its charms.

High power radar pulses trigger the immobilising devices of many makes of cars and motorcycles - BMW, Mercedes and Jeep among them. Many have had to be towed out of range of the base before they can be restarted. The RAF admits it is a problem but says it is down to the car manufacturers to change their frequencies. However, Jeep claims this is not possible because of government restrictions.

Either way the locals are not amused. Frank Doyle, who owns a shop called Bazaar in Whitby, makes regular deliveries to the Goathland area in his Mercedes Vito van. He said: "I have got stuck three times in less than two weeks and have to keep calling breakdown services to get out of the place. "I am very fed up with it. It's not just the inconvenience - it messes up the business and my social life. Now when I'm on deliveries I keep the engine running, but still can't visit friends who live near Fylingdales."

Goathland resident Jackie Fearnley said: "I know that car alarms do go off, but this is getting ridiculous. It is disturbing all the villagers - and I don't think it is going to help tourism here either. Someone has got to sort this out."

North York Moors National Park car park attendant Bill Peirson said that Jeep Cherokees, Mercedes cars and vans, and BMWs seemed to be worst affected by the radar. "As soon as the alarms go off, I go over to the owners and explain it's probably the Fylingdales radar that's caused it. Motorbikes are the worst. There was a bike alarm screaming all afternoon recently and the rider didn't have any breakdown cover. I asked a friend in the village with a trailer to tow him away, and as soon as they were out of Fylingdales' range, it stopped."

Wing Commander Chris Knapman, of RAF Fylingdales, said it was not up to the base to resolve the problem. "We have had the frequencies we use for a very long time," he said. "They are allocated to commercial, military and government users, and the allocation is very tightly controlled. As far as we are concerned, the radars are working on frequencies which are well known, and most car manufacturers take that into account."

A spokesman for Jeep said: "The problem is that the government gives manufacturers such a narrow band to operate in - so the radio wave we use for our key fob is severely restricted."

Trimingham

(Eastern Daily Press, 20 February 2006)

The giant grey "golf ball" cuts a sinister shape on the seaside skyline as it goes about its silent duty of helping protect the nation. But strange things, that could be part of an X-Files episode, are happening in the shadow of the radar dome. Frightened motorists have had their engines and lights cut out, while instrument dials crash to zero or speed to 150mph as they cruise past the landmark on the North Norfolk coast.

Mother-of-two Kerrie Maydew, who does a "school run" past the Trimingham radar unit, has been a victim half a dozen times. The first time saw her dashboard go dead - and when she pulled into a local garage mechanics found all her electric windows and indicators had failed too. It turned out the main fuse box of her reliable Nissan Almera had been "fried" and needed replacing at the cost of £300. The next few times it just saw the dials drop to zero, but it was just as scary.

"It is frightening. The first time I dare not turn off my ignition in case the car would not start again and left me stranded," said Mrs Maydew from Mundesley. "I am a bit more used to it now, but your heart still goes in your mouth each time. It only ever happens when I drive past the radar golf ball towards Cromer - so it must be what is causing it."

"We have lived here for about five years, but it is only been happening the past couple of months," said the 39-year-old from Church Lane.

There has been a steady stream of trouble-hit cars turning up at the nearest garage - Crayford and Abbs on Cromer Road at Mundesley - where both the bosses have also been victims. One of them, Neil Crayford, is a former RAF radar operator, so he brings some expertise to the baffling problem. "We must have had 30 cars in with problems over the past couple of months. And they are only the ones we know about, so there could be more. It is a mixture of lights and engines cutting out, along with dashboards going haywire."

Mr Crayford said his headlights and dashboard cut out for a few seconds as he drove past in convoy one night with a colleague - who suffered exactly the same fate. "It is a bit scary in the dark, suddenly having no lights on a country road - even for a few seconds," he added.

Most of the cars have been repaired by disconnecting and reconnecting the battery, which seems to re-set the electronics. "I have talked to people who live near the dome, but it doesn't seem to affect their televisions or radios - so it is just something in cars it appears to affect," said Mr Crayford. His business partner Kevin Abbs also suffered electrical problems at the dome, while delivering a customer's car after service - so it was in perfect working order when it began the journey.

During six years in the RAF as a fighter controller Mr Crayford worked at Trimingham's "mother station" at Neatishead before joining the motor trade. He is barred under the Official Secrets Act from saying too much about the dome - which is a key part of the national air defence system. But he said: "Something must have changed - either the frequency or output - for this to happen. I lodged an official complaint with the Ministry of Defence two weeks ago, but incidents are still happening. We get about five a week, and had three more on Friday."

An MoD spokeswoman confirmed it was investigating complaints about the radar head interfering with cars. But she added that there were other private users on the same frequency range as the Type 43 radar spinning inside the dome. The radar was "operating legally" and there were "no guarantees the Trimingham radar is the cause of the reported incidents." The spokeswoman also pointed out it was the responsibility of car makers to protect vehicle electrical systems, and that car handbooks warned of possible malfunctions close to radar transmitters.

(And again in The Guardian, February 22nd 2006; also in the Telegraph, February 21st 2006)

Modern motor cars rattle with fear when they take the winding coast road from Mundesley past RAF Trimingham to Cromer. Engines have stalled. Fuseboards and microchips have fried. Speedometers have roared up to 150mph or down to 0. Dashboards have gone black. Clocks have conked out. Down at the local garage, they have a technical term for it. "It's like the X-Files isn't it?" said mechanic Kevin Abbs. Mr Abbs has been a busy man in recent days after a spate of mysterious breakdowns outside a radar station on the north Norfolk coast.

Housed inside a giant white golf ball-like structure, the radar station looks as forbidding as the North Sea churning brown below. "A micro-wave radiation hazard exists beyond this point," warns a danger sign on a barbed wire fence. Its purpose veiled by the Official Secrets Act, something has quietly whirred here since 1941, when the station provided early warning against a Nazi attack. For decades it watched for the Red Menace in the east. With the cessation of the cold war, it appears to have turned its spying eye on today's computer-guided cars. But only if they have immobilisers and are driven in a westerly direction.

"The display went. That's what I noticed first. The rev counter, the speedo, the whole lot went to zero," said Kerrie Maydew, who was taking her son to school when the electrics broke on her Nissan Almera as she passed the radar. Mrs Maydew drove to the garage, and was told her fuseboard was fried. "The garage said, 'this doesn't happen'. They've sold nearly 1,000 Nissans and they've never seen it happen."

Since then, the dashboard indicators have stopped working on Mrs Maydew's car half-a-dozen times, most recently yesterday. The radar is not just zapping Japanese cars. The mechanics at Crayford and Abbs say nearly 100 motorists have phoned them in recent days reporting similar problems on everything from a new Honda to a Renault Laguna. "I thought I was going mad," said one woman, who had to keep resetting her clock every time she drove past the radar. "I had it myself the other night," said co-owner Kevin Abbs. "I was driving past the radar station at 6pm and the dashboard lights went down."

Is the radar simply stuck in the past, futilely fighting the demons of modern life? "We used to live right nearby and it used to interfere with the TV as soon as they switched it on. They could see into Red Square in Moscow," said Jean Brown.

While it could prove excellent business, the local garage is not charging customers to fix cars zapped by the radar. Most can be repaired by disconnecting and reconnecting the battery. But they have lodged a complaint with the Ministry of Defence. "Now people are starting to wonder," said Mr Abbs. "If it's zapping your car, is there a health issue?" Car manufacturers use the military frequency deployed at the radar station to operate their immobilisers. The MoD promises to check if recent operations have caused the spate of breakdowns, but it is not yet admitting liability. "We have received a number of complaints recently about problems with people's cars when they drive past the radar and we are investigating the complaints," said a spokeswoman. The MoD is not ruling out compensation for affected drivers.

Perhaps, as local legend has it when a Russian dignitary came visiting, the boffins sometimes sneakily switch off the radar. Your correspondent bravely subjected his utterly unreliable 10-year-old car to the full force of Trimingham's radar eight times yesterday. Everything carried on winking and bleeping as before. The microwaves didn't even cure the faulty front light.

British Columbia

(BC Local News, February 16, 2010)

A tactical radar based at Pitt Meadows airport that’s been affecting electronics in cars is not a health risk.

Tests conducted by 1 Canadian Air Division and the 42 Radar Squadron found transmissions from the radar pose no threat to humans or medical devices like pacemakers, although it’s been bothering cars. People have reported their speedometers going haywire or dashboard lights fluctuating while driving along Ford and Baynes Roads past the airport.

Airport operations manager Michael McDowell assured - drivers have nothing to worry about. “It’s not dangerous,” said McDowell, who only experiences a “blip” on his radio when he drives past the radar to work.

The long range radar based at the airport has been operating 24/7 since the end of January, scanning the skies for anything suspicious as part of security operations for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The radar squadron conducted several tests, both at Pitt Meadows and their home base in Winnipeg, after nearby residents complained about electromagnetic waves interfering with their cars when the radar was first deployed to the area early last year. “We wanted to make sure it was safe for operating,” said Lt. David Lavalee with 1 Canadian Air Division. “What the testing showed was the radar was indeed safe. There was no threat to human health involved with the operation of the radar.” The Canadian Forces tested the radar against 27 different implantable medical devices and found they were immune to radio frequency emissions. The waves were also tested on a police cruiser, ambulance and fire truck and produce similar results.

Signs advising drivers that they may experience electromagnetic interference are now posted near the airport. The squadron is also running the radar at a lower power setting to eliminate some of the interference. “We are taking steps to do what we can to mitigate it,” said Lavalee. “We are hoping it’s less of an impact on the public.”

Braking accidents in Japan

(The Risks Digest, 21st December 2003)

It has been reported widely in the Japanese press that electromagnetic interference caused by illegally modified transceivers on trucks is suspected of causing two accidents by disabling the braking system of commuter buses.

Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corporation announced that two models of its buses are adversely affected by high-powered EMI from short distance and its braking system may not function properly under such conditions. Specifically, its breaking system that detects the wheel-locking condition falsely triggers due to the EMI and thus the brake doesn't work as intended. Two accidents were reported last year where the bus drivers reported that the brake suddenly stopped working. However, after the police investigation, no visible malfunction was found.

The manufacturer continued investigation and found that high-powered radio signals emitted by a nearby transceiver (illegally modified and thus 1,000-10,000 as strong as permitted by law for such transceivers) can interfere with its braking control unit, resulting in false information that the wheels locked due to braking.  Upon this false information, it seems (my interpretation from what I read various reports) that the control unit decided to release the brakes, and thus caused unintended loss of braking. It is not known whether such illegally modified transceivers were present nearby in two accident cases.  But in other two instances where loss of braking was observed, the bus drivers saw suspicious trucks nearby.

The company could reproduce the condition in live experiments, and it will refit the 2200+ cars by replacing the control unit, sensors, pipes, circuit harness, etc.  I think the company should be commended for its continued investigation after the accidents. I have personally noticed voices of presumably truck drivers whose transceiver must have been modified to generate enormous amount of power from my audio equipment over the years. (Remember the CB radio craze of 1970's?)  But this is the first time such strong emission is linked to real-world accidents.  [I don't think so.  We had CB interference knocking out cruise controls long ago.  PGN]

The warning that I see and hear on airplanes during landing and take off is no longer a remote worry.  I should be glad that most air runways seem to have enough distance from the nearby highway. As we depend on computers and sensors for better control of *everything* such as cars, home appliances, the malfunctions due to external EMI must be considered carefully, but I suspect that only the military agencies who have tried to harden the fighter planes and such against the EMI caused by nuclear blasts have the technical knowhow or mentality to cope with such problems caused by unusually and possibly illegally high-powered EMI.

(Yes, I know that the FCC regulations and similar usually protect the ordinary home appliances against the run-of-the-mill EMI from computers, etc.  However, I doubt that electronic home appliance makers are ready to tackle the above the normal, high-powered emission caused by illegally modified transceivers. And they are a real threat along busy traffic route today.  I hate to see various home appliances behave erratically every time a truck with such a transceiver passes by.  Or for that matter, a whole field filled with tiny sensors blown by a strong zap of an illegally modified transmitter.  Illegal or not, such dangers are going to be real and may have wide-spread consequences in the future.)

Airport transmissions interfere with some cars on nearby motorway

(Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 19th August 2006)

While towing a caravan south between junctions 24 and 23 of the M1 recently, the turbo of my 29,000 mile Audi A4 TDI suddenly shut down. There were no warning lights or mechanical noises, simply a serious loss of power. I struggled off the motorway and a mobile technician from Audi Assist checked the car the following day. He ran a series of electronic checks but could find no fault other than a "possible" mechanical turbo failure. On the subsequent test run, the turbo was working again and I have completed a further 200 miles without incident. Could the problem have been due to the electronic interference that has previously been mentioned in your column? A.S., Doncaster.

'Honest John' replies: Another reader puts it down to the automatic aircraft landing system at East Midlands Airport. It transmits to planes coming in across the M1 and can apparently interfere with badly shielded car electronics.

The manufacturers' response

(Evaluation Engineering, August 2006)

For many years, automakers have performed electromagnetic compatibility testing of automobiles before their release to consumers. However, as the electronics content of vehicles becomes greater every year, it expands the potential for component or system failure caused by external sources of electromagnetic radiation.

One challenge has come from commercial and military airport radar systems that operate at frequencies from 1.2 to 1.4GHz and 2.7 to 3.1 GHz. Cases have been reported in which vehicles near airports and military bases suffered degradation or even failure of critical vehicle systems including braking controls and airbag deployment. As a result, Ford Motor Company and General Motors Worldwide (GMW) have introduced sections in their immunity standards for component testing when exposed to radar pulses, such as those at the 600V/m level.

Sudden unintended acceleration

(This subject had extensive press coverage a few years ago. This article covers most of the issues)

Experts point to throttles, not floor mats, in Toyota incidents

(Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times, November 29 2009)

Eric Weiss was stopped at a busy Long Beach, Calif., intersection last month when he said his 2008 Toyota Tacoma pickup unexpectedly started accelerating, forcing him to stand on the brakes to keep the bucking truck from plowing into oncoming cars.

Toyota Motor Corp. says the gas pedal design in Weiss' truck and more than 4 million other Toyota and Lexus vehicles makes them vulnerable to being trapped open by floor mats, and recently announced a costly recall to fix the problem. But Weiss is convinced his incident wasn't caused by a floor mat. He said he removed the mats in his truck months earlier on the advice of his Toyota dealer after his truck suddenly accelerated and rear-ended a BMW. "The brakes squealed and the engine roared," the 52-year-old cabinet maker said of the most recent episode. "I don't want to drive the truck anymore, but I don't want anyone else to, either."

Amid widening concern over unintended acceleration events, including an Aug. 28 crash near San Diego that killed a California Highway Patrol officer and his family, Toyota has repeatedly pointed to "floor mat entrapment" as the problem. But accounts from motorists such as Weiss, interviews with auto safety experts and a Los Angeles Times review of thousands of federal traffic safety incident reports point to another potential cause: the electronic throttles that have replaced mechanical systems in recent years.

The Times found that complaints of sudden acceleration in many Toyota and Lexus vehicles shot up almost immediately after the automaker adopted the so-called drive-by-wire system over the past decade. That system uses sensors, microprocessors and electric motors to connect the driver's foot to the engine, rather than a traditional link such as a steel cable. For some Toyota models, reports of unintended acceleration increased more than five-fold after drive-by-wire systems were adopted, according to the review of thousands of consumer complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Toyota first installed electronic throttles in 2002 model year Lexus ES and Toyota Camry sedans. Total complaints of sudden acceleration for the Lexus and Camry in the 2002-04 model years averaged 132 a year. That's up from an average of 26 annually for the 1999-2001 models, the Times review found. The average number of sudden acceleration complaints involving the Tacoma jumped more than 20 times, on average, in the three years after Toyota's introduction of drive-by-wire in these trucks in 2005. Increases were also found on the hybrid Prius, among other models.

Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said the automaker could not explain the trend. But Toyota consistently has held that electronic control systems, including drive-by-wire, are not to blame. "Six times in the past six years, NHTSA has undertaken an exhaustive review of allegations of unintended acceleration on Toyota and Lexus vehicles," Toyota said in a statement earlier this month. "Six times the agency closed the investigation without finding any electronic engine control system malfunction to be the cause of unintended acceleration." NHTSA officials consistently have said they have not found any electronic defects. "In the high-speed incidents, which are the type of crashes in which death or serious injury is most likely, the only pattern NHTSA has found to explain at least some of them are pedal entrapment by floor mats," a spokeswoman said in a written statement.

Toyota has been under a spotlight since the San Diego crash, in which the driver's desperate efforts to stop the car were recorded on a 911 emergency call made by a passenger. Following that incident, the Times reported that sudden acceleration events involving Toyota vehicles have resulted in at least 19 deaths since the introduction of the 2002 model year. By comparison, NHTSA says all other automakers combined had 11 fatalities related to sudden acceleration in the same period. Independent electronics and engineering experts say the drive-by-wire systems differ from automaker to automaker and that the potential for electronic throttle control systems to malfunction may have been dismissed too quickly by Toyota and federal safety officials. Unlike mechanical systems, electronic throttles -- which have the look and feel of traditional gas pedals -- are vulnerable to software glitches, manufacturing defects and electronic interference that could cause sudden acceleration, they say.

Driver not in control

"With the electronic throttle, the driver is not really in control of the engine," said Antony Anderson, a U.K.-based electrical engineering consultant who investigates electrical failures and has testified in sudden-acceleration lawsuits. "You are telling the computer, 'Will you please move the throttle to a certain level?' And the computer decides if it will obey you." Although Toyota says it knows of no electronic defects that would cause a vehicle to surge out of control, it has issued at least three technical service bulletins to its dealers warning of problems with the new electronic throttles in the 2002 and 2003 Camry. The throttle systems on six-cylinder engines can cause the vehicle to "exhibit a surging during light throttle input at speeds between 38 mph and 42 mph," according to one of the bulletins that was published by Alldata, a vehicle information company. The solution provided to dealers was to reprogram the engine control module.

NHTSA, the nation's primary agency for auto safety, has conducted a total of eight investigations of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles since 2003, prompted by defect petitions from motorists and its own examination of complaints. But the agency has tested electronic throttle systems only twice in those probes, its records show. Three years ago, the agency asked Toyota to test an electronic throttle component from a 2006 Camry, a task the company delegated to the Japanese supplier that manufactured the part. The supplier exonerated the throttle, and then NHTSA allowed Toyota to keep the 74-page report almost entirely confidential. The report, posted on the agency's Web site, has dozens of redacted pages. The other test, conducted at an NHTSA laboratory in Massachusetts, found that a Toyota throttle exhibited unusual behavior when researchers applied a magnetic field to the device's sensitive electronics. Engine speed surged by 1,000 revolutions per minute, according to a 2008 report by the agency's Vehicle Research and Test Center. Nonetheless, the lab concluded that the system "showed no vulnerabilities to electric signal activities." The details of the experiment were not explained in the lab report, and the agency never explained the apparent contradiction.

Two decades of lawsuits

The electronic throttle was introduced by BMW in 1988. Like a conventional throttle system, it controls the flow of air into the engine. Today, every new Toyota vehicle sold in the U.S. uses drive-by-wire. The systems cost less to install on the assembly line and increase the efficiency of the vehicle. To run these advanced throttle systems, each automaker develops its own electronic control modules and proprietary software that has unique control logic. The operations of the systems are opaque to consumers, as are potential failures.

In a worst-case scenario, consultant Anderson says, stray electrical voltages, electromagnetic signals or bad sensor readings could cause an undetectable error within the car's network of up to 70 microprocessors, setting off an unpredictable chain of reactions. One of those, he said, could be a command to completely open the throttle.

The auto industry has battled allegations of electronic defects in sudden-acceleration lawsuits for more than two decades, arguing that they are not caused by any vehicle defect. Richard Schmidt, a former University of California, Los Angeles, psychology professor and consultant specializing in human motor skills, said the problem almost always lies with drivers who step on the wrong pedal. "When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong," Schmidt said. "The human motor system is not perfect and it doesn't always do what it is told."

To be sure, the complaints by Toyota and Lexus owners about sudden acceleration involve a tiny share of the company's vehicles on the road. But runaway acceleration represents a high proportion of the complaints filed by consumers about Toyota in federal databases. For the 2007 Lexus ES sedan, for example, 74 of 132 complaints filed with NTHSA alleged sudden acceleration. And independent experts say that the number of complaints filed is only a tiny fraction of all potential problems, since most people don't bother filing a report.

Critics say NHTSA hasn't kept pace with technological changes. The auto industry has undergone a technological revolution in the past decade, and today about 25 percent of a vehicle's price reflects its electronics content. Nonetheless, NHTSA has adopted few, if any, standards for designing or testing vehicle electronics, according to industry officials. The agency's two-page safety standard for accelerators was adopted in 1973. Dale Kardos, who runs a consulting company that helps automakers with regulatory issues, said that manufacturers have repeatedly tried to get that standard updated because they fear they can no longer comply. "The industry would like to see standards written to reflect modern technology," Kardos said. Instead, independent organizations and the industry itself are setting standards and developing safety policies. The International Organization for Standardization, a nongovernmental group that sets industrial standards, recently introduced a new standard for automakers to protect vehicle electronics.

Supplier TRW Automotive Holdings Corp., which makes computerized controls for brakes and air bags, said its systems have multiple layers of redundancy to make sure electronic faults are detected and isolated. "Manufacturers' standards are far above the regulatory standards," said Ian Harvey, TRW's executive lead for electromechanical compatibility [sic]. "You wouldn't want somebody to make a cell phone call and the air bag goes off. That potentially could happen if you didn't take the proper precautions."

Field tests perfunctory

Despite the huge increase in complexity, when NHTSA investigators conduct field tests of alleged malfunctions of Toyota throttle systems, they rarely have done more than drive suspect vehicles for a few miles, test the brakes and plug a diagnostic tool into their onboard computers to look for error codes, investigation records show. Michael Pecht, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland who has studied sudden acceleration for 10 years, said it's nearly impossible to replicate an electronic control system fault simply by driving a short distance. "These are not things that occur every day. If it occurred a lot, you could track it down. If it occurs once in 10,000 trips, then it is difficult to find," he said. What's more, said Huei Peng, director of the University of Michigan's automotive engineering program and a specialist in vehicle control systems, many of the kinds of electronic errors that a modern car is susceptible to are not detectable by the car's fault detection system. "When there's no error code, it doesn't mean there's no error," Peng said.

Despite the potential risks associated with electronic systems, NHTSA's own reports indicate it often does not test them while investigating unintended acceleration. In a 2005 probe of Lexus ES vehicles, NHTSA reported that its investigator reviewed two vehicles that had allegedly surged out of control, but that "no interrogation or communication with the electronic systems was performed" before giving them a clean bill of health.

Texas resident Thomas Ritter, who has a mechanical engineering degree and spent 15 years as an engineer at General Motors, Chrysler and other auto and truck makers as well as 25 years designing oil exploration equipment, believes Toyota's acceleration problem lies in the electronics. In July, his wife was driving her 2006 Lexus ES 330 with four grandchildren near Houston when it accelerated out of control. To avoid a wreck, she crossed four lanes of traffic before smashing into a masonry sign, totaling the car and deploying the air bags. No one was seriously injured. "When you think about a machine operated by computers, almost anything can go wrong," said Ritter.

Smart pedal software

Toyota announced Wednesday that it had developed a series of fixes to prevent floor mats from causing sudden acceleration. In 4.26 million vehicles in the U.S. and Canada, Toyota said it will cut off a segment of the accelerator pedal and later install a newly designed pedal. It also will add a so-called smart pedal, software that cuts engine power any time the accelerator and brake are depressed simultaneously. Such software has been adopted as a safety feature by a number of automakers, including Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, Nissan and Chrysler, the companies said.

Independent auto safety experts said that although Toyota's fixes will help reduce the problem, it has not gotten to the root. "These incidents are coming in left and right where you can't blame the floor mats," said Sean Kane, president of the consulting company Safety Research and Strategies. "So they are chipping away at a problem that is widespread and complicated without having to unravel a root cause that could be very expensive."

Windscreen washers

(EMC Society of Australia Newsletter, June 2006)

In the development cycle of a certain automobile, it was found that the pump motor for the windshield washer was creating interference and causing an ABS warning light to activate. This vehicle's brake lines were coated with a new material which had a much higher conductivity than on older models.

It was later determined that the pump motor was generating a transient that was directly coupled to the ABS module by the new conductive coating on the brake lines. This transient was interfering with the ABS module and activating the ABS warning light. A capacitor was placed inside the pump motor housing and the housing material was changed from plastic to aluminium to fix the problem.

BMW rear screen heater interferes with car radio

(Sunday Times, 13th March 2005)

Q: The rear-screen heater in my BMW 3-Series causes so much interference when switched on that it's impossible to listen to the car radio. Our local BMW dealer suggested replacing the entire rear screen at a cost of more than £600. This seems drastic. - KR from Hertfordshire.

A: This is a known problem within the trade. It stems from the fact that the rear screen includes both the heating elements and the radio aerial. The high level of electrical current required by the heating elements is being picked up by the aerial. Fortunately, it is usually possible to fit one or more electrical suppressors into the heated rear window wiring, as close as possible to the window itself. These reduce the electromagnetic interference from the screen to a level where it shouldn't interfere with the aerial. This will cost much less than a new screen.

And lastly, just to show that it's not always unintentional...

RF Safe-Stop shuts down car engines with radio pulse

(BBC News, 3 December 2013)

A British company has demonstrated a prototype device capable of stopping cars and other vehicles using a blast of electromagnetic waves. The RF Safe-Stop uses radio frequency pulses to "confuse" a vehicle's electronic systems, cutting its engine. E2V is one of several companies trying to bring such a product to market.

It said it believed the primary use would be as a non-lethal weapon for the military to defend sensitive locations from vehicles refusing to stop. There has also been police interest. The BBC was given a demonstration of the device at Throckmorton Airfield, in Worcestershire. Deputy Chief Constable Andy Holt, of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), who has evaluated the tech, said the machine had "potential, but it's very early days yet".

At one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles. In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected. "It's a small radar transmitter," said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine. "The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall." He did not provide other specifics. However, the Engineer magazine has reported the device uses L- and S-band radio frequencies, and works at a range of up to 50m (164ft).

Some experts the BBC has spoken with suggested that turning off the engine in this manner would not stop vehicles rapidly enough. Others worried about what effect it might have on a car's electronic brake and steering systems. But E2V said the risks were lower than with alternative systems. Acpo suggested the machine's ability to stop motorbikes "safely" could prove particularly useful. Mr Holt noted that the tyre deflation devices used by some police forces posed the risk of causing "serious injury" if used against two-wheelers.

E2V added that its device could also be effective against other types of vehicles, including boats. But because the device works on electronic systems, he acknowledged that it would not work on all older vehicles. "Certainly if you took a 1960s Land Rover, there's a good chance you're not going to stop it," Mr Wood said. The firm added that it did not believe the RF Safe-Stop posed any risk to people using a pacemaker.