Hundreds of motorists explain that they had experienced brutal braking of their vehicle without action on their part, with consequences that can go as far as the fatal accident. The Ministry of Transport has taken up the file.
A car that brakes on its own and suddenly on the highway: it is the scenario experienced by Joanna, a resident of the Rhône department, last April. While driving on the A40 aboard her recent Peugeot 208 and cruising rhythm between 110 and 130 km/h, her car battery without her pressing the brake pedal.
No alert beep or obstacle present on the road, this is called “ghost braking”, which can a priori be explained by a dysfunction of assistants to driving and emergency braking. Several cases identified in recent years are pushing the Ministry of Transport to launch an investigation, learned here (ex-France Bleu) this Wednesday, August 13.
More than 250 testimonies
Surprised by this brutal braking, the car which was rolling behind Joanna had indeed struck him. The shock is very violent, the two vehicles are good for breakage, but fortunately the two drivers are just out of cervical sprains and hematomas.
After hearing the two motorists, the gendarmerie requests an investigation, but justice refuses. “Unofficially, I know that it is because it is too expensive and that there was no death,” said Joanna at the microphone of France Inter in early August.
Shocked by this accident, she had previously told her experience in the columns of the newspaper Le Progrès in early July, creating in passing an email address (incident.freting@gmail.com) so that other motorists appear if they had experienced a similar situation. In a month, she received more than 250 testimonies.
Expertises that give nothing
All brands would be affected, with more or less serious accidents that have spread over the past four years. At least a fatal accident is unfortunately identified, with a driver, Aurélie, who recounts her lived experience in December 2023 on the A7 in Drôme. Same circumstance, with brutal braking when it was “accelerating”. Stronged from the rear, the shock is terrible: it was her passenger who lost her life, when Aurélie finds herself in a coma.
“Her car, a Skoda, was appraised three times, but no failure was found. According to her, her car had already experienced electronic problems in the weeks preceding the fatal accident, with GPS and music. The dealer had examined the vehicle, without finding dysfunction,” summarizes here.
The consequences are very heavy for Aurélie, tried last May and sentenced in early July for manslaughter. On the advice of her lawyers, she did not appeal, but would like “justice to be done, that the truth be done” and avoid new dramas which could therefore be linked to the recent equipment of vehicles.
The emergency braking in question?
“The ministry will question the manufacturers and carry out testing,” the Ministry of Transport said this Wednesday. The idea will notably be to ensure the proper functioning of emergency braking systems, compulsory on new vehicles sold in Europe since 2022, but which has already been offered on certain vehicles for longer.
Thanks to radars, cameras and various sensors, the vehicle can detect the presence of an obstacle, trigger an alert and activate the brakes if the driver does not react. A system which is not infallible and which can, like adaptive speed regulators, misinterpret elements on the road, until it causes unnecessary and even dangerous braking.
We also speak of “false positives”, when the system will voluntarily ignore a detection of a potential obstacle, leaving the driver making the decision to brake or not, precisely to avoid ghost braking. A fine adjustment which had also been pointed out during the fatal accident in 2018 in the United States with an autonomous Uber prototype, this time for not having triggered automatic braking.
The investigation of the Ministry of Transport will therefore have to shed light on these numerous dysfunctions identified in France in recent years and on the measures to be taken.
In the meantime, on the most recent vehicles, it is possible to deactivate the emergency braking functions that reactivate each start. False alerts, without necessarily going to the ghost braking, can also push to contact a mechanic to revise the various sensors of the vehicle.