Doctor's dice with death after Volvo's brakes fail while accelerating on mountain road

Daily Mail​

13 hours ago

A retired doctor was forced to crash his own car after it started to accelerate and his brakes failed on a mountain road.
Peter Rothschild was driving down a mountain road in northern California in May when his new Volvo SUV started to accelerate, dashcam footage showed.
The 69-year-old retired radiologist spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the horrifying journey and his battle to slow the car down.
'I kept pushing on the brakes and pushing on the brakes', he told the outlet - but the car continued to speed up.
Horrifying footage of the incident showed the car quickly driving down the road, before Rothschild managed to crash the vehicle into an embankment to stop it.
The side air bags deployed and the vehicle was damaged, but Rothschild added: 'I don't think I would've made the next curve and would've gone off the side.'
Unbeknownst to Rothschild, and Volvo, his XC90 plug-in hybrid had a breaking defect.
The vehicle had been recalled the month prior over failures with the rearview camera and given a software update.
Volvo said that around 11,500 of those updated vehicles, which totaled 400,000, then started experiencing braking failures.
After discovering the problem, Volvo said they immediately stopped installing the software updates.
A statement said: 'We are treating this issue very seriously and doing everything we can to update all impacted vehicles as soon as possible.'
Rothschild told the outlet that he bought his first Volvo in the 1980s and owns two currently.
He passed down his love for the Swedish car manufacturer to his children, and claimed that he had spent close to a million dollars on Volvos over the years.
His love comes from their renowned safety-first reputation, having invented important safety features including the three point safety belt.
Following the brake failure however his enthusiasm for the brand has waned and he told the outlet that he is officially done with the brand.
He added: 'The last thing you want to do is panic, but this was a scary road and without brakes it's very scary. This wasn't my fault. This was Volvo's fault.'
Following the crash he said a third-party emergency provider had called him due to the air bags going off.
He added: 'I remember telling them "you need to tell this to your supervisor, this is huge, this is really, really important".'
After alerting Volvo, they discovered the software issued in the recall had interfered with the breaking system.
They found that a driver could lose all braking functionality without warning 'after coasting downhill for at least 1 minute and 40 seconds', the company said.
According to Volvo the problem occurs when drivers are using the vehicles regenerative braking technology. In normal circumstances the issue wouldn't happen.
The car maker said they had received three reports of similar incidents, nobody was injured in them.
In June they advised drivers of nine models not to use their car until it was fixed, they then said in July that all drivers should urgently go to a dealer to have it repaired.
As of this week the company said that 600 of the vehicles remain unfixed. Rothschild is now considering a Tesla as his next purchase.