With all respect to the OEM engineer plus lots of gratitude for enhancing this discussion....
I think we need to keep some things in mind.
- The idea is to use the car's electronic park brake for a breakaway situation - not everyday toad braking.
- If deploying in a breakaway results in fault codes etc -- well, so what? Keep in mind, the toad will probably be totaled anyway, so a few fault codes will be of little consequence ! ! (is that "toadaled" ?)
- Plus, wrt screwing with the computers - Activating the park/emergency brake with a solenoid to trip the switch avoids tapping into any electronics and is no different that hitting the switch with your finger.
- This will probably never be used and if it is, it will not be used more than once. :o
- A car with the rear brakes applied as it careens off the road is likely to be no more out of control than one with four brakes applied. A crash is a crash.
- Aggressive application of the rear brakes in a breakaway would certainly stop the car as long as it stays right-side-up. That easily meets the intent of a breakaway system and I speculate it would satisfy any regulatory requirement for breakaway.
So in the points above, are there errors in logic ?
ps: It bugs me to pay $200 to $400++ for a breakaway system that will never be used anyway. Using this solution, the total cost will be
less than $20 plus my time (which is free as I am retired).
