The other day I was on the final approach to my house, coasting with the engine off like always. A storm had just blown by and as the car rounded a corner a tree jumped out in front of me. The tree was about 4 inches in diameter and had I been driving my old 4wd pickup I would have just crunched over the top of it. Civic Hybrids are not nearly as high off the ground as 4wd pickups so at first I swerved in an attempt to go around the tree. The swerving action caused the headlights to iluminate the rest of the tree at which point I realized that the tree was across the entire width of the road. A few milliseconds go by while I realize that there is not going to be any way around the tree and also that going over the tree in the Civic is a bad idea. At this point I slammed on the brakes. Any guesses on what happened next? Keep in mind that the car was off.

 

My guess would be no, since you would use up the vaccum pressure pretty quickly in a panic stop.... I hope I am wrong.

 

I would say yes, because all of the electronics work during a reboot. The only reason we lose power to the breaks is the vacum runs out. I would expect that the vacum would last long enough to handle a stop or two even pulsing.

 

My guess is that you did not have anti-lock - but the brakes still worked OK.
If you just applied the brakes, not pumping or brake and release, the vacuum booster may still have been available. And even if the vacuum was depleted, the brakes will still function, you just have to mash the pedal harder.
Did you manage to modulate the brakes and not lose control? Again, I would guess that everything worked out OK. Or I hope that it did.

Regards,

 

It is true that you can run out of vacuum and lose power brakes but that did not happen in this case.

Not only did I have power brakes but the anti-lock kicked in as well (that part kinda surprized me). After a few seconds of tires squeeling and anti-lock brakes chattering the car stoped just fine. I did a quick underwear check and then got out of the car and moved the fallen tree. It all turned out Ok except that I had to use gas to restart the car (ohhh the humanity).

 

Nope I just mashed the brakes, hard. The car did the rest. I was only going about 20mph so the panic was for the car. The situation was never physically threatening.

 

You know, I thought of this mod to make our cars even safer. Since the main problem of rebooting is loosing power breaks we should just replace our existing vacum canister with one of those canisters people use for pnumatic suspension. That should last a good dozen or so stops.

 

Or if we can figure out how to do a real manually induced auto-stop. I think it checks the vacuum pressure and would restart the car if it got low but I'm not sure about that. The car will not auto-stop if there is not enough vacuum for sure.

 

maybe when I get a car computer and a tap into the odb II connector I can figure out how it does an autostop.