Vehicles
If it is used to shut down vehicles and machinery if the operator loses control or is ejected, then it is called dead man's switch. A common example of this would be the kill switches used by boaters wherein a cord connects the kill switch to the operator (usually by their life jackets), and if the operator is thrown overboard in an accident, the cord will pull the switch and immediately shut down the vessel's engine. This prevents it from becoming a run-away vessel that could impose a danger to other vessels or swimmers at sea, and allows the operator to swim back to the vessel and re-board it.
NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) requires all their stock cars to be equipped with a steering wheel-mounted kill switch, in case the accelerator pedal sticks and the driver needs to shut down the engine.
Kill switches are also used on land vehicles as an Anti-theft system and as an emergency power off. Such devices are often equipped into bait cars and set up so that observing police can trigger the switch remotely.
Read more about this topic: Kill Switch, Physical World Applications
Famous quotes containing the word vehicles:
“Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)