The 1st kaboom case since day 1, an unfortunate side affect of the leash is every failure of the control mechanism results in full throttle until it runs into something. Usually, it eventually settles into going in a circle like a control line airplane. Pull the leash in until it hits you or falls over. In the worst case, the leash could get pulled completely off the truck, disconnect from the serial port, & the mane confuser would kill the motors after 1 second. Let the leash go & maybe it'll fully retract, killing the motor. Maybe it'll get hung up & run forever.

Another stress point was revealed. A standoff also broke off. That standoff is in a difficult position. Another model & another step up in robustness followed. More functional than visually appealing.

Leash failure in traffic is still a real possibility. Lions avoid using it in traffic. 1 mitigation has been to limit the maximum speed to 9 min/mile, but it makes the rear camera angle difficult. Another mitigation would be a kill switch on the leash, but it makes the leash heavier. There could be a kill switch as a separate dongle. Finally, the operator could carry around the paw controller at all times. The paw controller could override the leash whenever it was on. It would be hard to access the paw controller. The startup time for any RF system is quite long.

The new leash is a translucent beast designed for observing how everything fits & surviving more bashes. It has more plastic than the other 2 designs.

Sadly, the leash has a glitch problem whereby its measured distance either resets to 0 or errors low for some reason.  This has happened only twice.  It could be the micro resetting.  In both cases, the glitch happened after it was rewound to 0 & extended again.  The only way to recover it was to retract it & power cycle it.  It could be static electricity.

Another glitch is where it's fully deflected & ends up oscillating between full deflection right & left.  It has to be retracted & extended again when in the center.