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Toyotas Suddenly Accelerate; Owners Up In Arms
cyclocommuter writes "Some Toyota owners are up in arms as they suspect that accidents have been caused by some kind of glitch in the electronic computer system used in Toyotas that controls the throttle. Refusing to accept the explanation of Toyota and the federal government (it involves the driver's-side floor mat), hundreds of Toyota owners are in rebellion after a series of accidents caused by what they call 'runaway cars.' Four people have died." The article notes: "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has done six separate investigations of such acceleration surges in Toyotas since 2003 and found no defect in Toyota's electronics."
Problem exists between accelerator and chair?
Follow me
I have to say that the decline in manual transmission driving has really diminished people's driving abilities. It's one thing that the there's an acceleration issue. It's another thing to not consider putting the car in neutral when something like this is encountered.
You get more MPG if the odometer is tied to a speedometer that is calibrated to show a higher speed, and thus greater distance traveled.
Morphing Software
So Toyota says it's floor mat. But here's something I don't understand after reading TFA... all people who had that problem (and lived to tell the tale) insist that they were braking hard as the car was accelerating. If it were really just gas pedal stuck in a floor mat, then surely applying brake would force the car to decelerate regardless?
There you have it, the HAM in the truck in the other lane rag chewing on HF about his new rig has managed to seize control of the Prius.
I for one welcome our RC Prius wielding retired overlords.
Hihi
And again, nothing was ever found to be wrong with the cars. Seems most of the drivers were used to American cars, and the Audi had both brake and accelerator a little to the right of the more typical position. They were pressing the accelerator instead of the brake. Fact is, in almost all commonly available cars, if you stand on the brake and on the accelerator simultaneously, the car will go nowhere. For events to have happened as described, you'd need the simultaneous failure of two unrelated systems, which both healed themselves miraculously after the event. Additionally, same as last time, there are a few unfortunate cases followed by a deluge of similar claims. I wonder why...
God damn it, this again? All these "sudden acceleration" accidents are caused by morons "suddenly" putting their foot on the gas pedal. Afterwards, they say that the car accelerated by itself - and it's impossible to prove them wrong.
F-22 raptor - 1.7 million lines of code
F-35 joint strike fighter - 5.7 million
Boeing 787 - 6.5 million
Premium class automobile - ~ 100 million
IEEE Spectrum: "How hard should it be to stop a runaway luxury car?" http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car
IEEE Spectrum: "This car runs on code" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
With American cars, the floormats are optional and come with a big price tag. This is a safety feature to prevent exactly this type of problem.
It's exactly like when Ashlee Simpson appeared on SNL and was caught lip syncing. She knew that she couldn't sing live, so she played her auto-tuned voice over the speakers. When the playback stopped and she was shown to be faking it, she danced a little jig. American car floormat pricing is like that little jig.
My Hyundai nearly always shows 3mph higher than my GPS. My GPS always agrees with the street-side radar things that flash your speed at you exactly. I never actually compared the long distance odometer readings to actual distance traveled to figure out if the speedometer needle is just aimed a few degrees too far to the right, or if the calibration of the axle rotation to distance traveled is just slightly off. I suppose it could be either one, but it's less evil to think that auto manufacturers just want you to drive slower and saver by tricking you into thinking you are going faster than you actual are that it is to think that they are trying to inflate their MPG figures.
Morphing Software
My Geo Metro had the EXACT same problem. It would suddenly jump from 1mph to 1.1mph very quickly. They wouldn't admit the problem either. We figured it was due to having an odd number of cylinders.
The BMWs I can remember all indicate 10 mph while parked.
(the scale is from 10 mph to 160 mph)
I guarantee you this is another example of driver error in the same vein as the unintended acceleration that afflicted Audi 5000's years ago. If I'm not mistaken I think the problem in the Audi was that the position of the pedals was slightly off from what people were accustomed to causing them to think they were pressing down on the brake when they actually had the accelerator down to the floor. There have been a few other cars with similar issues.
I'm quite certain the problem with these Toyota's is similar. How in the hell could a car possible start accelerating on its own? And even if the accelerator is drive-by-wire the brakes are not and will likely never be. This means that if the owner got on the brakes hard they'd be able to slow the car. Even if the ECU didn't cut power when braking as some cars do, the engine won't be able to overpower the brakes. About the only possible culprit I see is cruise control, but again, that should be fairly easy to defeat.
The fact is that when some people panic they freeze up and are unable to do anything else. As with the Audi, they press the gas accidentally, the car lunges forward and they panic, pressing down harder on the pedal. It reminds me of what happened to my father years ago. He was teaching my sister's friend to drive. For whatever reason she got on the gas, started barreling towards a car and hit it. She freaked out and froze, her foot firmly planted on the gas. My father actually had to take her leg and lift it off the gas because she was completely unresponsive.
And the problem is that sometimes the issue isn't actually unintended acceleration but some other problem that gives that impression. I know of some cases, for example, where a transmission doesn't engage properly for whatever reason. The driver tries to accelerate but the car doesn't move, so they give it more gas. The transmission eventually does engage and the car lunges forward more aggressively than anticipated. The car may have a real problem, but the driver didn't respond to the issue appropriately.
People nowadays are far too ignorant about they drive. Some people barely know what they're driving, let alone how anything works. As part of driver training basic instruction on the mechanical operation of a car should be mandatory. This would allow drivers to better respond to problems and make them better informed when they deal with mechanics so that they don't get taken advantage of so easily. It's like Toyota's recall over the floor mats. Are drivers so oblivious that they don't notice their floor mats riding up under the pedals. It's not like those things slip under there that easily. Too many people seem to take driving as seriously as they do sitting on the sofa watching television. But they sure do manage to have quite an ego about what they drive.
It's very difficult to diagnose problems like these without a reproducible testcase. It sounds like you've stumbled upon one. You should talk to your dealer. Either:
Toyota has a serious problem. Have for years. It's not the floor mats.
I was driving a '98 Toyota Camry. Foot on the brake. B-R-A-K-E. Yes, I know the difference. Car in drive. Waiting for a right turn. The car revved up high. I did manage to throw it into neutral, and the engine continued to surge. Luckily I didn't hit anything. And it was pure luck.
The car did not have All-weather floor mats.
I have racing experience, and a background in Mechanical Engineering.
The reason the problem hasn't been found is that it's probably a subtle fault (like the AT&T crash back in the early '90s, or the stress concentrations in the DeHavilland Comet) and they're (by they I mean the NHTSA) probably not looking very thoroughly, due to lack of manpower. They don't do investigations of car crashes the way they do for other serious engineering failures, like plane crashes or bridge collapses.
Phhh. Beemers are a joy to drive, but their electronics suck goatse's ass. And that's been the case for decades.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I had this same problem with a 1989 Jeep Cherokee in 2000. People died because of similar problems. On the internet and in court, Jeep claimed it was user error. The problem is people don't know enough about their cars to diagnose it, but it turned out to be the Throttle Position Sensor. Which would randomly rev the engine to 4000 RPM's instead of the idle of ~900 when you put it into gear. Yes, absolutely unpredictably. It was not easily duplicated for a mechanic, because when the TPS first started to go bad, it was very infrequent.
The problem is your normal routine is start the car and put it into gear almost immediately. The engine takes more time to rev noticeably past idle speed, at which time you're already moving and lost control of the car. Jeep claimed this was an unreasonable explanation, because they had an engineer sit in the car, depress the brake, put the car into gear, and then rev the engine and be unable to overpower the brakes. I found this only to be true if I were standing on the brakes, something I wasn't in practice to do, from a stop. It also overlooked the problem that once you let the car start moving, getting it stopped again was extremely difficult.
So everyone always assumes there are enough idiots out there for it to be driver error, but it happened to me, so I never trust any of the car manufacturers when this problem creeps up which it does fairly often. Also, it seems like extremely poor engineering on the manufacturer's part to fail to acknowledge this possible avenue of failure. Seems more like they are just covering their asses to avoid culpability.
I was in college at the time, and this is probably one of the more valuable lessons I've ever learned in engineering and something I think would be valuable in software engineering also. Never, ever dismiss complaining customers as morons just because its the simplest explanation especially regarding a safety issue. People actually put up with a lot. More often than not, when people complain and it is difficult to do so, there is merit to the complaint. A proper investigation is required, and a open mind, and wide imagination help determine the failure states.
Of course, it's because of the Earth's rotation speed.
Nah your thinking of Volkswagon, this is a Toyota article.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
The ABC web site has a video from Consumer's Report on what to do in case of uncontrolled acceleration. They use a Toyota to demonstrate that pumping the brakes results in brake failure - so the brakes cannot always overcome the engine. The Toyota off button requires holding down for three seconds, which is not obvious (until this happened) even to Toyota owners. They recommend putting into neutral and braking to demonstrate that this does work the best. At then end they show a VW where the full on brake does override the full on accelerator, and this is where good programing could make the car "failsafe" (I know, not the correct term but cut me some slack).
This is a "feature" of German cars due to a law in Germany mandating that the speedometer must NEVER read lower than real speed... even if the car has non-standard wheels and tires fitted.
Porsche and BMW exaggerate speed the most, and the theory is because owners of these cars are quite likely to upsize their rolling stock (and thus make the speedo read lower). It's annoying, but it's simply in response to a legal requirement.
Car and Driver did a test on several vehicles a bit over a year ago. GM vehicles were the most accurate... around +1 mph on average.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
My mom's best friend was killed when her husband was parking their Toyota Camry at a restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway, and the car suddenly accelerated through a fence and off a tall cliff onto the rocks below. Her husband survived with severe injuries, and he swears that the whole floormat excuse is BS. The car had been giving them acceleration issues prior to this incident, but the mechanic they took it to could find nothing wrong.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Hundreds of Toyota owners?! Well, then: if a percentage of the population of Toyota owners of North Dakota are upset, by all means, everyone who has ever owned a Toyota should raise their torch and/or pitchfork!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
One thing I haven't understood on the Prius floor mats. I don't know if this is on the newer models or not but the older sedans have a clip that prevents them from skidding up into the pedal. There has not been any reports of the retaining clip breaking, only the mats slid. I wonder if this is an issue on only newer ones.
For a picture of the hole for the carpet clip;
http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/Toyota-floor-mat-proper-installation.jpg
I've never had my mat come lose. Due to the shape shown in the photo, it can't get in the way unless it comes lose. If it comes lose, I'll remove it.
The truth shall set you free!
How do you think the speedometer that the odometer is connected to works?
Besides, wheel radius on a car is variable and is constantly changing. This is one of the primary reasons that speedometers read fast - the car maker provides a conservative buffer to ensure that no matter what your tire wear, air pressure and wheel size are, there is a much better chance of you traveling equal to or slower than the displayed speed, as opposed to faster than the displayed speed.
The government & Toyota are probably right about the floor mat. But that's what recalls are for.
This is exactly what happened to me and I was heading to a cliff - 3rd gear - floored and I had the presence of mind to turn off the ignition. Seriously - I was terrified.
Picture this, you turn a corner, accelerate, change gears, and suddenly you are going around 80 Km/h with about 1 block to the edge of cliff and a 90 degree turn on a residential street with a cliff in front of you.
I had the time to turn off the ignition and jerk to a stop... BTW taking it out of gear under full acceleration is not simple either. I can hear the vacuum cleaner sound of the engine too - it was crazy. However, when the engine red-lines - it kill the accelerator for a second and then lets it restart... grabbing the ****ing anything with that is un-fun.
AFTER it stopped I could diagnose the problem being that the driver's side floor mat came off the hook that is supposed to hold it in place and inched up over the gas-pedal... thus couldn't un-press it until the carpet was pulled back.
Since there was a slot in the peg that holds the carpet in place, I took a handy dandy twist tie and wrapped the peg with the carpet in place preventing the carpet from EVER popping off that peg. Since then - no scary shit.
Toyota and Nissan should fix this problem - at their cost - and it should be a recall. - After all - it's a 10 cent fix - a peg that has a simple spring latch on top would fix it with no problems. Picture hanger anchors have used that technique for decades now.
This year I've been driving 4 different Toyota Yaris and 2 Toyota Auris from 2009. The floor mat stuck on the gas pedal on all 6 cars which can be a bit annoying when driving 75 mph on the freeway and some idiot is stuck in 70-72 mph and you can't pass him because you got someone else driving past in the outer lane. Just breaking while the gas pedal is stuck is no fun. First time this happened I almost panicked, but I managed to remove the floor mat in time. So I wouldn't call this an electrical glitch, you just need to move the floor mat back 2-3 inches and this doesn't happen.
About 20 years ago, the Audi 5000S had the same supposed problem. You can read about the problem at the "New York Times", the "Los Angeles Times", and the "Business & Media Institute".
The trouble began when "60 Minutes" (of CBS News) broadcast a story about a woman who killed her son when she accidentally pressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. Her son was standing in front of the car. The woman, refusing to admit guilt, accused Audi of producing a defective car which accelerates automatically without driver intervention. She even filed a lawsuit against Audi. (Later, the court determined that she was at fault, but that fact was never broadcast in the original "60 Minutes" program.)
The sales of Audi vehicles fell dramatically after that "60 Minutes" program.
The Audi 5000S was never defective, but it did have 1 minor inconvenience. The accelerator pedal and the brake pedal were much closer to each other than they were in a traditional American car. This closeness was something to which a small subset of American drivers could not become accustomed. They sometimes did press the accelerator pedal when they intended to press the brake pedal.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective. Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire. Supposedly, Toyota used 2 identical sets of wires (for reasons of fault tolerance) from the electronic box to the transmission.
Another participant in this discussion claims that Toyota also mechanically separated the accelerator pedal from the fuel line. Toyota appears to have used drive-by-wire throughout the design to eliminate some metal -- thus saving money.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products. Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive. Toyota likely tried to save some money on the fault tolerance, and it was not able to protect the vehicle from the 1-in-1,000,000 chance of a transient fault in the electronic circuits. The chance of a glitch is low, but the probability that it occurs exactly once among 200,000 vehicles is high.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch. If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire. The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
That's a ridiculously uninformed comment.
BMW speedometers read high but it's not due to a problem with the electronics. It is intentional and other replies have already stated why it's intentional.
If you go into the car's service menu (you can reach it with a goofy pedal combination, similar to the old Nintendo up-down-up-down-a-b-start) you can find a menu that presents the ACTUAL speed which is clearly separated from the REPORTED speed.
GPS is horribly inaccurate to start. By that I mean its accuracy is out by a larger margin than you report the Hyundai showing. On a good day you'll be within 5% of your actual speed depending on the number of satellites in view. More sats, more accuracy.
Those road side radar things, I don't know about their accuracy, but I would imagine angle of approach will have something to do with how accurate they are.
Tire wear will have an impact on your car's actual speed, the more wear the faster your tires have to rotate to maintain the same speed. Depending on your speed this slight difference could account for your higher mph report.
Basicaly I am trying to say is that anything better than about 5% margin of error and you should be happy with the reported speed.
There is a butterfly valve on the air intake designed to keep this from happening (chokes the air from the engine) but I think it might have sucked that through too.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
It is so that they cannot be sued for displaying a lower speed than the real one - for which reason you could get a damn ticket. And that happens everywhere (or at least "almost" everywhere...)
GPS was never intended to measure speed. All it does is get position and repeat. Speed is calculated based on change of position over time, which is good for averaging but NOT good for spot measurements.
And there are several ways to calculate change of position, not all GPS's do it the same. Haversine, Spherical Law of Cosines, etc. Some may even use geometry on UTM (which can work cause rhumb lines are great circle lines in mercator projections). But again, what happens between refreshes and recalculations is lost in the averaging.
Those road-side radar speed signs...real police radar (the kind admissible in court) have a calibration regimen in order to stay accurate. The roadside radar signs....not so much.
I'm not arguing your speedometer is off...could be tire size, bad design, conspiracy...whatever. But GPS and radar signs aren't the standard by which to judge.
THL phish sticks
It's akin to setting your clock 5 minutes ahead so you won't be late.
It's fucking stupid and it defeats the point of the instrument.
A friend of mine just had her toyotas engine die because a cheap $20 hose was prone to failure, When it failed, the oil all leaked out WITHOUT the oil light coming on. This issue has occured for quite a few people with the Toyota Avalons (though almost all the ones with this issue were made in the same year)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Yep, and we have *such* and exact value for Pi.
Are you insane? We have as exact a value for pi as we need, far more accurate than any machine tools we can construct. Accurate enough to measure the entire universe down to Planck values, if it comes to that. Speedometers are rough, but it ain't because we don't know enough digits of pi.
Hey, when you come up with that Ford Fusion that has a non-electronically controlled automatic transmission and that doesn't have the electronic throttle control that they're wallpapering the world with press releases about, I've got some nice land to sell you to park it on...
You put the car in neutral and the engine goes to 8000RPM. That will freak you out, I guarantee.
Not really. I had a 1980 Ford Granada (US/Canadian model with 4.1L 6 cylinder automatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Granada_(North_America), a totally different car to the European model) in the early 80s. Its throttle was entirely mechanical, and the linkage to the butterfly valve involved a rod which twisted when the gas pedal was pushed down. One of the cheap clips holding this rod at one end got broken, and as a result, when I floored the throttle (required for manoevering in fast traffic on urban expressways), one of the engine hoses got jammed under it, effectively locking the trottle wide open.
I think the other highway users were more freaked out than I was, since I was driving with the brake lights on while holding the car at the speed of the traffic (65-75mph). There was no shoulder to stop on, but it was only a few km to the next exit ramp, where I dropped to neutral and then switched off the motor (as it raced towards bursting speed) and coasted to a safe halt with manual brakes and manual steering. A quick look under the hood revealed the problem, but I waited a few minutes extra to allow the motor and brakes to cool properly, before continuing home.
Despite driving more cautiously, I had the same thing happen two more times, before the clip was replaced a couple of days later.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
and they built some pretty impressive stuff.
little do we know, the pyramids were actually supposed to be spherical : (
The Audi 5000S was never defective...
It might be true that some people hit the wrong pedal, but I actually owned an Audi 5000 Turbo and experienced sudden-acceleration.
I was driving down an Interstate highway in Texas, when the car suddenly began accelerating. I was on cruse control, and my feet were not touching any pedals. Since I'm comfortable at high speeds (past racer) and the weather and road were good, I was pretty calm. I put my foot behind the accelerator pedal and pulled back. It moved freely. I realized the cruse control had opened the throttle wide open.
I tapped the brakes to shut down the system. The pedal wouldn't move. I pressed hard with both feet, and could feel the arm flex, but it would not move. Realizing I had no brakes, and a wide open throttle, I hit the dash switch to shut off the cruse control. As the car slowed, the brakes slowly became operational. I noticed the turbo boost gage was now reading negative pressure. When the turbo boost was on, you could not apply the brakes.
It turns out that there was a check valve between the intake manifold and the brake booster. If it leaks/leaks, then high pressure air prevents the application of the brakes.
My belief is there was a bug in the cruse control, or it was susceptible to outside interference (trucker with hopped-up CB radio?) Combine that with the check valve issue and you have a car that could very well exhibit the behavior that 60 Minutes indicated. Those people said the car suddenly accelerated and the brakes didn't work. And that matches my experience exactly.
I contacted Audi USA, but they blew me off. The dealer didn't care either.
I'll let others argue whether this is a 'defect', but I've been cured of ever buying another Audi.
Place nail here >+
which is good for averaging but NOT good for spot measurements
Spot measurements? For speed? GPS does the same as any speed measurement - calculates the time it takes to cover a prescribed distance, if you know of another way I'd be interested ;)
As an owner of a 2009 Toyota Camry LE, I can confirm that my car will occasionally (maybe once every 30 minutes on average) start accelerating (not fast, maybe 1 mile per hour per second) for about 2.5 seconds, even when my foot is steady on the gas pedal, and even when I'm driving on a completely flat surface, with the cruise control off, and with no external forces like wind outside or gravity pulling the car up/down a hill. This absolutely has nothing to do with the floor mat because it happens when my feet are not shifting at all. I'm a test engineer and have a good sense of cause and effect, how changes on the inputs to a system affect the outputs. The next thing I'm going to do is remove the floor mat and see if it still happens.
Anytime your car starts to accelerate when you don't want it to, you can always just put the car in neutral. You have to train your brain to do this automatically and quickly, because if you start accelerating rapidly, you will also need to focus on the road and not cause an accident. My wife almost got in an accident several years ago because our old 1993 Ford Explorer had a sticky gas pedal. We've since gotten rid of that clunker (thank goodness), but when it was happened I told her it was important for her to train her "muscle memory" to put the car in neutral. Many people who don't know how to drive a manual transmission also don't ever use the neutral on their automatic transmission vehicles.
The Audi 5000S was never defective...
That's right it wasn't. It was people blaming the equipment for their own failures.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective.
Umm, please show your calculations. You already admitted that the Audi 5000S was not defective so this should be interesting.
Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even if true (and you've provided no evidence that it is true) that has precisely nothing to do with a car sold in the United States where US consumer safety standards apply. Never mind that the Toytoa Camry is produced right here in the US (also in Japan, Russia, China and Australia).
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire.
Drive by wire does not make it a more dangerous design. It has DIFFERENT failure modes but different is not the same as dangerous. Fly by wire has become state of the art in airplanes where they have much stricter reliability standards so the technology clearly CAN be safe. While it is certainly possible Toyota has a defective system, I want to see some actual evidence of a fault beyond a few anecdotes of customers.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products
You do that every day whether you are aware of it or not. There is a reason we have product safety and liability laws. You trust your life to mass merchandise products every single day of your life.
If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire.
Good luck with that. Lots of cars are already drive by wire and within a few years nearly all will be. Enjoy driving unsafe older cars.
Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive.
Actually it doesn't have to be expensive at all. A pipe wrench is a great example highly fault tolerant engineering but it isn't expensive. Fault tolerance CAN be expensive but it doesn't have to be. With an appropriate design it can even be cheaper.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch.
It also matches the distribution of a handful of people standing on their accelerator pedal and being too embarrassed to admit they weren't using the brake. Remember the Audi? It's entirely reasonable to believe this is people trying to get money via our legal system instead of an actual engineering fault.
The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
The Ford Fusion DOES use drive by wire. Every hybrid car is drive by wire and soon enough so will (nearly) every non hybrid. Drive by Wire has FAR too many advantages in both cost and features to not be used.
Regarding quality, JD Power thinks you are full of crap and I tend to believe them more than you. 2010 Ford Fusion vs 2010 Toyota Camry
This is exactly correct. Mechanical speedos are designed to show an approximation of speed and will always err on the side of caution by reading high - it has nothing to do with massaging MPG figures. If it were possible to be going faster than the indicated speed then manufacturers would be liable to paying for every speeding ticket ever issued. If I'm going through a fixed speed camera bang on the speed limit, I don't want to get nicked because my speedo under-read by a few mph.
A few years ago I took part in a charity 'run-what-you-brung' motorcycle event, which consisted of 2 miles of pristine runway, with a calibrated radar trap in the middle. Even though my fastest indicated speed was 180mph, the maximum speed recorded by the radar was only 165mph; a full 15mph out. That was on a Suzuki GSX-R750, but some other bikes had much bigger discrepancies, from speaking to the riders up to 20-25mph in some cases. Note that sports-bike riders generally don't care about mpg either.
My 1987 Plymouth reports speed 5mph lower than actual. I discovered this after getting two tickets, and the officer told me his radar showed 5mph faster than I was driving. Not the designers' fault, but my own since I inadvertently bought tires that were one size too big than the original stock. (shrug)
Back to Toyota:
Prius owners have been reporting over 5 years now that their cars will suddenly accelerate for no reason. I know at least one guy who said the car started moving while he was filling it with gas, so clearly not driver error. The car has a computer and the computer has a mind of its own. Now it seems that Prius tech is being applied to mainstream cars like Camrys, so what was once just a rare occurrence is becoming commonplace.
Toyota has a bad habit of denying culpability.
When midsize SUV and sedan engines started failing at only 20-30,000 miles Toyota refused to honor the engine warranty, and owners were forced to spend thousands of dollars for new engines. Toyota blamed the owners for failing to change their oil (even though owners had dealer receipts proving oil changes happened). Later-on it was discovered the engine ran hot and basically cooked the oil, hence early engine seizure, but Toyota still refused to honor the warranty. Eventually the US DOJ became involved and forced Toyota to refund customers for engine repairs, or else face a class-action lawsuit.
It appears Toyota is once-again being stubborn, and it may take legal action from the U.S. or EU to force them to do the right thing.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
your in car GPS is using the unscrambled height measurements so that you can know your true position? You did know that consumer GPS doesn't have the real height in it, right? it uses an altimiter to guess at your height. Now if you had to sign a paper and pass a background check and had a reason to have it (say you are the party responsible for maintaining the safe "cap" over a contaminated area) Expecting your GPS to be more accurate than your car is folly. your GPS is what? 3 feet? 5 feet? hmm pretty easy to get a 0 speed on that even when walking. :P
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Those funny tires are called low-profile. In North America, the ratio between the tread width and the sidewall height is expressed as a percentage in the tire size. It's the second number. For example, P225-50R16 would indicate that the sidewall is 50% of the tread width (225mm), i.e. about 113mm. The last number is the rim size, which is in inches for historical reasons. The thing that one should note is that it's perfectly possible to keep the same total wheel/tire combo height and thus, keep your speedometer accurate. All you have to do is reduce the profile when you increase the tire width or wheel size. I think that if you reduce the profile by 5 for every 20mm in tread width or every inch of wheel width, you stay pretty close. Unfortunately, the pimps like the full wheel well look, so they usually end up with a taller wheel. I assume they modify the wheel well, spacing, ride height, or axles to keep the tires from rubbing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You did know that consumer GPS doesn't have the real height in it, right?
Umm,you're not making sense. GPS gives you your position in 3 dimensions - height is an integral part of the calculation.
it uses an altimiter to guess at your height.
No... no it doesn't. None of my GPSes have a barometric altimeter in them. With a good constellation of at least 4 satellites you can get your 3D position with no external data (your GPS may use external data so as preexisting knowledge of your rough location to speed up the satellite acquisition, but that data is not actually required for the GPS to work). It is true that if you have a poor constellation (e.g. only 3 good satellites) then many GPSes start making assumptions about things like your altitude to fill in the missing data, but if you have a poor constellation then the DOP is going to be insanely bad anyway.
Many GPSes use doppler shift as well as measuring how your position changes over time to calculate your speed, so the accuracy of your position may not be that important either.
Expecting your GPS to be more accurate than your car is folly. your GPS is what? 3 feet? 5 feet? hmm pretty easy to get a 0 speed on that even when walking.
You are making a faulty assumption. You are assuming that if a GPS is "accurate to 2 metres" that you are likely to see a large positional shift between one sample and the next. However, this isn't the case - whilst the position may be 2 metres off, that error is going to be relatively stable over short periods of time. i.e. if you read your position and are told it is 2 metres west of your real location, when you read the position 1 second later it will still be roughly 2 metres west of your real location, it won't suddenly have jumped to 2 metres east. So despite moderate positional errors, the speed can be quite accurate, especially when combined with doppler shift to help filter out sampling errors.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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