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Toyota Pedal Issue Highlights Move To Electronics
cyclocommuter writes with an excerpt from a brief WSJ story on increasing electronic control of car components: "The gas pedal system used Toyota Motor Co.'s recall crisis was born from a movement in the auto industry to rely more on electronics to carry out a vehicle's most critical functions. The intricacy of such systems, which replace hoses and hydraulic fluid with computer chips and electrical sensors, has been a focus as Toyota struggled to find the cause for sudden acceleration of vehicles that led the company to halt sales of eight models this week."
At least in one case, the brakes failed, the accelerator stuck, and the person didn't know how to turn the car off because it was a rental and used a push-button ignition. Also, they couldn't put it into neutral because it had a push-button shifter as well. People really should learn about the car before they drive it, but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota. I think that we can do the push-button stuff CORRECTLY, but this isn't the way to do it.
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Title: "Electronics parts = Toyota woes"
Article: "condensation from heaters caused increased friction in the gas pedal, making it stick in some cases, making the problem a mechanical one and not an issue of electronics."
So electronics had nothing to do with it at all. And their suggestion that the complexity of electronics made this issue harder to diagnose isn't backed up at all.
It doesn't matter to me if the issue is electronic or mechanical, I want a mechanical peddle pair and a mechanical key switch. I want to be able to kill the machine if I have to, and not rely on the electronics to behave appropriately when malfunctioning. How many press down to turn off power systems have you encountered that failed to turn off after a crash? I've certainly encountered my share of them.
There is still no excuse for Toyota not coding the ECU to cut throttle when it senses that the driver has BOTH the throttle and the brakes on simultaneously. All drive by wire VW/Audis are setup this way.
So you have never 'power braked' as a kid to impress the girls i take it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just because that's what Toyota is focusing on, doesn't mean that's what's actually wrong. They were all about floor mats previously.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
There is still no excuse for Toyota not coding the ECU to cut throttle when it senses that the driver has BOTH the throttle and the brakes on simultaneously. All drive by wire VW/Audis are setup this way.
Plus this would solve the problem of the drivers that like to ride with their left foot on the brake pedal - accelerating with their brakes on, cruising with their brakes on, braking with their brakes on (but who can tell?).
Just need to solve hills where the driver may need throttle and brake simultaneously to start moving, and it should work.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Most throttles are a simple cable system (or, at least, they used to be). Such a system doesn't break often and, when it does break, seems to be a gradual thing. I don't personally see much of a need to change things from such a simple mechanism: it works, and rarely breaks. Added complexity introduces many additional failure points. The failure being solely mechanical still likely points to either a drastic re-engineering to account for the electronics, or an electronics-induced mechanical failure. Cable throttles are not exactly "new" science.
A throttle really needs to be designed with safety in mind: IE, under-working not over-working. In other words, the car doesn't "go", never mind not accelerating.
The summary is referring to breaking systems when mentioning hoses and hydraulics. It's already a complex system, but should not be in any way associated with the throttle: breaks should still work when the throttle is broken.
Really, there's little excuse except poor engineering on the part of the Toyota failures. I don't think it speaks one way or the other, for or against, EVs/electronics in vehicles. There are other, bigger issues surrounding EVs/electronics which aren't even really related. The fact that the Toyotas were 'advanced' vehicles is simply coincidence.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The issue isn't the sticky pedal it's what you can do about stopping a car once it sticks. In a traditional mechanical car you can simply put the car in neutral, pull over and stop. If for some reason you can't get it into neutral then you could still turn off the car by turning the ignition key to off. With a keyless ignition and all electronic gearbox you rely the designers of your drive-by-wire system to have foreseen this type of situation and have included an appropriate failsafe in their system.
In the case of the runaway Toyota pressing the ignition to turn the car off does nothing (to stop you accidentally turning the car off) and the gear selector wouldn't select neutral (presumably because the accelerator was on full) the correct thing to do is hold down the start button for 3 seconds and that shuts down the engine.
With mechanical systems you can simply disconnect them and they stop working, with electronic systems you need to know a shutdown procedure and these procedurers are currently specific to each model of car.
According to the sibling posts it's because his car didn't allow him to shift into neutral while at speed, which means if the brake doesn't override the suddenly stuck gas pedal and the push-button power switch doesn't want to turn off (just like my computer when it hangs...) he's fucked.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Steps for starting a manual transmission car pointed up a steep grade:
These are not a manual transmission cars.
How do you distinguish between the gas pedal being down due to being stuck versus the gas pedal being down due to someone stepping on it? In either case the sensor is going to report that the gas pedal is down. All the software intelligence in the world is going to have a hard time distinguishing between the identical inputs of PEDAL_DOWN and PEDAL_DOWN.
You could have more intelligent sensors, perhaps, but then that's no longer a software problem.
you're off base here. Toyota shut themselves down until they had a fix in place and known good parts. Yes, the NHTSA did step in, as they should, but they did not shut down Toyota. In fact, they agreed that Toyota's plans were "acceptable" and left Toyota alone to implement them.
IMV, if it's possible to kill the engine on a car that has become a demon possessed mechanical monster, driving it to the dealership is f*cking stupid.
'kill -9 engine' is not enough.
you forgot about kinetic energy (0.5 * m*v^2).
One might try 'kill -9 -1' but I wonder what will happen with the Universe.
Man pages are somewhat ambiguous about its effect.
As opposed to the dozens that get killed because drivers with automatic transmissions seem to think they are sitting in a mobile couch and do things like crosswords or homework or embroidery instead of looking at the road?
[FUCK BETA]
Before you go bashing the intelligence of the driver you should be aware of some issues.
First, the car was a rental so the driver wasn't familiar with some non-standard features of the car.
Second, the car did not have the standard key ignition switch. It has a push button on the dash that turns the engine on or off. But more importantly, when in motion the operation of the button changes. When stopped, you simply press the button and the engine turns off. But when in motion, you must hold the button down continuously for three seconds in order to turn off the engine. Presumably this is to prevent turning off the engine accidentally while driving. This three-second delay doesn't normally occur so only someone who has read the 200 page manual would know that. I imagine that in a panic situation you would press the button two or three times and then give up.
Third, the automatic transmission has a sport shifter feature. You can move the shifter in a position through a gate so that when you press forward the transmission up-shifts and when you press backward it downshifts. You cannot directly push the shifter into neutral. You have to move the shifter sideways and then up several notches to get to neutral. In an unfamiliar car and a panic situation you would try to push the shifter into neutral like most cars. Instead pushing it forward would just up-shift to a higher gear. In a panic situation, going 120 mph, it might be difficult to figure out how this non-standard transmission works -- that you have to move the shifter sideways through a gate to get to neutral.
The solution is to just put the damn thing back on a key.
There is no actual reason not to use a key, there is no usability increase from using a button and most certainly usability problems from using a button.
At least make the button a fucking toggle rather than momentary contact.
Perhaps the idiots should take a clue from people who have doing fly by wire for a lot longer ... aircraft.
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You didn't do much research. Toyota has been having this problem for several years now, its been in the news several times, it has not been fixed, and they keep coming up with new excuses for the problem.
They don't know, or don't want to admit to it.
Either way, you're an idiot for trusting them to tell you its safe to drive your car. It doesn't matter how rare it is, its JUST as likely to happen to you as it is every owner. They haven't told the truth or have had no clue what the problem is for several years. Trusting them is about as intelligent as trusting a politician at this point.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
so it's OK to take your family into an unfamiliar vehicle? The manual is in the thing, and the fact that it is non-standard is immediately obvious once you try to start it and shift it into drive.
sorry, but when you are using something unfamiliar that could be dangerous (car, gun, bulldozer, etc) it is customary to receive instruction or to operate it in a controlled environment (parking lot). Maybe I'm just crazy, but when I rented a car and it seemed a little weird(a Honda, I'm used to American cars), that is exactly what I did (drove it around the parking lot at the airport for about 5 minutes).
Failure to do so can result in the death of you and your family. Sorry, but that's the harsh realities of people who disregard safety. A car is not a toy. And a CHP officer who has likely seen the results of hundreds of fatal accidents should be far more paranoid than any of us when it comes to operating a motor vehicle.
I blame him because the driver should assume the responsibility for operating a vehicle. And for Toyota for making their car so automated and high tech that it is difficult to operate safely.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The German solution we should copy is a real driving test. In the US, one has to be mentally defective not to be issued a license, driver/rider training sucks, and the result is deadly.
I could care less about manual boxes. I have both, but autos suit the way I use my larger trucks.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Regardless of which is given priority... I'll bet those cars are real fun to drive on glare ice, where you may need to be constantly nursing both the brake AND the throttle, to maintain traction and control direction.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I'd rather shift into neutral and blow the engine than blow myself all over another vehicle or a guard rail at 100 mph... Brakes don't work as well when you're at wide open throttle. Don't be an idiot. A blown engine is easy to replace; in fact, I bet Toyota would give you a free one if you experienced this problem. They'd rather pay for an engine than pay death benefits to your family.
Bottom line, don't try to be a hero. Let the engine blow if it's gonna, put it in neutral, brake to a stop, and turn off the ignition.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
> Then you have to move to a city where this is possible.
There are not enough such cities in the US to hold its current population, or even any significant fraction thereof.
> Again, you don't have a right to live wherever you want.
You also don't have a right to not slowly starve to death in the street, really. Nor do you have a right to live anywhere at all.
None of which is useful in terms of dealing with society as a whole. If 10% (rough guess; I would be very surprised if the threshold is above this) of the population is homeless, you end up with civil unrest. If 20% of the population can't find a place to live where they can hold down a reasonable job, almost certainly the same thing will happen.
> Choose a job closer to your home (or on a better location WRT the bus route)
You seem to have a mistaken impression about how many such jobs there are.
> There's no right to a job.
Indeed, or to breathing if you want to look at it that way. Again, that's not useful for setting up a society.
> But McDonald's is always hiring
This is in fact false.
> and it shouldn't be hard to find a place where you can walk to work at McD's and live
> within walking distance at some cockroach-infested apartment
For any one person, perhaps. For a significant fraction of the population, this would in fact be difficult: McD's simply doesn't need this many employees.
> You don't have a right to the job you prefer.
See above.
> We "invested" a bunch of money in a light-rail system here in Phoenix/Tempe, and it's
> been a disaster.
Hey, I'm not talking about graft, people building bridges to nowhere, people screwing up, etc. I'm saying that even in the best case, with the best of intentions, people are _still_ bad at major non-incremental infrastructure investment. Which is why ideal infrastructure investment would be incremental: build a small piece that's immediately useful and then work out from there. That turns out to be pretty hard.
> The problem is our cities are already designed for cars
They were designed for pedestrians and carriages in 1890. Designs can be changed if the alternative is good enough or enough money is trying to push the changes through (or ideally both). In the case of alternatives to car transportation, we just aren't there.
SkyTran would be nice if it could happen, perhaps, but I predict we'll get cars that can drive themselves (given a combination of sensors and GPS) way before we could convince people that SkyTran is a good idea, much less get elected officials to act on it. Then we'll have the fun of scare stories about them running over pedestrians, and they will in fact run over pedestrians. Could get interested.
> Instead, we have politicians, who waste money on crap
Fundamentally, people want stuff for themselves out of a government. Each of them only wants a little bit, really, but we have 300e6 of them or so, and a nontrivial portion of them are trying to get more stuff all the time. Such things never get rolled back, typically (politicians like getting reelected) so if there is any success in getting stuff out it just all agglomerates.
I have a hard time seeing this social dynamic changing as long as you have universal suffrage. The only hope is that productivity growth remains high enough that the constant drain is not too bad. I'm not sure that'll happen.
Of course getting rid of universal suffrage would bring its own issues.
In the end, there aren't any magic bullets or simple solutions here, much as you seem to want there to be some...
Brake fade is what happens when the brakes get overheated, they become less effective.
However, what happens when the engine is at wide open throttle is the same thing that happens when the engine is off: you lose vacuum assist. You'll have enough for maybe 2 pumps of the pedal and that's it. Once your vacuum assist is gone, you're relying 100% on the pressure of your foot on the brake via the hydraulic system to stop the car. If you've ever tried to use the brake pedal when coasting with the engine off, you know how hard that is.
So if you are ever in a "unintended acceleration" situation, push the brake down as hard as you can and do NOT let it back up. You will probably destroy your brakes in the process but that's better than the alternative.
The whole move to electronics is somewhat disconcerting. Computer software will always have bugs, and modern cars have computer software that controls the throttle, and the transmission shifter. Always make sure you know how to shift into neutral in a panic. On my car, it's easy: just push down the clutch pedal.
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Two big caveats with that test --- first is that the brakes were in good condition to start with, second is that the driver immediately applied full panic braking effort. What about a car with 30K miles on the brakes. What about the situation where you're driving down a busy freeway at 80mph, is your first reaction going to be to apply panic braking? No, you'll be afraid of being rear-ended...