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Toyota Accelerator Data Skewed Toward Elderly
An anonymous reader passes along this discussion on the data for the Toyota accelerator problem, from a few weeks back. (Here's a Google spreadsheet of the data.) "Several things are striking. First, the age distribution really is extremely skewed. The overwhelming majority are over 55. Here's what else you notice: a slight majority of the incidents involved someone either parking, pulling out of a parking space, in stop and go traffic, at a light or stop sign... in other words, probably starting up from a complete stop."
He described a case where unintended acceleration occurs.
He did not describe a case where uncontrollable acceleration occurs (in his case, the acceleration is halted by simply tapping the brakes).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yes but the Woz case is possible bug in the cruise control software, not the accelerator.
It sometimes does. From everything I can gather, the story reveals that the driver pressed the gas instead of the brake... revealed from the recorder box in the car.
Any vehicle with cruise control will have the same issue.
Since you made such a total generalization, I can easily demonstrate that you are incorrect by only giving one example.
In the 1997 Nissan Sentra:
1) Any touch of the brake pedal cancels cruise.
2) If the vehicle goes under 30MPH for any reason, cruise is cancelled.
3) Once cruise is cancelled, it can only be started again by going over 30MPH; and even then, you can only set it to the speed you are currently going at; not at a higher or lower speed. (So you have to reach the desired speed manually, then hit the button).
Come back when you have facts, not fabrications.
Actually most won't activate until you're pushing the pedal yourself to around 20 mph or so.
So true. The average new car buyer's age is 45 - 50. If you reasearched age comparison with any defect you'll most likely come up with the same data. http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2008/01/down-economy-mo.html Data is a little old but still valid
Because regardless of whether this turns out to be more problems with cars or problems with drivers, Toyota's actions in the matter have been surreptitious at best.
Toyota insisted the problem was with floormats until incidents with mat-less cars forced them to dig deeper.
They are on the record as patting themselves on the back for saving money by not issuing a recall sooner.
The way they have handled this is far more concerning than where the fault ultimately lay.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
It's a joke, taking advantage of the fact that "resemble" and "resent" both start with the same 4 letters.
The common phrase is "I resent that remark" which means "I take offense at your implying that I am ... whatever"
The joke is "I resemble that remark" which means "I am exactly like how you describe, but don't like it."
It's always done in a joking manner, feigning that you are angry when in fact you realize that you are guilty of whatever is described.
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I have used a number of cruise control systems in GM, Ford, and Toyota vehicles of various vintages from the 70s on to brand new vehicles. I have NEVER ONCE seen a cruise control that would do what you describe. All of them refuse to activate below a minimum speed (over 25mph, over 30 in most cases.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The accelerator isn't a binary input, since it's measuring an analog range of pedal positions. From your description (and from the nature of the type of sensor I'm guessing they use) I'm guessing you were seeing sudden (not slewing) jumps between low and high values. If the sensor registers consistent jumps without any intermediate values the sensor is broken (and the software should detect such, as that's not a totally unheard of failure mode). I guarantee the control loop is sampling faster than you can slam it to the floor, which means it should be logging the transition values.
Except as stated here by Toyota themselves:
"November 8, 2009: The Los Angeles Times claims Toyota had ignored over 1,200 complaints of unintended acceleration over the past eight years because NHTSA had thrown out those reports that claimed the brakes were not capable of stopping the car under an unintended acceleration scenario. In the story a Toyota spokesman confirms the brakes are not capable of stopping a vehicle accelerating at wide open throttle."
http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2010/112_1001_toyota_recall_crisis/october.html
The info above is from page 3. It's actually a very good read.
if your car's brakes are behaving the way you describe, something is very wrong with them. They should be able to bring your car to a complete stop in under a minute if you press the accelerator and brake pedals all the way. Please get them repaired. I tried the same thing in a honda civic (not mine, lol) at about 50km/h and the deceleration was so great that my head banged into the steering.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Just out of curiosity, does your cruise control have an "accelerate" button that bumps you up a couple of mph on a tap? If so, what happens when you tap that button while underway? In most cruise control systems, that button is also the "resume" button, which will attempt to get you back up to the last set speed, flooring the accelerator if you're currently doing 45 and the last speed was 65 or something. That said, it still won't do anything if you're doing less than 30, but it can be surprising to hit what you think is the set button and have the cruise control suddenly floor it.
I read the internet for the articles.
On my 1993 Sentra (RIP), there was a resume button that would bring the vehicle back to its old set speed. Touching the brake or going below 30 (say you're going up a hill while you're trying to resume cruise speed) would knock out cruise again even if it hadn't yet gone back up to speed.
You can't because Toyota won't show you that data. Their blackbox system is entirely CLOSED. In fact there was an article here on /. not that long ago about how there was precisely ONE laptop in the entire United States that was capable of reading the blackbox data.
it's not the workers, it's the managers
I listened to that This American Life, too, and there was a pretty significant change in worker behavior at NUMMI (vs when it was GM-Fremont) that could not be replicated at other GM plants because... (drum roll) workers at other plants didn't really think they'd be closed if they didn't reform. Aside from that episode, however, there are plenty of stories out there of sabotage by auto workers. The management was insular and came up with uninspiring designs, but the workers also did a truly awful job of building cars. (And it took more like 2 years to reform the place.)
in my country (india), we are a little... lax about things like seat belts, and talking on your phone, and jumping a traffic light, etc. :)
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Specifically, it's a Three Stooges joke. Though I wouldn't be surprised to find it was older than that. But Curly used it regularly.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The e-brake is just a mechanical application of the rear brakes. The rear brakes are also controlled by the brake pedal so if you've faded your brakes by riding them, you're not going to magically get some new stopping power with the handbrake.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
What are you talking about?
Making a superior product in any established market is extremely difficult. And not only do you have to make a superior product, you have to explain to consumers that your product is superior in a way that will induce them to buy your product (easier said than done).
If it were easy you wouldn't see mature industries invariably solidifying into a oligopoly of a few companies.
...for you Septics
In case anyone else is as puzzled as I am -- it turns out that's rhyming slang for yank. (Septic tank, got it?)
Here's page 4:
Toyota began using its drive-by-wire system in 2002, starting with the ES 300. According to the Times, unintended acceleration complaints on Lexus ES 300s jumped from an average of 26 per year in 2001 to 132 per year in 2002
That's quite a difference. Page 5:
A Toyota Avalon crashes into a lake in Texas after accelerating out of control. All four occupants die. Floor mats are ruled out as a cause because they are found in the trunk of the car.
Respectfully, from page 5 of the Motor Trend timeline that I linked:
That is when the Toyota recalls appear to kick into overdrive, and within a month sales are halted. I think I was reasonable in saying that mat-less incident is what finally provoked a deeper action on Toyota's part: they could no longer deny a problem less trivial than pedals stuck under floormats.
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Not only is it very easy to steer a car with no power steering when it is moving (it gets easier the faster it goes in fact), the vacuum assist also lasts for a little while after the engine dies - should be more than long enough to provide help to bring the car to a stop. The assist dies after a few actions on the brake - try pumping your brake pedal without the engine on. When it goes solid, that's when the assist has run out.
In an automatic it's trivial to shift into neutral. People just don't know to do that in a panic situation.
Cow Cube
IIt's not a surprise that traffic fatalities were skewed towards the elderly
Show me where the summary, headline, or article says anything about traffic fatalities.
Because it doesn't. It's saying that out of the drivers who reported sudden acceleration, there seems to be a disproportionate number of cases where the driver is elderly. In fact the article doesn't even talk about how many of the incidents did or did not result in a crash, if there were passengers in the car, or if anybody was injured or not.
Now that you're a little bit less of a moron, please go on with your day.
Thanks for that. But I'd like to point out that the current +5 Insightful rating you have indicates that your post has actually left the some of the mods a little bit more moronic.
1 U.S. gallon ~ 3.79 liter, so $1/L ~ $3.79/gal, not 6.7.
"But one shouldn't believe the hype. We went through this a generation ago with the Audi 5000 and other autos accused of sudden acceleration, and, again, mysterious unknowable car components were supposedly at fault. In a North Carolina case I worked on, the plaintiff's expert theorized that electromagnetic transmissions from submarines might have set off the throttle via the cruise control, though, unsurprisingly, he was not able to duplicate the effect while driving around electrical towers with much greater electromagnetic interference. Back then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spent millions studying the issue. They found that sudden acceleration was several times more likely among elderly drivers than young drivers, and much more frequent among the very short or someone who had just gotten into a vehicle. Electromagnetic rays don't discriminate by age and height, which suggests very much that human factors were at play: in other words, pedal misapplication. A driver would step on the wrong pedal, panic when the car did not perform as expected, continue to mistake the accelerator for the brake, and press down on the accelerator even harder. This had disastrous consequences in a 1992 Washington Square Park incident that killed five and a 2003 Santa Monica Farmers' Market incident that killed ten the New York driver, Stella Maycheck, was 74 (and quite short); the California driver, George Russell Weller, 86. We're seeing the same pattern again today. Initial reports of a problem, followed by dozens of new reports coming to light as people seek to blame their earlier accidents on sudden acceleration."
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The other problem is that the cars that are a problem (Prius) don't have keys, and don't have a shift lever that physically links to the transmission. They have an electronic joystick that controls shifting. If you press N for neutral, it won't shift to neutral, you have to hold it for a little over a second for it to shift. Likewise, you can't shut the car off by simply pressing the power button. You have to press and hold it for 3 seconds. These things aren't difficult, but 1) a panicked driver is going to try repeatedly pressing neutral or power, and isn't holding the button down, and 2) I'm willing to bet most of these people didn't fully read their owners manual to find out how to do these things when the vehicle is moving. Note: the press and hold thing isn't how you turn the car off normally. As long as you are in park, you can just press the button once and it will shut off.
and I mean really shit, every 50 miles you had to open the hood/bonnet and tinker with it, and even when it was running nothing worked anything like it should have done when new.
I learnt to drive a car that had, at one time or another...
a/ no clutch
b/ no starter
c/ no brakes
d/ no hand/parking brake
e/ dodgy steering
f/ throttle / carb problems, inc throttle cable breaking or jamming open
g/ carbs that iced up at whatever throttle position you happened to be on.
h/ dodgy tyres
i/ no syncromesh on the gearbox
j/ now power assist on the brakes or steering
j/ etc etc
compared to the kids now who start out with relatively new cars, basically I learned to drive and control a car, by having to cope with cars that pushed the envelope, whereas everything a driver encounters now is within a very very small performance envelope.
The old Series II Land Rover had 3 gear sticks, one high-neutral-low range, one two-none-four wheel drive, and one reverse-first-second-third-fourth, which also had false neutrals, no power steering, no power brakes, and frankly, even in a country where the vast majority of drivers are stick shift, probably less than 1% of drivers can just get in it and drive it, and this is with a (worn, but working) synchro main gearbox.
I've also driven auto trans, from RE Olds through Merc to press button selectronic "drag strip" shifters, also floor stick, column stick.
I've driven vehicles that you had to adjust ignition timing and mixture manually as you went along, and even some you had to manually pump the lube oil.
So basically, if you have ever been taught to drive PROPERLY, you can remain in control of the car, no matter what happens, short of the wheels literally falling off.
The problem always comes back to driver ed, particularly given the fact that one car model is sold worldwide, but there are VAST differences in driver ability, attitudes, roads, traffic, etc etc.
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hi neighbor (i'm from brasil). just to add one thing about manual transmissions.
in MT cars, acceleration from a stand still is a lot more fine-grained than in automatics. since you can't simply release the clutch completely without stalling the engine, the driver is required to apply some pressure to the gas, usually enough to put the engine in the maximum torque area of the torque curve, then release the clutch slowly. the more the clutch is released, the more RPMs is transmitted to the wheels. this efectively turns the clutch into a speed governor. you can actually press the gas pedal all the way to the floor and still have precision control of the acceleration and speed.
to have a sudden acceleration in a stick shifter, the driver would have to floor the gas pedal AND release the clutch suddenly. this would cause the car to jump ahead screaming tires (if it's a more powerful model) or stall suddenly.
having two pedals, one as a torque control, the other as governor, goes a long way to ensure safety.
What ? Me, worry ?