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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."
Yes but the Woz case is possible bug in the cruise control software, not the accelerator.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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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In an automatic it's trivial to shift into neutral. People just don't know to do that in a panic situation.
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"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.