Slashdot Mirror
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."
Were little old ladies form Pasadena...
27 data points is not enough to draw a strong conclusion.
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
Or in other words, they take their foot off the pedal and put it on the wrong one.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Old people can't use computers. Even if it involves lightly pressing on the accelerator.
I suspect it's got something to do with the idle left foot getting involved as well. I drive manuals (stick shift for you Septics) and have a strong preference for them. Occasionally when I drive an automatic I get a brain fart and I am trying to de-assert (haha I am a programmer) the non-existent clutch I end up hitting the brake and wondering WTF is going on. Same goes when one wears thongs (jandles/flipflops) and driving one gets the brake being pressed at the same time as the accelerator. How many old people with low muscle tone are wearing broad soled shoes nowadays?
I resemble that remark you young whipper-snapper!
Now get off my lawn before I accelerate uncontrollably and run you down!
God-damned kids!
Sig this!
The black box system does tell you that, in some cases at least. And it says that the driver is slamming their foot on the gas. I tend to believe the black box - but it's based on the same sensors and software that's supposedly at fault...
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.
What it means is that there's likely zero problem with Toyota's cars and there never was.
What's happening is that people are missing the brake pedal and hitting the gas pedal without realizing it. Their car then speeds up, shocking them, and since they think they're foot is on the brake they slam it all the way down, stomp on it, etc., and it just keeps going.
The elderly do this all the time.
Toyota's are just really popular cars, and some lawyer out there smelled blood.
And right now is a really good time to buy a Toyota. You'll get the deal of a lifetime :)
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
bingo. Ok, ok, I'm 53. But I have a 2007 Toyota Avalon that had not one, but 3 recalls so far (accelerator pedal sticking on the mat, little metal plate to do whatever, and an oil line problem).
The problem (as I see it) is a stackup of features:
pushbutton start/stop, and it doesn't stop when I momentarily push it.:
accelerator pedal by wire.:
transmission shift by wire.:
There is nothing in the owners manual that would tell me that you have to hold in the start/stop button in to stop it, I looked. That is beyond bullshit. I want a car that turns off when I tell it to, I will deal with the lack of power steering (you don't need it at 120mph) and a couple of power brake pedal pushes (the engine isn't making vacuume at full throttle anyway).
This is either an embedded software bug (it has issues with the cruise control sometimes when pulling a mountain) or RF susceptibility. At no time does ANYONE test for RF susceptibility with a nearby trucker running a linear amplifier on his CB radio. It is well above CE test limits.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
If the vehicle has that much computer controlled functionality, why doesn't the black box tell which pedals were pressed at the time of impact and for the moments before impact? The black box system is arguably an invasion of privacy, but in this case it would go a long way toward fixing the problem(s) and perhaps saving lives.
I bought a brand new car in 2006. It was great for the first few months.
Then about 4 months in, it acted strangely. If I put the throttle past 1/2-way, the car would start bucking wildly. It was as if I was alternating between *flooring it* and *idling* every second. It was major because merging into fast traffic and crossing busy intersections (from a stop sign) was a real pain. I had to take it to the dealer 3 times for them to find the problem; they thought "user-error", fuel line, transmission, etc.
A sensor in the throttle assembly was faulty. It was reporting to the computer that I was flooring/idling/flooring/idling when in fact I obviously wasn't. It was showing the throttle position and everything.
So...
Had I gotten into an accident and someone looked at the black box, it would show the same thing. "Umm, he took his foot off the gas and then floored it, repeating. Probably drunk or distracted."
The data in question catagorizes fatalities. Elderly people are often
killed by accidents that would only injure a young person. This could explain
the data skew regardless of whether or there is an actual accelerator defect.
First thing you would need, if you really wanted to see if there was a correlation, would be the age distribution of Toyota drivers.
If, perhaps, the distribution looked just like this graph, it would mean nothing.
If, perhaps, the distribution of driver ages skewed to younger drivers, or showed a flat pattern, then you might have something.
Without that baseline, it isn't even worth coming up with theories.
These numbers are meaningless without the proper context.
First of all, what is the percentage of ownership, by driver age. In other words: Do a disproportionate amount of older people buy these cars?
Secondly, what is the comparable accident percentage, by car manufacturer and driver age. In other words: Do older people have a problem with all manufacturers or only Toyota?
Lastly, 24 incidents is way too few to make any kind of sane inference. Once you break it down by age category you have some categories that only have one to three members. At that low an amount they could simply represent random chance and not some sort of trend.
When you have such a low number you have two choices: ignore the problem or dig deeper beyond these simple statistics. Given that people's lives (and Toyota's reputation) are at stake I'd say that Toyota is doing the right thing by dissecting the cars and chasing every possible problem. If they find something then they can fix it, if they don't find anything then at least they gave it their best and can honestly say that these incidents seem to be user error.
Sapere aude!
I started car shopping shortly after the bad press about Toyota broke. I always wanted a Corolla because of its great reputation.
I tried researching the issue, but nobody had hard numbers to firmly establish that the hype was hype. All I got were anecdotal accounts along the lines of "we've had Toyotas for years we love them". The only numbers I did get were that Toyotas got in more accidents per a given number of cars than Hondas, though it wasn't established if it was the car or the driver.
It occurred to me that the main reason I started thinking about the Corolla was reliability....in other words, not having to think about my car and here I was scouring the internet doing research.
Finally, the 2010 Car Buying Guide of The Consumer Reports came out. Everything that attracted me to the Corolla, reliability and safety seemed to rated slightly higher in the 2010 Civic.
If my current car was in better shape I probably would have waited 6 months for the smoke to clear before giving up on getting a Corolla.
My intuition is that a significant amount of bad hype is involved( though not the only issue going on ), but when it comes time to put down tens of thousands of dollars of your own money and take risks that could hurt you personally, your attitude changes.
I don't like spending more money for a Honda, but I can and given what is at risk it is not worth it to take a chance on a Corolla in the next few weeks.
I think getting their electronics analyzed by NASA is the smartest thing Toyota can do. They need a detached third party body with a stellar reputation to reassure people to clear their name.
According to TTAC, the number #1 vehicle for unintended acceleration is the Lincoln TownCar. The Ford Police cruiser is one of the lowest, however. Funny thing is that, mechanically-- they are the same car. The difference is the people who drive them-- one group being highly trained with fast reaction times, and the other group-- well not so much.
It is not just age distribution that they need to look at with Toyota, it is the complete demographic of the Toyota owner. Car enthusiasts do not usually buy Toyota's these days. Toyota's are incredibly boring in appearance and they handle like slugs. The are anti-exciting, right up there with a root canal. The average Toyota driver is the person in the fast lane doing 45mph and texting someone at the same time. For the average user, unintended acceleration happens everytime they touch that strange scary pedal on the right. When you add in that their brakes are likely shot because they drag them all the damn time while talking on their i-phone going down the road-- and never do routine maintenance on their vehicle: it is no wonder they can't stop.
Toyota's main problem is that they decided to make cars for idiots and got bit by that (granted that is a large market share, just ask Microsoft).
1) Older people have slower reflexes. A thirty-year-old is more likely to regain control of a runaway without incident than a seventy-year-old regardless of the cause.
2) Older people are not as strong. A twenty-year-old may be able to stop a runaway by hitting the brakes where a seventy-year-old can't.
3) Regardless of whether or not Toyota has a computer problem, some of the Toyota runaways are probably due to "wrong pedal syndrome". What is the age distribution for "runaway" accidents for all makes?
4) As others have pointed out, the elderly are more likely to die in accidents.
5) As others have pointed out, the sample is too small to justify any conclusions about age.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The odds of this kind of skew are ridiculously low.
We have ages of 27 people. 13 of them are over 65. If you look here, you can compute that of all Americans over 15 years old, 16.5% are over 65. (14.4/(14.4+72.9)=16.5)
I'll be generous and assume that 20% of Toyota owners are over 65.
So in a sample of size 27, what are the odds of getting 13 or more people over 65, when the population you are looking at has only 20% of its people over 65?
The odds of getting that skewed of a sample are only about 1 in a thousand. (1-binomdist(12,27,.2,1)) So despite claims to the contrary, that is indeed statistically significant.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about where this sample even came from, and am not claiming anything about its validity. I am merely disputing the posts dismissing this sample out of hand without doing some simple math.)
Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick? It's hard for about 3 hours, but once you get a feel for it you simply have so much more control over how the car behaves that it is actually hard to deal with not doing it. I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic... they always seem to upshift too early, sacrificing torque for smoothness, which would be great if I didn't have some whacko barreling up behind me at 50 and I need to be going fast enough that he won't smash into me 5 seconds ago.
Oh, and when they flub going up steep hills, that's just terrific.
But you just go ahead and keep knocking people who are better at driving than their cars, I'm sure you know better than they do.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
If you want to use that kind of analogy, I'd suggest comparing an IBM Model M to a cell phone on-screen keyboard. The Model M is tactile, precise, and communicative. The touchscreen is none of those things, and you just have to hope the software does a good job of guessing what you meant to press.
I'd much rather switch gears myself. The car can't see the hill coming up, or spot the hole in traffic I need to merge into. I can, and having the ability to select gears for power or economy as I please makes handling those scenarios that much easier. The only place I'd prefer an automatic is when there's a string of stop signs on a hill, and there are morons behind me pulling right up to my bumper. I do sometimes roll back a hair, you know...
All in all I'd be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which modern autos are "better".
Teenage girls.
That being said, i agree with you 100%. Ive been driving manual since getting my license, and find AT to be very annoying.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Again, someone making fun of GP.
Ever driven an 18 wheeler? Ever driven an 18 wheeler with an AUTOMATIC???? I did. Once. Never again.
As has been pointed out, the transmission cannot anticipate that I need a bit more torgue to climb a hill that it hasn't sensed yet. Nor can it see that I need to merge into traffic. It senses nothing, anticipates nothing - it only responds to certain stimuli, and everything is WRONG by the time those stimuli reach the brain controlling the transmission.
Worse, that damned transmission took a nice stab at killing me. Going downhill, a driver puts the truck into a lower gear and/or engages the Jake brake to govern his speed going down the hill. Try that with an idiot computer which decides that you are wasting fuel at high RPM's and upshifts the transmission, just before you get to the steepest grade on the hill. I had a hairy few minutes, believe me. 80,000 pounds of inertia falling into the gravity well is hard to overcome when the machine is fighting with you!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A few years ago I bought the "safest car in the world" (that's the brand promise) second hand from a dealer. It had one previous owner, and was two years old.
Three weeks after purchase, it suddenly accelerated uncontrollable on the freeway. Pressing the brakes slowed it down, but when I lifted off the brakes again it kept accelerating. Quite unnerving.
I managed to find the cause (not that many things in a car should cause it to accelerate) quite quickly, the 3+/3- km/h cruise control adjustment micro switch had broken (physically) and now sat and "vibrated" towards the 3+ setting several times a second. Turning the cruise control completely off (separate switch) worked fine.
I had the broken part replaced by the dealer, and never said much about it. I wonder what had happened if I had described the case to the press. After all, you could claim the design is defective since a broken switch shouldn't result in such a scenario. ... I still drive that same car btw, 10 years later. Nothing's ever broken down since ;)
it's in my head