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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."
Were little old ladies form Pasadena...
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?
27 data points is not enough to draw a strong conclusion.
So why then should the court of public opinion concluded that it's Toyota's 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.
Because GM is owned by the government, and by far the easiest way to gain market share is to take down the leader.
They tried to right-click on the brake.
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
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.
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 spreadsheet shows 20 age 50+ and 15 age 0-50. That doesn't sound statistically significant, let alone "overwhelming."
And if a driver is 50, are they put into the 40-50 category, or the 50-60 category? Where's the data on Toyota model/year ownership by age, needed to even begin to make a valid comparison? Is 55 the median age for the owner's of the models/years involved in these accidents?
Seems like a poorly thought out attempt to make a case to me.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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.
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!
Only if you can explain why the bumbling elderly somehow manage not to have wrong pedal crashes in other cars with the same frequency. If the explanation was "old drivers", then Lincoln and Cadillac would top the charts.
Can you also explain how a wrong pedal incident would lead to reliable reports of smoke pouring out of the wheels of a runaway car?
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!
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