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Toyota Sudden Acceleration Is Driver Error
phantomfive writes "The NHTSA has investigated data recorders from Toyota cars whose owners claimed to have crashed due to an accelerator error. They found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren't being pressed. The investigation looked at a sample of the cars, selected by the NHTSA." Jamie found this article with a superior headline at Balloon Juice.
Let's assume that the sensors were logging the wrong data. That would require assuming that the NHSTA was too stupid to be able to figure that out.
It's entirely possible, mind you, for bunglers to occupy government jobs, but if I had to bet money on it, I'd put my money on the NHSTA lab people being at least moderately competent.
Someone had to do it.
Could it even be the spring that makes the pedal spring back to the top that was broken or displaced? There could be a lot of failures that would cause the same things to be logged.
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It would require there to be a larger series of problems where not only is the car going into a mode of unstoppable acceleration, but it also stops logging the position sensors properly and it logs data instead that looks like driver error data. IMO, that greatly diminishes the probability that the problem is still in the car's electronics.
Do incidents of this nature occur with other manufacturers' cars? Or did the adverse publicity that Toyota was already receiving in the media cause these cases to get the oxygen of publicity rather than being considered as freak, and unconnected accidents?
Reading comprehension fail. First, delete the first sentence, because it is uttered by a lawyer. You cannot trust as lawyer to quote his opponent accurately.
Second, what Toyota is saying in the second sentence is that the black box is not designed to collect all data about an automobile accident for courtroom purposes, it is designed to collect data about what the subsystems were doing for engineering purposes. That's plenty sufficient to tell whether a pedal was down or not.
Someone had to do it.
Stop watching fox news.
ANY such evidence would be EXTREMELY easy to spot. The police would notice it in a second as would anyone investigating the accident. The entire claim was that the brakes did NOT work. A toyota won't easily go through its brakes. It ain't super cars.
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If you don't know how to drive, there isn't much you can do if you insist on getting in the driver seat and going out on the highway.
However, if you're going to exercise your right to free speech, there's at least a chance that you'll be able to defend yourself against such Islamic pedo fucktards who would try and silence you with violence.
Please note however that I am not saying all of Islam is a bunch of pedo fucktards, I am merely talking about the subset of Islamic followers who are pedo fucktards.
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. I don't think you do. Electronic systems can incorporate various levels of redundancy in ways that mechanical systems can't. How many cars have dual push/pull systems on their accelerator cables? And, anyway, how do you connect an accelerator cable to a solenoid-controlled fuel injection system? - which is self-adaptive and far more reliable than any carb or mechanical injection system.
On my car, there are two accelerator position sensors and they have to agree before power gets applied to the wheels. I believe that's standard practice. However, not long after I bought it, the warning light came on and it was at the garage for two weeks. It turned out there was a Mexican standoff. The ECU was reporting a gearbox fault - gear changes were not happening fast enough. The manufacturer insisted on many tests including swapping out virtually the entire electronics before deciding to replace the gearbox. The old one was expedited back to Stuttgart where it was found that there was indeed a mechanical fault. As the electronic technician at the garage said to me "They just didn't want to believe that a gearbox could fail."
Airbus is, I believe, no less safe than Boeing. And, if cars with fly by wire steering are eventually allowed in Europe, I expect they will be just as safe as all those farm tractors around the place, and more reliable because an awkward mechanical assembly doesn't have to be fitted into a restricted space.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ms. Marseille said in an interview Tuesday that she was entering a parking space near a library when she heard the engine roar. "I looked down and my foot was still on the brake, so I did not have my foot on the gas pedal," she said.
Police in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., investigated and believe driver error was to blame, Chief Steven Riffel said Tuesday. He said surveillance video showed that the brake lights didn't illuminate until after the crash. But Mr. Riffel said that determination is preliminary and that his agency has turned over the investigation to NHTSA.
Based on the black box data, NHTSA investigators found that the brake was not engaged and the throttle was wide open, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ms. Marseille sticks by her story. "It makes me very angry when someone tells me, 'She probably hit the gas pedal instead,' because I think it's a sexist comment, an ageist comment," she said.
So, every piece of evidence we have, and we have many, shows this woman panicked and jammed on the gas instead of the brake, and yet she remains thoroughly convinced she didn't do it. It's drivers like that who give credit to the phrase "woman drivers". But in this case we just have a bad driver crying "sexism!" as a defense. No, ma'am, you just need to fix your brain-foot coordination.
It's also interesting to look at the graph of reported incidents. Although there was no related changes in Toyota production, just look at that two month spike. That's caused by people, not by hardware. The number of bad drivers remains constant, and the performance of the vehicles remains constant. The only thing that surged was the number of people trying to blame their bad driving on Toyota. I'd bet that had they not gotten all the media-frenzy publicity to start with, that spike would not exist, that's just people latching onto a scapegoat. I'd love to see the graph of media coverage on toyota below that graph, to see the correlation. Bet there's about a two week lag from media to claims. Gotta feel bad for them, they're taking a lot of unfair heat, AND they're doing a better job than I would in holding their tongue when you know they want to just flat out call it, driver error. I don't think I could have that kind of resolve given the situation. They've waited until a lot of time has passed and the amount of evidence is overwhelming before starting to take that position publicly. And then Ms Marseille still insists she was hitting the brake when the black box AND the ramp cameras both say otherwise. The only thing left to debate here is whether she's genuinely that mistaken, or whether she's just stubbornly continuing to cover for her bad driving.
The two remaining issues are slow-return accelerators and floor mat traps. I don't see how a slow return to idle accelerator is going to significantly contribute to a crash, you still have the brake. (and so far, almost all the accidents investigated have shown NO brake use) As for the floor mats, heck, *I* have had that happen to me once in my cutlass. That's not a Toyota problem. That's a problem of floor mat creep that goes unnoticed for a long time (weeks) without the driver readjusting it. Again, driver error.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
No, because it's dangerous/difficult to drive otherwise. When I first learned to drive I never did; I'd roll backwards down the hill 2-3 feet, or I'd slow down in 5th gear and stall, or be left in neutral and need to accelerate. Eventually I started going through gears, but the car would jerk a LOT.
At a point, I learned to touch the throttle to raise the engine to around 2000RPM, and release the brake with my heel while releasing the clutch, so I'd catch and move without drifting back at all (and without idling on the clutch). Also when I want to slow down temporarily, I'll hit the brake and shift into neutral, and also tap the gas to maintain (or raise) my RPMs so I can shift into a lower gear.
Think about this: Once, on a two lane road, I had a guy pull his car directly out in front of me from parked by the curb, 20 feet ahead of me, while I'm going 50mph, with no signal, in the rain. I couldn't stop in that distance, and some guy was to my left-- not that I could maneuver like that anyway (my tires aren't that great, came with the car... Dunlop Signature Sport, not horrid but not awesome). Shitty, right?
My reaction was to immediately land my foot on the brake and pull right into neutral. In the mean time I was already done watching the road ahead of me; my eyes were on my mirror, and someone was next to me. My foot was on the brake and tilted to hit the throttle already; and I'd shifted all the way into second gear. I had a wide enough opening (not barely-- a few car lengths, still too small) and had my engine raised to around 3500RPM, and was going just under 35. Dropped that thing right in second as I shot into the next lane, maxed the throttle, and slipped my foot off the brake.
Dropping right onto second at 1000RPM at 35mph upsets the balance of the car, and can make it skid. It also makes it harder to accelerate. I needed to accelerate off pretty fucking quick or the guy I cut off would have hit me.
I do the same when approaching an intersection where everyone's stopped to take off from a traffic signal. While they're starting to move, I'm braking and shifting down to second gear, raising the throttle so I can go into gear easy enough. They start moving before I get there, I'm going at the same pace (around 10mph usually) and pretty far back. And then they start pulling away, and I accelerate.
What would you do, dick around in neutral shifting gears, overuse your brakes, drop the clutch hard on a gear going way faster than the engine?
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How on Earth is it "bashing the US" to point out that practically-identical cars are only failing in one particular country?
Nice that you took Toyotas talking points from their webinar. But it appears that all the professor did was short 3 wires together, all of which are in the same wiring harness. The evidence that Toyota has against this is that they claim to have found no damage or corrosion in the wiring harness in the cars they have inspect. Oh really? And we take their word for that? The professor stated quite clearly in front of congress that he was not claiming that this is exactly how the issues happened. What he was proving is that the car could malfunction, accelerate wildly while the driver was holding down the break and the computer would log none of this. I'm not saying these issues are not driver error... maybe they are. But to claim that the computer data is infallible is just silly.
No they didn't.
They got into a little hot water over not using the original tach reading do to there shaky quality they used en edited tach. They have since switched to the actually footage.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-recall-electronic-design-flaw-linked-toyota-runaway-acceleration-problems/story?id=9909319
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Had a wide-open throttle condition, that happened with my wife driving from Charleston WV to Beckley, WV on the Turnpike. A limited access toll highway, where towing is really expensive.
She drove all the way to the Ford dealer in town, slowing at toll-booths with the brakes and throwing money at the staff. It was a 4-cyl Ranger and mostly uphill, which helped too. She shut the engine off to stop, and when she started it, full throttle. We were 12,000 miles and a year out of warranty and the Ford dealer replaced the ECM no questions asked. It wasn't even the shop where we bought the truck!
This was before cars had black boxes, but as others have commented, when a computer screws up, often the .log file is as screwed up as the rest of the output. But don't tell me that complex code can't have unintended results. Maybe Toyota outsourced the code to Elbownia?
Think of the Irony!
So I'm curious how many of these drivers did any of these.
I'm curious how well you would do if faced with sudden wide open acceleration while frantically pressing down on the brakes and trying to avoid traffic. Also note that in the case of the Lexus crash (the one with the 911 recording that really started the whole media frenzy), the ignition was keyless. To turn off the engine, you had to depress the switch for 3 seconds.
I'm really sick of the assholes talking about Darwin awards because somebody didn't have the presence of mind to switch the car into neutral. Would they have? You can't know unless you've been in the situation.
He could reproduce the acceleration problem consistantly. I mean he's a good engineer, very technically minded. If he says he can reproduce it I tend to believe him.
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I bought toyota recently. The position of the cruise control resume makes it very easy to hit accidentally and it takes a very light touch that you might not even notice. I've hit it twice and had my car surge ahead in a way that was scary. Add in a miss of the hitting the brake pedal and you have what many of the folks are describing. Course the black boxes should show this.