I don’t want to sound too insensitive to the people that got killed in the Lexus with the stuck accelerator pedal, but, Jesus-tapdancing-Christ!, wouldn’t it be unbelievably obvious to anyone that you just have to move the shifter from D to N !?!
The car was on a highway and they had enough time to make a 911 call. How could anyone be that ignorant of the basics of how a car works?! Not to mention why didn’t the idiot 911 operator immediately tell them to do this?
I’m sorry, but to me its beyond obvious, it would almost be a reflex-action: Throttle stuck, brakes aren’t stopping it, slap the shifter out of gear! If it was a standard, just press the clutch. It wouldn’t take more than a couple seconds of thought.
Another obvious possibility is to turn the ignition off. You want to avoid locking the steering at the same time (though that would not be nearly as bad as what happened) - but IME you typically can’t do this until the shifter is in Park.
Back in May or June of 2008, there was a widely-circulated news item about a woman whose battery had died or some such and she found herself locked inside her car because she did not know how to operate the locks manually.
Never underestimate how stupid some people can be.
Actually, I heard an interview on the radio today with a person who experienced this situation, and she tried all of the above, to no avail. Shift wouldn’t go into any other gear and the ignition would not turn off.
That simply fails credibility. No, you shouldn’t be able to turn off the ignition until you’re in Park or Neutral, but the ability to put a car into Neutral at any time is simply a necessary safety feature. I’d sooner believe she bought a car with no seat belts.
Supposedly the Lexus had one of those buttons instead of a key-activated ignition, and you had to hold it down for a few seconds to turn it off. Since the car was a rental, the guy driving might not have realized this and just kept jamming the button. The dispatcher on the 9/11 call suggested they cut the ignition, but the people in the car didn’t have time to respond.
The guy was a highway patrol officer, presumably he did know how a car works.
I suspect he jammed the breaks a bunch of times, started to panic when that didn’t work, then realized he couldn’t get the ignition off and at that point either got too flustered to think of changing gears or had trouble getting the shifter to work in an unfamiliar car while dodging traffic at the same time.
Not exactly a glorious way to go, but he’d hardly be the first person to die because he was too panicked to do what probably would’ve been obvious to him if he’d been in a calmer situation.
So the more-or-less empirical answers to the above questions seem to be:
YES, if the gas pedal is stuck or the car is doing a “runaway” act for whatever reason, PUT IT IN NEUTRAL and then bring it to a stop.
It’s not that unusual for people to whom this happens either not to know the right thing to do or not to think of doing it, in the panic of the moment.
There’s also no car made where the engine at full gas is able to overwhelm the brakes at full. This, too, is a safety feature. When people say that the accelerator got stuck and hitting the brakes didn’t work, what that usually means is that the meant to hit the brakes but panicked and hit the gas pedal instead, which is in turn the cause of the “stuck accelerator” problem: The car keeps accelerating because you’re jamming the accelerator into the floor.
Are you sure about this? I don’t know, but this Consumer Reports video seems to say full brakes won’t override full acceleration, but that there are some German cars that are specially designed so the brakes override the throttle.
The interviewee I heard said that she was just about standing on the brake and most definitely not on the gas. Brakes were smoking and eventually siezed up entirely, which was when the car finally stopped. Later on in the segment people were speculating that it was an electronic, not a physical problem. Apparently the accelerator is not just a hardware linkup but an electronic (“computer”) interface. This would make it especially difficult to diagnose since the problem is obviously intermittent, as everyone who uses a computer, and especially anyone who’s debugged software will immediately recognize. Toyota vigorously denies this possibility and says they’ve tested these sensors and interfaces extensively. I’m also speculating that there are electronic controls on the ignition and the automatic transmission. Now, this particular incident may be unrelated to the other problems, and I suppose the person being interviewed could be lying. Didn’t sound like to to me, but I wasn’t there.
If that is true, it is possible the momentum + engine vs full brake will lead to brake fade and inability to stop the car after the fade. Add downhill to the engine side and ABS to the braking side and I think the engine side could win.
Blondestar! I actually got this phone call about 6 months ago. a customer got into the car, locked the door and the battery would not start the car. Trying to start the car depleted the battery to the point where it would not unlock the doors. Customer then called us on their cell phone. We told them to pull on the inner door handle.
They got out.
I call bullshit. If he took the car out of gear, why could he not stop it?
I can believe that is true from a stop, with new pads. (In other words, apply the brakes fully, then try to go.) I’m not sure I believe it would be true at highway speeds. You can make your brakes fail just by keeping them slightly applied during the drive down a mountain: the brake fluid will boil from the heat.*
When those fail you, it’s time to start pulling fuses.
Seriously though, when the accelerator cable on my 71 Datsun broke off of the pedal and jammed full-on into the floor mats, I reached down and pulled it up by hand. Now I was on a straight piece of road at the time,which helped, but now that Toyata’s problem is widely publicized, how hard can it be to reach down to where the pedal is, and pry up on it?
If the problem is a sticky fit between the pedal and the sensor housing as advertised, a bit of prying around should fix things long enough to get off the road safely.
Similar remarks might apply to the Lexus shifter, and explain why people “can’t” shift it or similar cars into neutral. Several cars, apparently including this Lexus, now come with a “manual” or “sport shift” mode which allows up/down shifting. If somebody is in that mode and doesn’t realize it, they could easily be trying to jam the shift lever into neutral, but simply be upshifting instead:
Presumably, somebody who BOUGHT a car with one of these “manumatic” deals wanted it, or at least realized the car came with it, and is aware of how it works. If it appears in a rental, somebody might not be familiar with the arrangement.
That’s fine if it’s a mechanical problem but, if as many speculate, it’s related to the computer/electronics, this may not doing anything at all to help.
