I practiced putting my 2010 Prius in neutral yesterday, while stopped in the parking lot at work. It took me two times to do it, and there was a noticeable pause before it happened, but it worked. But the Mr. Roadshow column gives a better solution. It seems that if you try to shift from drive to reverse while moving you will wind up in neutral. That I don’t want to try. Here is an article from Edmunds which mentions this. More people shift from drive to reverse than shift into neutral, it seems to me.
Another Prius acceleration problem is linked to the driver, not the car.
Of course, the 2005 model only collects data after the airbags were deployed (which seems rather odd…) but the data they had said the throttle was fully open, and the brakes were not applied. So while it is possible that the brakes were applied, and then when the crash happened the impact caused the driver to remove her foot from the brake, it still leaves open the question as to why the throttle was fully open.
Either there is some sort of software fault that is reading the throttle as being open, even when the pedal isn’t pressed at all, or (IMO the most likely scenario,) it was driver error and she was pressing on the gas, thinking it was the brake (which makes sense, because if you are sure you’re on the brake, and the car speeds up, you’ll press harder, and then obviously the car will go faster, and you’ll press more and voila, throttle fully open but you think you’re on the brake.)
There was an interesting piece on NPR’s Morning Edition on drivers hitting the wrong pedal by mistake. Apparently, it’s pretty common:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124815144
If there was a sensor or software fault that didn’t detect the driver was braking and didn’t “let” the car brake, that is exactly what I would expect, no log of the brake being pressed.
I heard a report on NPR yesterday afternoon, but in that one, they said that no study covered “sustained” pedal error (as in; a situation where the wrong pedal is pressed for more than a few seconds).
That would depend on where the sensor/software fault was. If it was “early on” in the system, then I might agree, say the part that initially detects if the brake is applied, and then does other things like tell this part of the computer to turn on the brake lights, tells that part to actually brake, tells another part to charge the battery from it, and another part to log the brake (though I guess only if the airbag deploys.)
But if the fault is further down in the system, then there should still be a log the brake was pressed. So the main computer could still get the signal to brake, but the sub-system that then gets or sends the signal to brake is faulty.
Besides which, don’t the people in the other cases say the brakes were applied, and in fact were functioning (ie, they saw smoke/smelled buring brakes/pads were worn down,) it was just that the car was still responding as if the gas was being pressed.
So even if this woman’s story is as she claimed it is 100%, it doesn’t seem to be entirely the same problem as the other ones, other than just “the car’s computer is broken,” which is a very vague and nebulous type of problem to claim is happening.
From the article it appears that the software only takes a snap shot of some parameters at the instant the airbags are deployed.
Brakes not applied. My guess is they are looking at the brake light switch, but it could be more involved than that.
As far as the throttle goes, the article does not mention if the signal was from the accelerator pedal sensor, or from the throttle pedal sensor. Big difference in the conclusions you can draw between the two.