Not just me, how about the NHTSA?
From here
And as Zabali_Clawbane pointed out, the thing that stops your car is a brake, not a break.
What did the garages diagones?
If it’s the same car as in this article, it’s a Kia Sorento. FTA:
That said, IIRC, the Kia Sorento can be turned off by either pushing the Start button three times within a few seconds or by just holding the button in. I can’t find the Owner’s Manual on line, but I’m sure it’ll have instructions for turning off the car, especially after the Toyota follies of a few years ago.
Is it true that, while the brakes will stop a vehicle, even at WOT and top speed, they may fade so badly in the attempt that they may not do so a second time? Say, if you were to take your foot off the brake, thinking you had the car back under control?
I wonder if this kind of user error is why a Skoda (a, like audi, VAG car) I was driving last month wouldn’t let me heel and toe - the moment you touched the brake the (fly by drive with piss poor reaction times but that’s another story) accelerator would kill itself. Given it was certainly not a performance car, clearly a bean-counter had taken the decision that protecting retards from themselves was was more important than allowing one to make progress. Even though ironically in normal road driving if you want to drive both smoothly and fast, then heel and toeing is actually more important in a crap car as you want to preserve as much speed as possible onto roundabouts and some corners/junctions (where as in a proper car you can accelerate away from a low speed) which basically means using brake/gear overlap. And BGOL needs heel and toe if you want to be smooth. But I digress.
(ETA: If you don’t know why you would want to use all three pedals at the same time on a car with manual transmission, then every day’s a school day)
When I was shopping for an Echo, one of the first ones I test-drove was a hatchback without power-assist steering. I realized fairly quickly that parallel parking was going to be a bit of a workout, so I went looking for a more accessorized vehicle.
Another thing, would downshifting be better than switching to neutral?
No. Assuming you have an automatic box that will let you do this (a manual box you’d just stick it in neutral) then either you downshift at a speed where you would bring the engine past its red line, or you downshift at a speed where it can still accelerate you further.
The only very limited situation this could “make sense” is to limit the speed, and I suppose that will happen (although you will hit that speed quicker btw, and also presumably your box is in kick down which invalidate the entire circumstance anyway ut bear with me) - anyway even if that was a possibility, if you have the brain power to do that you should have the brain power to sort out the car.
Honestly this is not at all a big deal. I gave an example earlier with a race car with three pedals too close for me to use, but I also remember in the first couple of months after I’d first learned to drive this floormat thing happening to me. It was basically second nature to sort it out after a couple of seconds of working out what had occurred.
What this is probably an argument for is better driver education. US driver ed seems utterly appaling to me. It’s pretty bad in the UK compared to places like Finland, but the US seems to take it to another level of incompetence.
Give a guy a braek.
I was thinking, in D you might reach 100 kph, if you switch to 1 you could slow the car to 40 before you hit the brakes (while switching to neutral), making it more likely to stop the car.
If your gear box is working properly it will not let you shift into 1 at 100. Or if it does, it won’t actually down shift into 1st gear until you’re at a low enough speed that it would go into it without damaging the engine.
I guess it’s possible depending on precise situation that it would let it downshift anyway, in which case congrats you have a fucked engine rather no damage.
P.S. 1st gear on most automatics is good for around 40 Mph, not 40 Kph
Canada, too. Our driver training is treated very lightly here - there is no requirement that you have any training at all, before getting behind the wheel and being responsible for piloting a large, powerful death machine. This is one of my ongoing peeves, and a cause that I support emotionally and financially - trying to get the idea across that driving a vehicle should be taken very seriously.
From this site -
If anything else was causing this kind of carnage, people would never stop demanding that somebody should do something to stop it.
Hmm I didn’t think of it not letting you shift. Guess automatics aren’t like manuals. Also, on manuals 1st only goes up to about 40 kph, but since autos have fewer gears, I guess they have a wider range.
So you know for a fact that there are no cases of mechanical or electrical failure causing acceleration?
In 100% of cases it was operator error?
Even the one Toyota inspected while the engine was pegged and they admitted they could not explain it?
Sorry but he broke my brand new irony meter with his first post in this thread.
A modern electronically controlled automatic probably would not allow any downshifts at top speed and a wide open throttle. You could pull the shifter into 1st but it would have no effect. (this would also be true of a non electronic trans now that I think about it)
However as you manage to slow down using the brakes the trans would downshift.
After hitting the brake, slowing down, and stopping, what do you do? The engine is still racing, right? If you still can’t turn off the engine or put it in neutral, seems to me you’re stuck there until it runs out of gas.
To folks above who questioned using brakes with the engine off, like the steering, they still work, just not nearly as well. The reason the brake pedal is wide is so you can get two feet on it – use them!
I always laugh at those scenes in old movies where the hero/heroine had the brake line cut by the evil villain, and is careening down the mountain road with no brakes, yet none of them has the sense to downshift or kill the ignition. Even James Bond, who should know better!
But with more modern cars, the issue is a bigger problem.
The final fight in License to Kill involves a bad guy chasing James Bond over and around an 18-wheeler and at one point the air-brake lines get cut, allowing the truck to slowly roll forward into an eventual exploding fireball of doom.
Of course, that’s not how air brakes work - cutting the line would, if anything, cause the brakes to lock down even harder.
Reading some of these accounts, I’m thinking driver error more and more. I can’t offhand recall the specifics, but there was one case of a guy calling 911 from his supposedly out-of-control car who didn’t want to shift into neutral out of fear the car would flip. If that is what the driver actually said, then he’s just plain too stupid to have a driver’s license, and I suspect he’s too dumb to know what his own feet are doing, including flooring the gas pedal.
That, or he’s trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket.
Overheated brakes lose braking capability for two primary reasons:
1)at high temperatures, the coefficient of friction between the pads and rotors is reduced. At some point you can squeeze them as hard as you want, but you won’t get much braking action out of them.
2)at high temperatures, the brake fluid behind the caliper’s piston can boil. You’ll be fine as long as you are applying pressure, but if the fluid gets hot, and then you release that pressure, the fluid will boil. Now you’ve got a hydraulic system filled with highly compressible gas: you can press the brake pedal all the way to the floor, but that movement of the pedal won’t be transmitted to the brake calipers, it’ll just go into compressing that gas a bit.
For a vehicle with an engine that has stalled or stuck at wide-open throttle, there is the additional problem of loss of brake boost. Passenger cars with gasoline engines use vacuum generated in the engine’s intake manifold to provide a power-assist for the brakes. Vacuum is only generated when the engine is running at part-throttle; at wide-open throttle, the intake manifold is nearly at atmospheric pressure. There is typically a vacuum reservoir (look under your hood for a plastic sphere the size of a grapefruit), but it contains enough vacuum for one or two full applications of the brakes. You can feel this the next time you park your car: turn the engine off, and see how many times you can press the brake pedal before it gets really stiff. You still have braking action after this, but without the power assist, you may have to stomp on the pedal very hard with both feet to achieve a useful level of braking force - especially if the engine is still trying to accelerate the car.
So yes, if your engine is running WOT and for some reason you can’t get it out of gear, stomp on the brake and hold it down until you come to a complete stop. Keep holding it down until you find some means to prevent the car from taking off again (kill the engine somehow, get another car parked in front of it, etc.).
In a video interview, the woman said her personal angel told her never to drive faster than he could fly.
Most manuals will exceed 30mph in 1st, usually around 32-35mph in my experience. I will check what my current runabout (2003 vauxhall omega 3.2 v6) red lines at later today - it’s an ex police car so the speedo basically doesn’t over read.
Possibly so, but “anything else” isn’t as thoroughly ingrained into the lifestyles of the overwhelming majority of the population. The uproar from any significant impairment of people’s relatively free use of motor vehicles would be tremendous.
Sound advice in these troubled times.