Of course there are some potential problems that can cause acceleration, I never denied that.
Ones that mysteriously go away by cleaning fuel injectors I will however deny.
As Rick showed, it was concluded that driver error was responsible for virtually all the Audi incidents. To my recollection, none of the cars were found to have any relevant mechanical problems. After shift interlocks appeared, incidents of unintended acceleration upon starting the cars disappeared. Any rational review of all the evidence gathered (and there was a lot) leaves driver error as the only plausible explanation.
It’s not a matter of being stupid. All the drivers were just POSITIVE that they had their foot on the brake rather than on the accelerator, just as sometimes eyewitnesses are just POSITIVE that they’ve identified the perpetrator in cases where it’s later proven that they were flat out wrong. Human perception can be a strange beast.
37-38mph is where I hit the red line in 1st. Note that this was during rapid accelleration and it is possible that I have two red lines (haven’t bothered checking but I have had a car that did - it let you go to 6500 for 2 or 3 seconds then cut you down to 6250) and a sustained speed would be slower, but anyway it would be considerably more than 40kph.
In this case, she managed to jump out of the still moving car, and the cops somehow managed to pull the wires on the battery.
“…and the recent toyota stuff too in that it’s imbecile user error rather than dangerous engineering.”
Your statements sure make it sound like you’ve ruled out the possibility of electrical/mechanical/systems failure for any acceleration problem. Despite Toyota admitting otherwise in at least 1 case.
These threads typically have some pretty vocal people that imply in all cases it’s operator error…which is a completely ridiculous position.
As a person that works with computer/electrical/mechanical systems, the only logical position is that the percentage of cases in which it’s not operator error is greater than 0%.
I don’t know how anyone (like some posters in this thread) thinks they can watch that video and conclude either of two things:
- What the root cause was
- Rule out system problem and guarantee operator error
I am not all that familiar with the details of automotive control systems, but some time ago I read a paper that may have some relevance.
Seems that as microchips get smaller, there has developed a phenomenon whereby small filaments randomly grow out from internal connections and create shorts between connectors.
These shorts can create random functional errors within the chip, which can be manifest in all kinds of unpredictable ways.
In addition, the current flow through these filaments can be sufficient to melt the filament, so that in subsequent investigations, the evidence for the short is almost impossible to see.
So I can visualize a scenario in which a microchip in the car’s control system develops a micro filament, this shorts out a control circuit causing the car to accelerate. After a while the micro filament melts, and the car comes to a halt. Subsequent investigation finds nothing, and blames “operator error”.
Possible explanation for this problem?
If I recall correctly - she had to be told to lift the accelerator with her foot - if that is the case - she isn’t that bright - doesn’t mean it’s her fault, but it was something easily remedied - I don’t expect everyone to figure that out in seconds - but after however god awful time she was driving - you would think someone would.
Not all the problems are even user error - at least one of the Toyota cases was made up. People do these things for attention sometime - remember the Pepsi Syringe Case. Not saying it NEVER happens, but to the best of my knowledge - none of these electrical/computer claims have been duplicated. Sure they might be intermittent SOME times - but all the time - seems unlikely.
Also - she apparently thinks she has an angel following her (more or less).
First of all her reference is to a knick knack she owns, you need to listen better. But so what if she really is religious and believes God sent an angel to help her? No bearing on her intelligence. See if you would be able to think of pulling up the gas pedal while pushing down the brake ALL WHILE AVOIDING TRAFFIC ON THE FREEWAY AT 119 MPH! As someone else posted, it takes A LOT of concentration to drive that fast! To quote her
plus she was dealing with traffic.
Well if you bring the car to a stop, why don’t you just put it in park and turn off the engine? 
Would seem to be the thing to do
If you look at the video, the officer jumps in and put the car in park (you can see the brake lights come on so he can shift the car.) In the video he does not open the hood.
Well let’s talk about this. For an Audi type sudden acceleration (pressing as hard as you can on the brake, car accelerates uncontrollably, no traces left after the accident) you would have to have the following things happen in order:
[ul]
[li]A failure in the throttle system that causes the throttle to go wide open (NOTE: the Audi 5000 had a mechanical throttle operated by a cable, modern cars have electronic throttles not the same thing)[/li][li]This failure would have to be one that did not leave any fault codes as either pending, current, or history in the Engine Control Module[/li][li]At the same time as this happened, both circuits in the hydraulic brake system would have to fail totally and completely.[/li][li]Again this brake failure would have to leave no codes in the ABS or traction control systems[/li][li]After the [del]accident[/del] incident the throttle system would have to fix itself, leaving no trace of the failure[/li][li]Ditto for the brake system, leaving NO trace of the brake failure[/li][/ul]
Or you can go with:
[ul]
[li]Driver puts their foot on the wrong pedal[/li][/ul]
Which do you think in more likely? A single point of failure, the driver, or multiple points of failure in various unconnected systems that totally elude the electronic monitoring systems in a modern car?
Me? I’ll go for the simple explanation, the driver stepped on the wrong pedal.
Now about the lady in question. The various reports say she could not shift to neutral. You have to push the button on the side of the shifter in a KIA to move the shifter to neutral. I got $5 that says she never pushed the button. This is not an electronic control, this is a mechanical button to prevent you from bumping the lever into neutral or reverse when driving.
Next the reports say that she was instructed to pry the accelerator pedal up, she did this and the car slowed down. Guess what? This is not some strange mysterious electronic fault, again I have $5 that says that she had a floor mat scrunched under the throttle and at the start of this incident she had stepped down to pass someone and when she let off the gas, the pedal was trapped and the throttle stayed wide open as that is what was being commanded from the accelerator pedal.
I almost wrecked a car at a training center once from this. I shared a training center with Ford and my side of the building with Mazda. The Mazda [del]instructor[/del] idiot had left a turbo RX-8 in the instructor parking spot, instead of putting it in the back of the lot where it belonged. So I have to go get the keys out of the safe and go to move it. As I walk to the car, I see some rust on the brake rotors (it had been rainy). I get in and notice that the idiot had flipped the driver’s floor mat upside down. This is an old mechanic trick if you don’t have a paper floor mat, you flip the floor mat over so any grease on your shoes won’t show when you get out and put the mat right side up again. This guy was an idiot, because we weren’t in a shop, we were in a training center that had floors so clean you could eat off of them, so this was a wasted effort.
Anyway I start the sled up, back out of the space point it toward the back of the lot and floor it (frankly I was pissed at the extra work this idiot was putting me to, and this was NOT the first time I had to move his cars when I got to the school)
Anyway about the time the engine gets to 2,000 RPM and the turbo kicks in, I take my foot off the accelerator. Throttle stays at WFO*. Ever been in a turbo RX-7 or-8? They accelerate HARD, they go like a raped ape.
I hit the brake. Remember the rust on the rotors? Yeah going to take 3 or 4 revolutions of the rotors with the brakes applied to clean that off and be able to generate any brake force.
At the same time I am diving for the key. As my hand is reaching for the key I see up ahead the front ends of 2 F250 4WD pickups parked at the back of the lot. I swear I had the thought that if I hit those trucks I would never be able to retire as I would be filling out accident reports for 3 different car companies for the rest of my life. :eek:
Just as my hand finds the key, the brakes grab, I get the ignition off and bring the car to a stop with maybe 30 feet to spare.
I get out, look under the hood and see noting wrong. I start the car, engine goes to right to red line.
At this point I look down and see the bottom on the floor mats has lots and lots of little tiny fingers that stick out about 3/4" to dig into the carpet when the mat is correctly installed, but due to the idiot turning the mat over, they were sticking straight up in just such a way to hold the throttle wide open if you were to step on the gas.
So I pulled the mat out, set it back in right side up, and guess what? No more sudden acceleration.
This is absolutely not the same as the Audi scenario I mentioned above. There was a single point of failure, the floor mat turned upside down by the idiot. The failure was discovered after the fact and corrected. In the Audi scenario, there is no trace and nothing that needs fixing.
I have also seen floor mats stuck under throttles to where they are almost ready to catch a pedal, or I love this one, car comes in with a complaint that the car is way down on power. Looking inside the car, the customer has two or sometimes thee mats one on top of the other, and at least one of them has scrunched under the gas pedal, where it can’t travel but about 3/4 of an inch or so.
A quick floor matectomy and the customer thinks you are the greatest technician in the world as you have tripled the power in the car in 3 minutes. 
*Technical term WFO = Wide Fucking Open
Toyota has tried hard to push propaganda that their cars were not at fault. true, only very rare problems with the computer etc were found. BUT the floor mat in several models did cause the gas petal to stick. Toyota paid a HUGE settlement to the US Government for this flaw.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/business/19toyota.html
The Transportation Department said Tuesday that Toyota Motor had paid a $16.4 million civil fine, the largest allowed, over a recall of sticking accelerator pedals on 2.3 million vehicles.
Not to mention a $10MM settlement when sued.
Toyota would not have paid out so far nearly $30MM in fines and settlements if it had been all been “user error”. :rolleyes:
Mind you- of course user error also played a part.
Watch all the video, the woman states they pulled the wires on the battery.
Watched the video qgain - In the last part of the video she claims that the SUV “slammed” her from 119 to nothing. From the video - there doesn’t appear to be any jerking - ok I guess slamming is relative. She also claims the vehicle is still moving when she “jumped” out. When the break lights are in - she is CLEARLY stopped. The only reason the car kept moving is she got out without turning it off. When the officer gets in - it appears to stop with no problem. The break lights correlate perfectly with the car slowing down.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did unhook the battery - but OBVIOUSLY the car would have to be stopped for them to do this. This seems to be a reasonable and smart precaution to take if I were the police.
She seems to be claiming stuff that clearly is exaggerations or not supported by the video. We can see the entire time from when she slows down to when she gets out of the SUV on the CNN video - what she is saying is simply not the case. This doesn’t mean she is lying - this is how she may remember it.
Could it be a case of some fault of the vehicle - sure. But it is hard for me to give credit to someone claiming things that I can clearly see don’t happen in a video.
Problems with your list:
-
I don’t know the details of the Audi cases, but I assume they did not all report having the brakes applied, right?
-
You didn’t list any of the other items that should go into that type of probability reasoning:
a) The fact that the Audi 5000 had a high number of incidents comparatively even before the media frenzy
b) The fact that incidents continued on cars with the shift lock installed -
The chances that cars don’t ever have mechanical/electrical/system problems that result in acceleration is 0%.
Problems with that kind of approach: -
It’s a guess.
If you apply that same logic to the car that the Toyota dealer inspected, you would also be left concluding operator error…despite having a car sitting in front of you with a pegged engine and no explanation and no failures.
Here’s a refresher:
According to a memo sent by Toyota HQ to dealers to explain this specific case:
- The dealer observed that the engine remained at high RPM in neutral, but the pedal did return to idle position and RPM returned to idle speed when the pedal was depressed and released.
- Subsequent efforts by technicians to recreate the condition were unsuccessful.
- There were no error codes in the engine control computer and it was determined to be functioning normally.
- According to the repair order, the accelerator pedal, throttle body and related parts were replaced, and the problem did not reoccur.
Summary (and my point):
Unintended acceleration not due to operator error happens some percentage of the time that is greater than 0%.
When I read an article that says “The NHTSA has determined that…” I laugh to myself because I know what they really mean is that they are scratching their heads and it’s unclear whether it’s operator error or not because there simply is not enough data.
Two things
- That does not appear in the video. WATCH it, don’t just listen to her. Officer never goes near the hood
- It takes a 10mm wrench to remove a battery cable on a KIA. Do police officers in your area carry 10mm wrenches?
Where I live the only thing that measures 10mm that the police carry is their sidearm.
It could have happened the way she said, but the video is not proof of it.
True, but at the same time if she’d fibbed on that it would have been debunked by now. I don’t wanna pull up the video again, but if I recall correctly I think she might have said cut the wires… ? But I dunno why I’d say “pulled” then, after having just watched the video at that point to confirm what I’d heard. Couldn’t they have ripped the wires out via brute force not caring if they broke things or not?
Well duh – I asked about what to do if you CAN’T put it in park and shut it off. I got the impression from descriptions above that this was not just a stuck pedal but a control system failure.
I hadn’t seen that video. Clearly, she’d fixed the problem by lifting the accelerator, and the engine was no longer racing. Otherwise when she jumped out it would have zoomed off. She was in a panic and not acting rationally by that time (not that I blame her).
In any case, it’s disturbing that a car would be designed to disallow shifting into neutral at high speeds. Park, yes, but neutral?
Yes, to somebody who has always driven cars with manual transmission, the idea that a stuck accelerator pedal would be a problem is rather hard to comprehend. Just shift into neutral, or even just press the clutch. Only having driven an automatic once for a couple of days, nearly 10 years ago, I can’t remember - what happens if you shift the lever into neutral while driving? Why wouldn’t this work in the situation described?
This bit puzzles me:
Why is this a problem? Is “neutral” in an automatic not like “neutral” in a manual, i.e. the engine can spin at whatever RPM it likes but there is no connection to the drivetrain? If my accelerator was stuck but I shifted into neutral, the engine would remain at high RPM but would no longer be driving the car.
Of course, I’ve never driven a car without a physical ignition key, either. Having a computer decide both which gear I should be in and whether or not the engine should be running doesn’t appeal to me at all.
There are several people out there who are not entirely familiarized with the whole driving thing.
My mother for example, shes’ been driving cars for more than 20 years, yet she pauses and thinks before doing anything, even something simple she’s done hundreds of times before, like turning on the lights or releasing the parking brake.
She doesn’t like to drive different cars, and when she has to, she’s like driving for the very first time. I guess that if her gas pedal ever stuck she would too panic and not know what to do.
The Toyota case was an illustration of a case of unintended acceleration without any observable mechanical or electrical failure.
The driver did shift into neutral and by shifting back and forth was able to get to the dealer.
But again, it’s a different case and it’s merely illustrative of the point that lack of evidence of failure does not automatically imply operator error.
In an auto industry publication that came out when this case was fresh, the comment was made that when Toyota overtook GM in sales, who would have thought that they would take GM’s arrogance also.
The fines and the recalls were for the floor mats. As I mentioned before floor mats can and do become wedged under and can trap gas pedals. Toyota either did not have any mat anchors, or ineffective mat anchors. This is not an unknown or mysterious case of UA. Rather it is well known and was addressed by most car makers 20-30 years ago. The only thing that surprised me was that Toyota hadn’t fixed this issue years ago. Arrogance.
Well if she pried the accelerator pedal off the floor mat that was trapping it and hit the brakes, she would come to a rather abrupt stop. A slam if you will.
Disconnecting the battery is a very bad idea in my professional opinion. Disconnecting the battery would erase any and all fault codes that might have been stored in the engine control module. If the battery was disconnected, I can pretty much guarantee that the KIA engineers are going Fuck! Why did they do that?
- Unlike you, I am very familiar with the Audi case, and the cases for UA against other car makers in the 1980s. I was working in the industry, and at the dealership I worked at we shared shop space with the Audi techs.
the typical Audi UA complaint was:
[ul]
[li]Problem happened when shifting out of park[/li][li]The car took off uncontrollably[/li][li]I was standing on the brakes[/li][li]I could not stop the car[/li][li]After the car is examined both the brakes and throttle are found to be normal[/li][/ul]
(Note I say typically, because I have not read all of the reports of Audi UA, and I know from your comments you have not either.)
Anyway would you like a cite? From the Wall street Journal
So the vote is 2 government investigations vote idiot drivers, you and assorted ambulance chasing lawyers vote against.
- Sure I did. You could have some type of failure that caused the mechanical accelerator to jam wide open, the brakes to fail at the exact same moment, and after it is all over each system fixes itself. Hey it could happen. Megan Fox also might show up tomorrow and fuck my brains out, but I’m not going to hold my breath on either one of these.
2A) Accounted for in the government reports. The pedals on an Audi were placed closer together than on many American cars and a disproportionate number of UA complaints came from people that had traded in Cads and Lincolns for brand new 5000s.
2B) Cite from someone other than a lawyer, like a governmental source
- I never said that. Cars have problems every day, I make my living dealing with cars that have problems. But in this case (Audi UA) it has pretty well been established by two different governmental safety agencies that the fault was with the driver.
- (shouldn’t this be 4?) Again not a guess, based on governmental research.
Now on to the Toyota you seem to be so enamored with. That car has an electronic throttle system. The Audi 5000 had a mechanical throttle. You are comparing a paint brush to an airless spray gun. Paint brushes have issues. Airless sprayers have issues, but it is very safe to say they don’t have the same issues.
Do you have a link to this Toyota “memo” I could not find it in a quick Google and frankly having worked for a car company, I highly doubt they would send out what you wrote to their dealers.
What I did find was the reports by the NHTSA about the Toyota investigations. NHTSA and NASA went all over the Toyota system and found no fault. NASA examined the computer code line by line and found nothing. I will be honest, when I first heard of the Toyota issues with high speed UA a few years back, I suspected a software bug, an errant line of code. But NASA says nope. The entire reports are here (PDF).
Here is a link to theexecutive summary (PDF) For your reading pleasure I would like to quote
So why could you not shift the car into park and shut it off? Every car I have every worked on, and every car I have ever known about (with one exception) has a mechanical linkage between the shifter and the transmission.If the car is stopped what would prevent you from putting the car into park? Answer not a damn thing.
The KIA does not disallow you to shift into neutral at any speed, it has a button that has to be depressed to move the shifter from D to N. Every auto trans I have every been around (again with one exception) has something to prevent you from either knocking the shifter into N or R while driving. It might be a button, or a gate where you have to move the shifter to one side or another, but I guarantee you there is something that prevents the lever from moving directly from D to either N or R. If you drive an automatic, you probably are so used to dealing with this button or gate, you give it no thought whatsoever.
BTW the one exception I mentioned above is the push button transmissions on late 1950s and early 1960s Chrysler and Edsels.