Sometimes I think I’m an uncharitable person, but I can’t help but marvel at the folks who died in a fiery 100+ MPH crash recently after the throttle on their Toyota got pinned wide-open. They complained during a 911 call (while already hauling ass) that they had no brakes. Admittedly it’s possible they could lose vacuum-assist with the throttle stuck wide open (and not providing any vacuum at all), but in my mind, that still left “put the transmission in neutral” and “turn the key off” as two viable options for getting one’s speed back under control.
Today I learned that the particular car in question had keyless start: the keyfob stays in your pocket, and you push a button on the dashboard to start the engine. Shutting the engine down is less straightforward: nothing on the car itself will shut the engine down, but you can push the button on the keyfob (in your pocket) for three seconds, and that will kill the engine. Unclear whether this behavior is the same whether the vehicle is in “park” or “drive.” In any event, it may be difficult to search your pockets for the keyfob while you’re trying to keep the car on the road at triple-digit speeds.
What of the final option, putting the car in neutral? My friend told me that the occupants, for some reason, were physically unable to get the car out of drive.
Huh. OK, if all that’s true, then I have more sympathy for those involved, and I’m much more leary of the car involved.
So, can anyone tell me:
-what year/model car was this?
-How many ways are there to kill the engine? Does the keyfob behave differently depending on whether the transmission is in drive/park/neutral?
-is there a problem with putting the transmission in neutral while cruising down the road?
I don’t know enough about the car in question to comment if that is possible or not but there was a similar story about a runaway BMW in Italy I think a few years ago. It ended up in mayhem but not tragedy and it turned out to be a partial hoax. I knew that it was immediately because I owned the same model and there are multiple ways to stop most cars and the likelihood of all of them failing at the same time is incredibly small. You have the ignition switch, the transmission, the brakes, and the emergency brake. In an absolute worst case scenario, you could use what you have left to wreck it in the safest place possible. I am not saying this didn’t happen as claimed but similar claims have been made before and they were either a lie or the driver simply didn’t know what they were doing (see the number of elderly people who put their car in ‘Reverse’, notice the car is going forward, hit the ‘brakes’ as hard as they can and then ram it into a building right in front of them at high speed).
If you have no brakes, it’s no big deal that you’ve lost any power assist to them. Steering might get a bit harder, but I’d rather have to strain my muscles to turn, than have them repaired following a crash.
Potentially, putting a transmission, with a stuck throttle, in neutral, would blow the engine at some point. You’d need a new engine. This is also preferable to needing repairs to yourself after a high speed crash, AND needing a new car/organs. (if you survive, unlike those in this crash apparently didn’t.)
This is yet another reason that I like cars with keys, actual switches controlling power to the ignition system, and clutches that you can throw, even if the “shift lever” stays in gear. Electronic controls are just something that can break, most likely when Mr. Murphy (of law fame) is feeling most bored.
There was a segment on Nightline last night about precisely this. Apparently there’s been a rash of Toyota “runaways”, and it’s not all blamable on people mistakenly stepping on the gas instead of the brake, or because the rubber mat underneath the driver getting caught under the accelerator pedal. It seems to be linked to Toyota’s changeover from direct linkage to electronic control.
Pepper Mill asked the obvious question – why not just shift into neutral and kill the engine? A druiving expert did, indeed, recommend shifting to neutral, but said not to kill the power because that would also disable power steering and power brakes. Nobody mentioned the “pushbutton start with no obvious way to kill the power” thing.
The engine is almost certainly electronically limited, so it can probably rev at the redline all day without causing any serious short-term engine damage. Shifting into neutral in this situation is win-win.
What would happen if you chucked the fob out the window? Does the engine stop?
But keep in the mind is that the claim is that the engine control module is itself faulty. If there is a bad program running the engine, who knows what other engine behavior might occur.
Well, I suppose if the ECU is just… eeeeeevil. But realistically, the problem is with the electronic throttle control and it is exceedingly unlikely that it would also override the limit on the electronic spark control and add some values in the fuel injection system’s injection pulse tables (part of why EFI’d cars can’t overrev is that the ECU has in its EPROM a table that tells it how many injector pulses are necessary for x RPM’s at x throttle position at x manifold pressure, etc and they simply don’t have values programed in for RPM’s beyond the redline).
Although I suppose murdering someone by deliberately modifying their ECU might be a good plot device in a mystery novel.
Heh, soon you’ll be able to program a car to lock the doors, disable the phone, drive itself to “dead man’s curve” and accelerate through the guardrail.
Don’t forget that on many cars, turning the key off (obviously, not on a car with a keyless ignition) will sometimes lock the steering wheel. Yet another not-fun-thing to experience at anything faster than, say, 0 mph.
For keyless ignitions (such as the Prius), I have heard that the distance at which they work is about 20 feet. If that is the case, I can totally see a scenario where someone puts their keyfob in a jacket pocket, hangs the jacket by the garage door, and the next morning, leaves the house without the jacket. The car starts up (being within the working distance of the keyfob), but when you get to work, then what?
I’m not sure if this fly-by-wire stuff is all that it is cracked up to be. What is the problem the engineers were trying to solve when they switched from mechanical linkages?
Huh. All this makes me glad I stick to my manual transmission with a clutch to depress and (even failing that) a quick tap of the stick to get me to neutral. Weird that in an automatic neutral might not work for whatever reason (although it’s unclear to me from the article whether neutral doesn’t work, or whether it’s driver error. The article seems to lay the blame on the driver, while still hedging a little.)
-mechanical cables require certain minimum bend radii to get from point A to point B. That means lots of considerations about how to route the mechanical cable from the gas pedal to the throttle plate. OTOH, electrical wires can get routed just about anywhere.
-Mechanical cruise control requires a vacuum actuator to move a mechanical throttle. That actuator needs space somewhere under the hood, and possibly another mechanical cable to connect it to the throttle body if it’s remotely located. With ETC, cruise control implementation becomes just a few extra lines of code in the software that already controls the throttle plate.
-Emissions regs are tight, transients are a bitch to deal with. Stomp your foot suddenly to the floor (or lift it just as suddenly), and the fuel system is hard-pressed to match; you can step-change the injection quantity, but it takes time to build up (or use up) the fuel film in the intake tract, and during that time the engine can be running rich or lean of desired, depending on what’s going on. With ETC, the computer can slow the throttle opening event just a little bit, giving the fuel system a chance to keep up. Presto: no stumbling/hesitation, lower emissions.
No. The car keeps going as usual with an indication that it cannot read the key fob any longer. When you stop and turn off the engine, the car will not restart with out the fob within range.
Also keep in mind that the driver in said accident (Saylor) had borrowed the car and was unfamiliar with the features in question (keyless ignition, lever manual shift, etc.) Had he owned the car maybe he would have been aware of how to shut off the power or shift into neutral, but who knows for sure?
Also I heard the accident report showed that the brakes were completely worn down, as if they had been depressed until failure.
Turning to the first detent is not a problem. With the transmition in drive and neutral the key should not return all the way to the locked position. The car would have to be in park to lock the stearing.
There’s no mention anywhere of an emergency brake. Don’t all cars still have a separate emergency brake system, either a center-console pull or a far-left ratcheting petal?
Not that it wouldn’t have failed, too, but my personal response to the same scenario would have been: shift to neutral - turn engine off - pull emergency brake. Though in panic mode I might have pulled the emergency brake as soon as I realized the regular brakes weren’t working and blown that option. But still, then shift to neutral and hope there’s rough ground to steer into.
I wonder if the problem with getting into neutral for these folks is that the brake pedal needs to be depressed in order to shift or something, and they don’t realize that just because the brakes aren’t working doesn’t mean depressing the pedal will still release the gear shift? Or maybe it’s an electronic release like the gas pedal, and it won’t respond because it sensed the car still in motion. That sucks, and would prove fatal.