Toyota ran a pretty good astroturf campaign, trying to show that since the fatal acceleration problems were not caused by their computers, it must have been driver error. Then Toyota admitted the floor mats might have been part of the problem.
Now it turns out they also knew it was caused by faulty pedals, which they also tried to cover-up.
"It never notified federal agencies, as they’re required to do in the United States. And in Europe, Toyota told distributors to replace the faulty part only if customers complained about it. (Customers who were presumably too busy screaming and dying to call customer support.)
Not content with ignoring the inevitable, Toyota actually canceled a design change in American cars because they didn’t want to tip off investigators. When the truth was revealed, the company got beaned in the head with almost 400 wrongful death lawsuits. Toyota was punished for its severe negligence with a $1.2 billion fine. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not quite six percent of their net income. "
I deal with this sort of thing the only way I can, by not buying Toyotas. I had owned 5 up to the point this happened, but the shenanigans they were pulling with just my AWD van drive convinced me the company was unreliable.
It’s one thing to built something dangerously faulty, and then remedy the situation. It’s another thing to cling to your faulty design like a child clings to a teddy bear and resist making any changes whatsoever UNTIL forced to do so by class action litigation and international law.
Let’s not even talk about millions and millions of faulty airbag detonators, all from the same Japanese maker and having to be replaced in a number of brands and models over multiple model years. The problem with their formulation is not something subtle and easy to miss.
Their disinformation campaign worked because until I read that Cracked article the other day, the way I remembered that story ending is it ended up being Internet hype and mistaken identity and Toyota actually had done nothing wrong. I should have known better.
I use my accelerator to slow down a lot. I modulate my speed more by adjusting acceleration more than breaking. If I intended to start slowing down and pulled my foot off the accelerator and the car didn’t slow down, that’d be very unexpected. Unexpected things during driving increase the risk of accidents.
I’m still not convinced. “Unintended acceleration” was a problem long before it started supposedly showing up in Toyotas specifically, and previously, there were strong patterns in the sorts of drivers it happened to, but no patterns in the cars themselves. The Toyota incidents all show the same pattern in drivers as the previous cases, and the usual reported behavior (speeding up even when slamming on the brakes) is inconsistent with the actual capabilities of the vehicle.
Agreed. The brakes are MUCH stronger than the engine. If you stand on the accelerator and stand on the brakes at the same time…you slow down and come to a stop. A “runaway accelerator” cannot overpower the brakes (and this is doubly true when you pull on the parking brake.)
There have been weird cases where drivers have been trapped in speeding cars. In one case, a police car had to get in front, match speed, kiss bumpers, and slow the car down. Note this, though: the police car’s brakes were good enough to stop the car. Why weren’t the car’s own brakes strong enough? It doesn’t add up.
Ultimately this is an issue of statistics. Most drivers will manage to hit the brake and slow the car down without incident. But some fraction will fail to do that, and the situation escalates, causing even more panic and inability to deal with the situation. Out of millions of cars, it takes only a tiny fraction of panicked drivers to cause hundreds of incidents. Redesigned floor mats won’t have any effect on the ability of the brakes to slow down a car, but they may prevent the situation from happening in the first place.
I’m not a big fan of this “internal memo proves how heartless a company is” style of thinking. The thing is, any vehicle has hundreds of decisions that contribute to its accident/lethality rate, from the design of the crumple zones to the choice of brake pad material to the placement of the instrument cluster. On every one of these, someone ultimately has to make a decision as to whether the performance is good enough. Which is just another way of saying that some people will die, but hopefully not too many.
Occasionally, someone will spot one of these decisions and make a big stink about it… but ultimately they’re all the same thing and they’re trading cost with human lives. They do this because the buyers do the same thing. No one likes to admit that there’s a price on human life even though there obviously is one.
The babble that follows is the half remembered explanation given to me by someone who seemed very much to know what he was talking about: I had a car, it had a problem, [babble] there was a fault with one of the valves into the turbo, allowing (under certain circumstances (dethrottle IIRC)) a too rich mixture to enter, [/babble] causing the car to accelerate unexpectedly.
I am here to report that it was a most unnerving experience when it happened – I can easily believe that some drivers would be immediately flung into a state of abject panic. I seem to remember that it isn’t even obvious that braking might be a good thing.
So unnerving is the experience, that I can believe that unexpected-acceleration due to driver error (wrong pedal/trapping pedal under floormat etc) could be so traumatic to some that their memory/impressions of those moments would be utterly suspect.
I can certainly understand momentary panic when the car accelerates unexpectadly or even if it doesn’t slow down when you lift off, but some of these stories (if I recall correctly) have people driving for minutes and miles further, at some point any reasonable person is going to give the brake pedal a try.
On semi-related note I remember once having parked in a car-park, I reached down to get something and when I looked up through the side window my car was rolling backwards, I stamped on the brake pedal several times but it wasn’t slowing me down! panic
…then I realised the car beside me was pulling out from its space and I wasn’t actually moving at all.
I used to think that too until I dug deeper.
On at least some Toyotas the engine is very strong compared to the brake and you might not be able to stop before impact. If you pump the brakes (which many older drivers were taught to do if they learned to drive before ABS), it is more or less impossible to stop some vehicles.
If you are petite and not athletic (as is true of many of the victims), it would be no surprise if you physically cannot stop the vehicle even without pumping the brakes.
But don’t just take my word for it. Watch a consumer reports driver demonstrate a 2010 Toyota Avalon with hundreds of feet lengthened stopping before pumping, and going up to 80 mph despite maximum pressure on the brake pedal after pumping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZZNR9O3xZM
Brake override software can help if the problem is mechanical (e.g., floor mat entrapment). Toyota is retrofitting that on some, but not all, of their older vehicles.
I can easily accept that a driver might not be able to brake to a halt in time; I was only doubting the idea that the driver couldn’t brake to a halt at all.
That a runaway accelerator might lead to an accident…yeah. I can see that easily. That it leads to the driver being “trapped on the freeway, unable to stop until he runs out of gas,” I’m really dubious.
(I drive a manual transmission, so I have an additional safety feature: I just throw out the clutch.)
If the engine is stuck at wide-open throttle, there’s basically zero manifold vacuum. After you’ve pressed the brakes once or twice, the vacuum reservoir is depleted, and now you’ve got the same braking capability you typically have when the engine is not running, i.e. you’ve got to stand on the brake pedal to develop even modest deceleration. So now you’re fighting the engine’s several hundred horsepower with brakes that have zero power assist.
The cop’s car didn’t have this problem: his engine’s still running, so he’s still got full vacuum assist for his brakes and is able to provide enough braking effort to overcome the engine in the other car.
