Wow, I didn’t realize so few people took it these days. Everyone I knew took it as a kid (midwest USA), I don’t know a soul who didn’t. Now I live in Ontario, Canada. There are significant incentives for doing so: a four month reduction in the 12-month beginners’ licensing program, and more importantly as far as my parents were concerned back in the day, a significant reduction in insurance premiums when they added me to their cars.
We’re talking, in this particlar case, about a car that had something close to 300 horsepower, with a commensurate amount of torque. If you want to overcome that engine, you need to press very hard on the brakes, even with vacuum assist. Take away the vacuum assist, and even a manly man might not be able to defeat an engine like that.
Yes, there is a vacuum accumulator. It does give you vacuum-assist for a few modest brake applications to stop an unpowered car while you are gingerly backing it down your driveway in neutral. But you might get just one single maximum-brake-effort event out of it before it’s used up. Spend the first ten confusing seconds of the crisis tapping the brakes and thinking “WTF, that’s weird” to yourself, and it’s gone.
He probably meant that he’s glad to have a clutch that gives him a third option if for some reason turning off the ignition and shifting to neutral fail. Unlike the brakes, disengaging a clutch doesn’t work directly against the output of the uncontrolled engine. In fact the clutch won’t wear out or the hydraulic fluid boil, just the opposite of what might happen to the brakes. That and the fact that most* manual transmissions don’t have an unfamiliar mode of operation like these ‘manumatics’ have.
*Not sure if the VW sequential transmission would offer any advantage here. Anyone have expereince with them?
On mine, if you move left into sport mode, then you’re there until you move right again into “regular” drive. But mine is a Scion, which is about as far from a Lexus as you can get, so I can’t say for sure if it’s the same.
I’ve bumped it into sport mode by accident a couple of times, and it’s really obvious what the problem is if you’re at a dead stop and trying to throw it into reverse or park. But I might well get a little flustered if that happened when I was trying to pop it into neutral at 50mph, especially if the engine were already revving on its own. If I wasn’t familiar with the car and didn’t even realize there was such a thing as “sport mode”, yeah - I’d be screwed.
I’ve got a Prius with the crazy proximity sensor key, and honestly love it. It’s a hugely valuable feature to me personally, so not everyone thinks it’s ridiculous. I like not taking my keys out of my backpack!
I also experienced uncontrolled acceleration – twice – in my 1984 Chevy Cavalier with Sears-installed cruise control. Both cases on the expressway, fortunately not in heavy traffic, and both times as soon as I realized it was happening, I put the car in neutral and steered it off to the side of the road, turned it off, popped the hood and unstuck the throttle. After the 2nd time, I went back to sears and demanded they disconnect the cruise control, however 
Now I don’t know if my “keeping cool” was a feature of (a) the cavalier being a dog and not capable of much acceleration at all, let alone the equivalent of a lexus e350, or (b) i was about 20 when this happened and had little sense of my own mortality, or both. But I’m glad it worked out ok
I must admit I didn’t know about the “hold the start button for 3 seconds to kill the engine” trick on my Prius until a few weeks ago. I told my wife about this, in case she ever had this happen in my car and she said “what, if it’s accelerating through traffic i’m going to manage to hold down some stupid button for 3 seconds”? and I see her point. But she’d also throw it into neutral, I’m sure, also being the product of growing up in Detroit where everyone knows at least something about cars (or so it seems).
And I’m not afraid of drive-by-wire. Nor of Toyota’s engineering. I used to work at Ford, and own a Toyota (my Prius), a Lexus (wife’s), and a BMW (for fun). I am completely confident that there is either not much of a real problem, or that TOY will get it fixed if there really is one. IMO their engineering is fantastic, although certainly, nothing’s perfect and it’s very possible (likely?) that some sort of fix is required.
Agree with upthread folks that reading your manual is important. I missed the “hold 3s to turn off” thing, but I go through mine, at least for anything I don’t completely know how it works. Guiding a giant hunk of speeding metal around our cities requires some responsibility and care, and that includes understanding how your hunk works…
Dag Otto gets it in one - there’s no way to get confused about which mode I’m in with my standard transmission. There’s never any confusion about what’s Neutral and what isn’t, or how to get to it.
Yeah, IMO it’s a dumb design, but it’s turning up in more vehicles. Even the tiny little “Smart” has one - when they first started appearing, I took one for a test drive, and was surprised to notice the “+”/"-" on the shifter.
If it really does become a common arrangement, the risk will eventually reced as the average driver becomes familiar with them, of course, but I still think it was a gimmick that didn’t need to be proliferated (Porsche/Audi has had the “tiptronic” for years, but it was something the more mainstream makers didn’t have any need to copy).
If the up/down feature is desired, it should probably be provided as a separate “paddle shifting” mechanism.
Hm. Data point: some PDF on the National Traffic Safety Administration Site says:
You’d think it would be wise to make it just a plain old mandatory requirement for the licensing process of new drivers, not just kids. That way there would be minimum standards for what people are learning before they are allowed to drive a few tons of steel at 60 mph.
Given a car that you can only upshift or downshift (because the design of the shifter is sort of screwed up, neutral isn’t easy to get to), then the best thing to do in this situation is to go into 1st gear to get the car as slow as possible, and then, with the car redlined in first gear, hit the brakes and immediatley shift into overdrive to reduced the advantage of gearing the engine has over the brakes.
Good luck figuring that out in a crisis. It took me a while and I’m just sitting at a desk.
And even that might not work because of another design issue: The transmission may not go into first even if you shift into first due to the programming of the electronic controls, you may only get into one or two gears lower than high gear.
This is yet one more reason to acquire the habit of shifting into neutral while waiting at stoplights…not that most will ever bother.
ETA: Turning off the ignition with a standard transmission does NOT cause loss of power brakes or power steering unless/until the clutch is depressed. If the throttle is wide open, then engine braking will be at a minimum, and there is little reason to press the clutch in.
Actually, now that I think about it, it would pretty much have to stay in “S” to allow you the control you want in a manumatic. Otherwise, if it popped back into “D”, it would still shift for you.
Pretty sure the system won’t allow you to try to shift down to 1st in that situation…If you’re redlined in fourth, it’s not going to let you shift to third.
Even on a old-fashioned manual car, it’s pretty damned difficult to try to downshift to a gear it’s overrevved on.
And, presumably, brakes of an appropriate capacity.
I don’t believe the vacuum assist affects the maximum braking effort - it simply affects the pedal force necessary to generate that. And while the pedal force increases significantly, it remains within the capability of almost any driver to produce that force.
Faced with uncontrolled acceleration, most folks are going to do more than tap their brakes, and in a lot less than 10 seconds.
I don’t remember learning it in my driver’s ed class. The quality of my driver’s ed class left something to be desired, though. I mostly remember writing down definitions of various words, and a few sessions in the driving simulator. IIRC, we focused heavily on stuff you’d need to know to pass the driving test. The driving test is more oriented toward everyday driving than emergencies.
From what I’ve heard, high schools are moving away from offering driver’s ed these days, because of budget cuts and more emphasis on reading and math.
I don’t know if it would help to change the driving test or driver’s ed standards. The problem really is that, with the reliability of modern cars, this is a once or maybe twice in a lifetime event for most people. More reliable cars are a good thing, of course, but even this is not immune to the law of unintended consequences.
The problem with that is that an accredited driver education course is not free. You’re adding an extra barrier to the licensing process for poor people. Making it harder for them to get a driver’s license is not going to help them get out of poverty, since not having one limits their employability so much. It would be a de facto regressive tax. At least the way it is now, the poor have the option of waiting until they are 18 to get a license.
Having schools offer driver ed might be a good partial solution to that. But that means we need more money for schools, for teacher salaries, equipment, insurance, etc. And it doesn’t solve the problem for poor people who are not in school. Not everybody gets their driver’s license in high school.
car manufacturers are hugely to blame for a lot of this nonsense, shifters that dont obey basic safety designs being one of them, also foot activated emergency brakes on the floor instead of on the console. the foot pedal parking brake is crap if your brakes ever fail because its either difficult with the hand release kind, or impossible with the foot release kind to control your braking.
some features on cars are there for safety, and in an emergency is when you need them most. I dont know what big brain in the auto industry thought this kind of nonsense was a good idea but the current toyota problems are really shining a light on the issue.
Again, knowing in theory what you should do and having the presence of mind to do so while accelerating through traffic and trying not to smash into things are two different universes.
Both adrenalin and shock affect people dramatically and in unpredictable ways.
http: //www.iol.co.za/index.php?fsetid=1&click_id=126&art_id=iol1265268107738K515]This picture, apparently real according to the accompanying article, will knock your socks off if you haven’t already seen it.
What we need to realize is that in many of the operations of a car, from shifting, starting and even unlocking/opening the doors, we are merely asking the equipment to perform a task, or are giving it permission to perform a task. We are not effectively directing any actual mechanism, as we would if we rolled up a window manually.
I know this has been touched on, but it needs to be rammed home.
You select “3” on an auto-stick, and you’ve granted permission to the engine to consider 3rd when shifting. You request that the car start with buttons, key fobs, etc. We ask for the throttle servo and position sensors to move.
I sure as hell hope it’s a lot rarer than that. Otherwise, if this thread is any indication, we should have a lot more dead or severely injured people on the roads.
But I do agree that drivers’ ed should be better taught, or something like this should be on the written exam. No matter how improbable the situation, knowing how (at least the most obvious way) to disengage the engine when you’re operating a 4000-lb hurtling block of steel is something that should be better known.
I do understand and I did say that I can see panic really setting in given the Lexus’ design on that shift lever and easy confusion between “N” and “+.” However, I also think drivers should be better trained to instinctively shift into neutral when they have a runaway engine situation. Perhaps I’m just paranoid and I’ve just played out the scenario too much in my mind while driving that it’s instinctive should it occur. Just like the scenario of what to do if my brakes ever fail.
People always say this so you save wear and tear on the brakes. This is a bad idea. Brakes are designed to be replaceable. If you do this, you end up causing more wear and tear on the transmission itself. It’s a net loss.