Was the Prius acceleration real or not?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Story here. Apparently, investigators cannot duplicate the runaway Prius’ acceleration. And yet, there are clear signs that the guy in the car really was standing on the breaks trying to stop the thing.

A couple of days ago, there was a flourish of news articles digging up dirt about this guy, like how he’s bankrupt, and how he collected insurance for something that had been stolen, and generally smearing him. Now, people are starting to accuse him of hoaxing the incident, without any proof. (The engineer in me says that failure to duplicate the acceleration probably isn’t significant. If the problem is in the computer module, the conditions that cause the acceleration might be so flukey that it’ll take forever to figure out why it happens.)

I’m wondering if Toyota is trying to weasel out of taking responisiblity for their vehicle by organizing a campaign to blame the victim. What do you think?

2

There was an article on Slashdot noting that Steve Wozniak (megamillionaire founder of Apple) had managed to reliably induce a very similar problem on a track.

3

You know, if Wozniak has isolated the conditions under which the acceleration occurs, it might be advisable for him to… you know… share them. It might, uh, help.

4

I wish I knew. My daughter and son-in-law just bought a used Toyota (2007 Corrola). The NY Times had an op-ed piece that claimed that these sudden acceleration problems were caused by drivers inadvertently stepping on the accelerator, thinking they hitting the brake. When they accelerated instead, they hit it harder and accelerated faster. He was almost–but not quite–convincing. Even if he is right, that suggests poor design.

Here is why it is semi-plausible. In about 55 years of driving, I have had just one accident. Coming around a blind corner in a very tight parking lot, I came on a woman driving her SUV, talking on her cell phone, in my lane. I tried to hit the brake, but hit the gas instead. I was going only about 2 MPH, but I still hit her. I realized my error immediately and braked, but it was too late. But the brake and accelerator pedals have (or should have) entirely different feels, with brakes getting harder to push the further you go.

5

The day that story hit the news, I posted a link on my facebook page and called him, “Balloon Boy II”

I think the whole thing is a hoax. Not sure if he’s looking for money, publicity, or a shot on a reality show.

6

But was he also standing on the accelerator?

7

The guy can’t get his story straight, some of his claims are demonstrably untrue, and he is in financial distress.

8

He did. One set anyway. He was going above the road speed limit (legal on a track) and made small incremental changes to the speed. This induced the problem. It’s clearly not exactly the same problem as that in the OP, but is equally clearly related.

9

The statistics on accidental acceleration show a strong correlation with driver age. A mechanical error would have a flat distribution (computers don’t know the age of the driver).

Previous “accidental acceleration” issues were all determined to be based on driver error, and the pattern for the Toyota is the same as it has been for cars in the past.

10

The vastly publicized story of sudden uncontrollable acceleration is probably a hoax. The evidence is shifting in that direction. Are all such stories hoaxes? Almost certainly not. Are a majority of them, >50%, cases of operator error? Probably.

That having been said, the increasing computerization of cars will lead to something like this being real eventually, and who is to say that day isn’t today? It isn’t like Toyota is offering up the code they embed in the throttle control and braking systems for independent testing.

Enjoy,
Steven

11

Well, he was riding the brakes because the cop could see the brake lights on and smell burning brakes, but we can’t really say how hard he was applying them or if he was applying power at the same time.

He also refused to follow instructions from the 911 dispatcher to put the car in neutral. The cop later told him the same thing over the bullhorn while the chase was going on. The driver later said he thought the car would ‘flip’ if he put it in neutral. He just blew off the dispatcher by saying something like “well, I’m trying to control the car right now” as if it was no time to be switching gears.

This particular incident sounds fishy to me.

12

This sorta reminds me of the hypodermic needles in Pepsi cans @1990. Pretty soon, there were reports of hypodermics in cans all across the country.

13

This is all consistent with there being a less frequent mechanical/electronic error with a flat distribution and cases of driver error that skew the distribution to correlate with driver age.

14

Considering that there have only been a couple of dozen reports of unintended acceleration in Priuses, with each one representing at least a few million vehicle miles, it will probably take a really, really long time to induce the issue in a test vehicle.

In any case, assuming that the problem exists, it’s certain that a large chunk of the reports are falsified or that the problem was caused by a problem not specific to Toyota (driver error, extreme heat/cold, lack of lubrication*, whatever). So we might be talking about an issue which has occurred in, say, five vehicles, and in that case each actual incident might require a billion test miles to induce.

This. Assuming 50% of the incidents are actually driver error, which is a probable minimum regardless of whether the problem is real or not, obviously that’s going to factor into the statistic.

In any case, 24 incidents is hardly a statistically significant number - and you would expect the curve to trend downward from the teens to about the 30-40 range, and upward from there.

Instead, it trends sharply upward from the twentysomethings, and though my generation is unquestionably better than any which came before it we aren’t very good drivers, and we’re certainly not any less prone to accidental pedallage than 30-40 year olds.

*I had this problem with a 1993 Accord once - I released the throttle pedal and the throttle didn’t seem to get the message. I was just a few hundred feet from home, so I popped it in neutral and coasted the rest of the way (including a left turn across oncoming traffic, which was way [del]fun[/del] terrifying).

When I got it home I popped open the hood and pressed the butterfly flap thingy on the throttle cable, and it popped loose and idled normally. Couple squirts of WD-40 and the problem was fixed.

15

Determined by whom? Long before the recall there was an article in one of the weeklies up hear talking about a problem with the Prius. It was Toyota that blamed the driver.

As to the OP, I think it was a hoax or publicity stunt. Why wouldn’t you just turn off the car and coast to a stop?

16

The latest from Toyota.

17

I recently rented a Ford Ranger. I’m used to driving Toyotas and air cooled VWs. Quite often, when I stepped on the brake, I pressed on the accelerator at the same time. I could hear the engine racing at just moved my foot further to the left.

On the other hand, when driving my friend’s newer Toyota, I had a hard time figuring out his automatic transmission (left is 4WD/gear and right is automatic, i think), so I can empathize with the confusion that someone might have. Nevertheless, I certainly hope that I would have had the sense to jam the damn thing into neutral. Also, the transmission in the Lexus has the automatic stick on the left, and pushing it up shifts the transmission rather than going into neutral, which adds to the confusion at 100mph.

Yeah, I know we are talking about Priuses, (Prii???), but I thought I’d mention my experience.

18

Here is that article. Dated 4/22/2009

19

Two points:

  1. This is only a histogram for age versus incidents, not age versus incidents/miles driven or incidents/vehicles driven by people in that demographic, etc.

  2. Even is there is an age-dependent (i.e. operator dependent) contribution to some or even most unwanted acceleration problems, that does not preclude a flat, “basal,” rate of mechanical failure induced episodes of unwanted acceleration

I’m not saying for certain that the Toyotas really do have such a problem, but computers are complex things. Its not impossible that electronic devices can fail in an unreliable and difficult to reproduce manner.

20

He did. The linked article says he reported it to Toyota and the NHTSA but hasn’t heard from them. There’s a link in the comments to his description, assuming this is really Woz. It’s a problem with the cruise control at just over 80 mph (which is legal only in a few areas of Texas). But braking does disengage the cruise control and allow deceleration, so it appears to be unrelated to all the other incidents. This, of course, doesn’t prove those are due to driver error. But frankly, that’s my opinion.

On the distribution by age, that’s an awfully small number of cases to draw conclusions from. Isn’t the 95% confidence interval be huge?

What really bothers me about the issue is that fatal car accidents by other causes are still much, much more likely. It looks like the exceptional heat non-union Toyota is getting for a small number of incidents is punishment on behalf of the unions of government-controlled GM.