Quickly.
How did he get it into drive :rolleyes:, holy hell you do not even need to push down a button to shift!
The guy died because he was retarded and operating a piece of equipment he did not know enough about. I still think it is user error. Funny how no reports of it came out, than suddenly there was one…that many more right after.
I heard about this case and thought, HTF could BOTH the gas and brake pedals be jammed by “ill fitting floor mats”? :dubious:
I mean, this would require the mat to simultaneously be pressing DOWN on the gas pedal and UP on the brake pedal, and with such force that a highly motivated grown man, an experienced driver, in a time period long enough for his passenger to call 911 and detail the situation, couldn’t get either one to function to, literally, save his life.
Hey, my floor mat sometimes shifts around and gets on my nerves, but it has yet to come to life and seize control of the vehicle in such a manner.
Struck me as total and obvious bullshit. A cover your ass excuse.
I have to agree. Toyota had been selling way to many cars in the US market for a long time. I don’t have any specific conspiracy theory but the idea that Toyota made “the car that won’t slow down”, dropping sales across the US significantly, in turn for the greater sales of US cars, is too ripe a fruit not pick.
BTW - over here (Japan) eyes were rolling back into heads further than you’ve ever seen. That’s the reason for the time delay in recall - the fact that they knew it was better PR to do a recall even though they quite obviously believed it wasn’t necessary. When genuine errors in manufacturing occur (See Mitsubishi) there is no beating around the bush - recalls are done immediately and mistakes are owned up to.
Too ripe a fruit not to pick, is what I typed.
Isamu and ChrisBooth12, have you ever read through the NHTSA complaints on vehicle speed/control for Toyota vs the other mfg’s starting back in about 2001? Go read through them and compare the patterns of reported behavior.
Also a few questions:
- Are any electro-mechanical systems made by humans perfect?
- How do you explain the case linked to above in which the dealer’s mechanic was unable to determine the cause? And that replacing various parts did indeed seem to solve the problem for that one car - doesn’t that imply there was either an electrical or mechanical problem?
- How exactly does the fact that a Japanese person formed an opinion without any scientific data cause that opinion to be correct? Seriously, wtf does someone’s eye-rolling have to do with anything?
As I said in my other post, go read the complaints reported to NHTSA over the last decade, there is a common pattern to the Toyota complaints.
dealer techs are frequently nothing more than parts changers. Relying on them for an actual diagnosis is folly.
you know how we tend to have that “America: Fuck Yeah!” attitude? The Japanese do so as well (obviously about Japan, not the US.)
Not entirely. A key thing we are trying to determine is whether it’s human error, if the human is taken out of the equation by getting out of the car and allowing the mechanic to try to trouble shoot the system, doesn’t that kind of eliminate human error (as well as the floor mat?)
Of course, but my point is that it has nothing to do with trying to determine what actually happened, it’s not a fact that is relevant to diagnosing the problem in any way at all.
Acura is a division of Honda, rather than Toyota. The Saylor family was driving a Lexus, which is part of Toyota. They may possibly have had similar shifter configurations, but that particular photo isn’t evidence of it. From a quick Google image search, it looks like the Lexus ES350 does have a ‘maze’ type shifter rather than a linear one.
I’ve driven vehicles with that type of shifter and didn’t encounter any difficulties in shifting. Does a Lexus ES350 even have any type of mechanical system that could prevent a driver from shifting into neutral? I can understand the difficulties in shutting off an unfamiliar car; I’ve never driven a car with pushbutton start and the procedure of holding the button in for several seconds to shut off the engine would be totally unexpected to me. I wouldn’t have expected an experienced driver to have problems shifting into neutral in that car though.
As a separate issue from what caused the acceleration in the first place, it would appear to me that panic and unfamiliarity with the vehicle are what kept Saylor from being able to bring the car under control. Maybe the procedure of shifting into neutral at speed is one that people should practice when learning to drive (under safe conditions, of course)? I remember reading about a case where the police told a driver of an out-of-control car to shift into neutral and he refused at first because he thought it would case the car to crash instantly. Unfortunately, the average driver doesn’t have a great deal of knowledge about how their vehicles work.
That’s interesting data DSeid, but I think it is countered by 2 critical facts:
- Isamu is aware of some Japanese people that figuratively rolled their eyes
- ChrisBooth12 is only aware of 1 of those incidents
Therefore the conclusion must be - human error in all cases.
No, I know of many instances, even a case were Steve Wozy claims he found the input required to reproduce such effects, although I did not follow that story that far. My point is how would replacing parts fix the problem if it is a computer issue?
Bare in mind Human Error caused a multi million dollar lander to crater into mars…In fact I can dig up a news story of an elderly gentlemen who plowed through a farmers market killing many people calming he thought he was pressing the break, his car finally stopped, drive wheels still smoking up until someone was able to take the keys out.
If it is a computer problem should not it cause many many more of these problems to be happening? Face it humans panic, me, you, everyone. I believe it is far more likely that a panicked driver was the cause of the out of control car as opposed to some programmer who works in assembly [language, one of the most proven and bug free] making a mistake on the car computer.
BTW it was severally noted in the German press at the time that by curious coincidence this issue seemed to be confined to the US. So it might have been an artifact of the US civil litigation system
To start, you need to not focus on 1 component and think it’s either that or the human. The acceleration system is just that - a system - including multiple parts mechanical, sensors, electrical, etc. Replacing parts could fix a problem if the interaction of that part with the other parts in the system happened to be causing a problem. Maybe it was the gas pedal in that case - if so then replacing it would probably fix it, right?
Next - if the human steps out of the car and the car continues to have the same problem as confirmed by the Toyota dealer - how can you continue to think that the human is causing that problem?
Yes, humans make errors all the time. They make errors when they are using things and they make errors when they are creating those things to be used.
There is a big difference between saying “SOME acceleration problems were human error” and saying “ALL acceleration problems were human error”.
You can have errors that occur 1 out of every 1 times and you can have errors that occur 1 out of every 10,000,000,000,000 times and you can have every percentage in between those extremes.
All of the cases reported (including the multiple similar incidents that happened to some people), they ALL were due to human error?
If there was only 1 incident then it would be pretty tough to draw any conclusions, but given the thousands of incidents that follow a more similar pattern than acceleration issues reported on other cars, then the logical conclusion is that there is probably something going on that is not just human error.
As an assembly language programmer, I can assure you errors occur in any complex system and are easy to make in assembly language as well as the language they use to program the devices used to control things like automobiles.
If so, then how can the case linked above in which the driver took the car with the problem to the dealer be explained?
Got news for you. A fair perecentage of the mechanics at any shop are just parts changers. Also half of the doctors out there graduated in the bottom half of their med school class. In fact there is a technical term for the guy that graduates dead last in his/her medical school class. They call them Doctor. Also in case you are unaware a good percentage of 1st level tech support people you call don’t know jack shit about computers. so what’s your point?
Now that we have that out of the way let’s talk about probably happened at that dealership when the guy pulled in with a stuck throttle.
Again I don’t work at that Toyota dealership, but based on my experience and how I have trained my people here is what would happen at my dealership. I would be called immediately (I’m a service manager), I would then call both of my team leaders and my shop foreman for all of us to look at that car before we even turned it off. Between the four of us we have about 120 years of automotive experience. We are not parts changers. Pictures would be taken and the factory called in about 30 seconds. I would have the engineers on the phone along with the field tech specialist to find out exactly what they wanted me to do.
Since a case like this is very likely to end up in court, all the i would be dotted, and all the T crossed.
I suspect that something very similar happened at that Toyota dealership.
That seriously sucks ass. I think if I was driving, I would tell my family to bail out while i had it as close to stopped as possible, and get to safety, then I would open my door and try to bail out if i possibly could. Maybe someone could have survived =(
But it is difficult to say that you would definitely do whatever if you have never had the exact same experience …
You mean here?