(un)intended acceleration and toyota

I don't think Toyota has made any info public on the car in the Lexus rental crash, but they settled with the family for $10M. Toyota specifically left the dealer out of those numbers and negotiations, so now the dealer will be going through a similiar settlement and/or lawsuit (a dealership employee was told about the sticking floormat issue by the previous rental/loaner customer, but evidently didn't do anything about it).

There's a few unanswered questions in my mind about this incident, especially why the CHP-trained officer driver got off the freeway at that particular exit going full speed because the exit offramp road intersects the cross-street with a "T" connector. A policeman friend of mine said the first thing they teach you in driving school is to turn the car into the "K" rail in the center of the freeway to slow it down, and this multi-year, multi-trained officer exited the freeway, ran right through a perpendicular intersection at full speed, hit the curb on the other side, went in the air, and landed in a dry riverbed on the other side, and then the car exploded.

I guess you never know what you'll do until it happens, but as full of panic as I might have been, I don't think I would have taken that offramp.

Such a tragedy for everyone involved....

DaveinOlyWA said:

last i heard it was inconclusive because they found nothing wrong mechanically or electrically. but with the damage in the accident wondering if there was anything left to find

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I thought they blamed it on the car mat which was still found in the car to be improperly installed (and the wrong mat for the vehicle).

I'm sorry, gotta speak up here and hijack this thread for a moment regarding Toyota runaway vehicles.
So how does this one incident clear up the issue of the other 5 dead people attributed to the problem.
Even if one guy was a fraud (of which there is no evidence), I was very interested in the way Toyota "handled" the incident. They chose to discredit the man as corporations and politicians do when faced with this kind of problem. I was also very interested in all the information they didn't give us. For example: If Mr. Sikes repeatedly pressed the accelerator and brakes as the data indicated, It sure as hell isn't a floor mat problem. What were the other sensor readings? What was the TPS showing for throttle position? What was the fuel delivery rate when the accelerator was in the closed position? Did the vehicle speed decrease when the accelerator was released or brakes applied? Toyota refused to release the raw data. Naturally they say that the car does not operate like he stated but then that's a normally operating vehicle which these runaway's are not.
Frankly, If I was driving a car and it began to accelerate on it's own I'd be trying the peddles too in an effort to wake up the system. Remember the accelerator peddle is not mechanically connected to the throttle body. Further if you depress and release the brakes, the vacuum booster is emptied and a full throttle engine will not have vacuum so now there is no brake boost and they become hard to activate. In fact a guy tested it on a Camry and it was impossible to slow down a full throttle vehicle if you cycled the brake peddle even once. In the owners manual it states that you should not turn off the engine in emergency situations because a loss of power to the ancillary systems can be very dangerous. So I can understand the confusion some of these drivers have when facing a runaway problem. You don't dare loose steering control when speeding down some road dodging other vehicles trying to figure out a solution.

officials who investigated mr sikes seems to think they have proof that mr sikes intentionally attempted to fraud Toyota.

records show that he had his foot on the accelerator while pumping the brakes to intentionally overheat them.

bowthom said:

Further if you depress and release the brakes, the vacuum booster is emptied and a full throttle engine will not have vacuum so now there is no brake boost and they become hard to activate. In fact a guy tested it on a Camry and it was impossible to slow down a full throttle vehicle if you cycled the brake peddle even once.

Click to expand...

I had forgotten about this fact during the Toyota debacle, but was reminded of it recently when I had to tow my vehicle a couple of miles behind another car. Without the power brakes (engine was inoperable) it was surprisingly hard to stop the car from 35 mph even with the VERY grippy brake pads that I have in there.

I still think that kicking the uncontrolled car into neutral is the best bet...then shutting it off if that doesn't work. YMMV.

Hello,
That isn't what was stated. Toyota said that Mr Sikes stated he was holding the brakes while the data showed he "had cycled the peddles over 200 times". The question of fraud got started after investigating that he had filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and clients of his that had trouble with a house they had bought from him thought it was "shady," interviewed as a character reference. That was the media sensationalizing the story and Toyota trying to discredit the source to minimize the publicity impact. I said at the time that unless Toyota was completely forthright and open with information that it was going to backfire and cost them millions of dollars. I said this at press conference held at a local Toyota dealership after the investigation. Co-incidentally I was there with my daughter who was buying a new Prius. Go figure! I also said something about Toyota should take a lesson from de Havilland in the 50's.

Don

ON EDIT: Yes I agree, put the car in neutral and let the motor blow if it must. Better it than you!

"records show that he had his foot on the accelerator"

The computer can't tell the difference between a peddle that is stuck and one that is being held down and this is in complete disagreement with the data they released saying that he had cycled the peddles over 200 times. You see the discrepancies in the info and the news stories made by non automotive people. All designed to discredit the driver and not the car. I want to see the raw ECU data and make my own analysis because of all the disinformation out there.

Don

I've no other choice than splitting this thread now ...

Hello,
That article is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It takes things said out of context, combines it with info from other articles containing conjecture and quote it as fact. Only has half of the Camry test quoted. The missing half was the run where the brake peddle was cycled once and he could no longer stop the car. It contains misquoted data from Toyota as many articles did. On this basis and having his character maligned, it is stated as fact he is a fraud even though he made no attempt to sue. And, how does this one incident cancel out the many wrecks some with fatalities attributed to this problem over the last few years?
Here's another fact: Toyota hired NASA to look into the problem and as a result the ECU software has been rewritten and now has new routines.
If you look at how the ECO mode interpolates driver input signals then controls the steering, power and braking to increase fuel economy and handling, it easy to see how a software glitch could happen.

That being said, engineers are working tirelessly to eliminate the #1 cause of failures in automobiles, that being us humans. Wrecking yards are filled with cars because of human error. A lesson the insurance companies learned when they offered discounts for anti-skid brakes and pushed manufacturers to make them standard equipment only to find out the accident rate did not go down. Most cars don't get wrecked because the brakes failed to work properly. Those discounts disappeared. It's funny how we don't like the idea of machines taking control away from us so the idea of runaway cars is frightening. However, we accept the risk without question when the vehicle is being driven by a person, flawed & distracted as we all are at times.

Don

i dont now nor have i ever felt comfortable "with what i know" about the Lexus crash.

there are simply too many things that dont make sense to me. a trained driver, the seemingly utter lack of ability to slow the car down even a little (gravity was against him a bit as there were several rolling hills in the area including a descent on the latter half of the road traveled before the crash)

i can t help but feel that there is something else that played a factor in all this. a something that involves the human element that we will never know.

wondering if panic or illness took over the driver. at 45, he is prime time for strokes, heart attacks, etc. (my brother dropped dead from a sudden heart attack at aged 43 with no health issues whatsoever up to that point)

wondering if something else played into it?

all in all, if this creates a situation where a car is made one level safer; that is a good thing

if it creates a situation where it makes it a bit easier to determine exactly what happened; that is a good thing. for one, it stops Toyota from having to pay out millions when it is or is not their fault. (i personally think it is not but then again, i am against litigation for most of these things simply because human negligence imho, plays a part in all this. how much? if we can better understand that role, then maybe there is a silver lining in this tragic event

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/07/unintended-acceleration-in-toyotas-the-ghost-in-the-data/

Found this article by accident. It has some interesting documents embedded for download.

Actually, the 2010 Prius has/had three different "unexpected" acceleration alledged issues:

1. High Speed Runaway
2. Loss of "braking" in a "skid/bump"
3. abrupt acceleration from initial Start/On

This study appears to ignore and seemingly misinterprets the data pointing to the low-speed problem (#3). The writer says that he cannot imagine a cause, so it "must" be operator error.

A firmware "fix" might have "eliminated" #1, seems to have substantially reduced the effect of #2, and ... it is not clear if #3 was treated or not, since it was never publicly admitted (that I saw), that it even exists/existed.

I never experienced #1, experienced #2 once (many others described it), and experienced #3 about a half-dozen times (others also experienced it, but it was described in various ways).

#2 could be re-created easily, but we never found a way to "create" #3, but did find a way to "reset" it when it did happen.

My personal opinion is that #2 was a "feature" of the firmware design, and that #2 is an infrequent (probably startup-timing related) bug in the control firmware.

All is discussed at length in the PriusChat forum.

The attached documents are more interesting than the article. There is still a lot to be desired in the information available, but these docs were more than I'd seen before.

http://images.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/07/100630DOTSlides.pdf
http://images.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/05/NHTSA_Alleged_Toyota_SpeedControl_Deaths_Since2000.xls
http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/complaints/index.cfm
http://images.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/07/100630DOTSlidesCompton.pdf

i never experienced #1 or #3 either and not even sure that #3 was proven to be anything other than driver error.

#2 i have experienced in all 3 Pri's. but then again, have felt it in other cars as well. it just happened to me on my way to work last week. it was very cold and i was turning right in a roundabout and had one wheel slide a bit.

although it felt very dangerous, it was nothing. in the roundabout i probably only had a few feet of room but in retrospect, i probably only slid at most a foot or so. we have manhole covers in the roundabout and i am guessing i slipped the wheel across it.

like i said, dramatic but not really nothing. the other #2 scenario involved momentary loss of traction and braking on an uneven surface. have had that too. now since this happens while braking, the loss of braking makes the car seem to lurch forward when in reality its really nothing more than the feeling you get hitting glare ice unexpectedly.

there was a fix that was implemented to alleviate #2 and i had it installed but was unable to tell a difference. there are a few places in town where i can replicate the issue on a semi regular basis and tried it about 3-4 times in a row both before and after the fix and could not tell a difference.

kinda made me think that nothing was done although i did get this fancy computer generated form detailing the changes

Dave,
You should at least have a different dealer re-load the firmware fix, and try the tests again.

After the "fix", the same thing still happens, but the time duration for a short, single wheel-slip-detection (can be triggered by a bump) is (supposed to be) more like 0.1 (or 0.2?) seconds now, rather than the original (approx.) 1.0-second Regen "dropout".

Of course, if you have a series of bumps or chuckholes all "together", a series of "connected" skid-detections would probably still "become" one long Regen "dropout".

I have experienced #3 a half-dozen times, definitely not operator "error" (no foot or anything else near the go-pedal), ONLY starting up and slowly releasing the brake. Normal operation is car "creep", the abby-normal operation is an "abrupt, powered lunge", which could easily cause parking-space collisions.

I wrote it up and gave copies to my dealer, but without being able to "demonstrate" it, I doubt it went anywhere.