Automotive → Re: I regret just buying a new car

There have been enough instances of accidents (sometimes highly fatal ones) caused by unintended acceleration that what I said seems to be a very reasonable thing to do here; if the brake is engaged (at least past a certain point) then kill the gas pedal input. This is already much the same way that the cruise controls works; if you touch the brakes then the cruise control automatically disengages, although the gas pedal still stays active. Brake drying aside, performance driving aside (maybe you have a override switch to allow these functions), if I'm hitting the brakes then there doesn't seem to be any sane reason why I would want to have the accelerator active at the same time.

It is precisely the types of accidents that I refer to here that have given drive-by-wire systems a bad name; these were called into question again a year or two ago after a series of bad accidents and other incidents. In the incident that I referred to, I had to pull over and experiment for a couple of minutes before I figured out what was going on. The pedal configuration was such that, given the wide-soled athletic shoes I was wearing at the time, it was possible to put my foot on the right side of the brake pedal and have it accidentally catch and engage the accelerator if I pushed down past a certain point. I didn't know this at the time it happened; all I knew was that I was pushing on the brake pedal but the engine was revving and the vehicle wasn't stopping. If I had pushed down really hard (which is probably what most people would have done here instead of putting it in Neutral), I don't know if the engine would have died or if the vehicle would have slammed into the car ahead of me.

in a modern car the brakes can always over-power the engine unless they have been abused.

I had the same thing happen in my luxury Nissan, the Infinity FX35. Big feet and close pedals and a new vehicle added up to a harrowing experience at my first stoplight. Now I'm used to moving bigfoot (size 13 Wide) a bit to the left on the brake side. And I'm a one footer.

Apparently not - and this certainly wasn't happening in my case. The car wasn't accelerating but it wasn't slowing down, either.

Here's one of the worst accidents that I recall reading about. The driver was in a loaner car from the dealer, and there was talk of this maybe being a floor mat problem, but I don't recall what they decided in the end. This guy was an off-duty CHP officer, BTW, so it's not like he didn't know what to do here or how to handle a vehicle driving at high speeds. They said his lack of familiarity with the vehicle's unusual shifter arrangement probably contributed to the crash.

»www.dailymail.co.uk/news ··· ash.html

»www.10news.com/news/4-ki ··· entified

Unintended accel has zero to do with this. There are very few true cases of unintended accel , very, very few. The pedals are working as intended. Please do not allow the dumbing down of driving even more.

I would disagree the cop could have done many things to prevent the accident including the #1 thing, turn off the car. There are also questions about the cause - it looks like the floor mats had far more to do with the issue than anything else.

in the case of the lexus hybrid the rental place put a floormat on a floormat which ended up obstructing the pedal.

test drove a newer car and i did notice the pedal was extremely light in comparison to cable throttle, so it would be very easy to not realize you have pushed the pedal in, and if your used to a specific amount of pedal feedback and you span across the brake/gas you would be very unlikely to notice that the accelerator is activated as well.

the brakes not working while accelerator is active is still something that doesn't make sense to me, unless there is something intervening in the braking system reducing the force applied to the piston.

as i said, i would want to see the status of the EBFD and ABS during a dual pedal application in a car that does not have brake over-ride.

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test drove a newer car and i did notice the pedal was extremely light in comparison to cable throttle, so it would be very easy to not realize you have pushed the pedal in, and if your used to a specific amount of pedal feedback and you span across the brake/gas you would be very unlikely to notice that the accelerator is activated as well.

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We test drove a Toyota van several years ago before we bought out Honda. One thing I did not like was the ease of the accelerator. My first comment to my wife was that is was easy to push down - I knew that within a few seconds. All it takes is paying attention to the feel of your feet and more importantly, what the car is doing per input. The Toyota was probably dbw and my current 2001 is dbw but the Toyota was night and day easier than my car and far easier than the Honda which I think is dbw.

I dislike how much of driving for most people is get in and drive without any iota of thought as to how things are. How the pedals are placed and how easy it is to activate or inactivate things. This, imho, leads to far more accidents than anything else and going further down that path to me - is not good.

Also funny is that by negating the accelerator with the brake - I lose some ability to start a manual transmission on steep hills or in slippier conditions when I release the clutch, have the break on and use my heel (or toe) to start pressing down the accel - just before releasing the brake.

Personally I would prefer a pure mechanical link for the accelerator than dbw but I don't want driving dumbed down even more.

I prefer the feedback of a cable throttle over a dbw system, but i can see as we start moving further away from ICE motors that detachment is going to happen regardless.

I never found it as a problem, but could potentially see it as a problem for people that are not exactly the best drivers to begin with.

I also like a mechanical connection to my throttle. Chalk it up to my resistance to change. But throttle by wire has some advantages. I'm sure there are cars that do this too, but I follow the motorcycle world more, so I'll use that example.

BMW, Ducati, and many others are using throttle by wire. They now have various computer programs, selected at the touch of a button, for different riding situations. In sport/race mode you might have 100% power, very tight throttle response, and very limited traction control and ABS. Switch to street mode and you may have 100% power, but a slightly laid back throttle response for a smoother ride on and off the throttle, and more response from driving aids like ABS and traction control. Switch to rain mode and you might get a 50% reduction in power, a slower throttle response, and high levels of traction and braking aids. All to keep better traction in wet conditions.

Now whether a guy really needs these features is for everyone to debate. They can help. When riding my old Suzuki with its light switch power band (on or off, little warning), you need to be very mindful when riding in less than ideal conditions. But in the end, these type of systems would never work well with a mechanical cable throttle. Or at the least it would require some kind of intervention from addition components like an actuator or something.

Most power brake systems are vacuum-based. This vacuum is highest when the throttle is fully closed, so if the throttle is open then you may get reduced braking ability. In a worst-case scenario you'd get basically zero power assist. Plus if you're fighting the accelerator then the brakes will quickly start to overheat and fade, and may even catch on fire. And if there is any moisture in the system (which might be true of the brake fluid hasn't been changed in a while), then that may flash to steam and all of a sudden when you are pressing the brake pedal all you are doing is compressing that steam, and not really activating the brakes at all. So, yeah, there a quite a few things which could go wrong here.

I drove a large Saturn rental car once which had various performance modes like that. I played with them for about five or ten minutes one day before I get tired of them and went back to normal mode.

I'm not disregarding DBW systems, I'm just saying there should be some sort of user input on their functionality, throttle smoothing is great for saving fuel for people that might not be that good at driving, but for someone that has been driving for a long time and a doing more than just commuting to and from work might not appreciate the ability of the ECU to second guess them.

there are some cars that come with different settings like you mentioned, but they are mostly higher end, only option I would need would be on and off for each feature(not a huge fan of ABS, TCS, or non 1:1 throttle).

Define "unintended accel" for me, then. To me it's any time the vehicle is accelerating when you don't intend for it to, regardless of the physical cause. And in any situation like that, your first response will be to hit the brakes, so it seems extremely sensible to then automatically kill the gas pedal input if you can. I find the fact that anyone here is arguing against this point to be simply astonishing, unless they have a good reason to back that up (manual transmissions, for example). "Stupid car tricks" just don't cut it here.

I've run into the floor mat problem at least three times now in three different vehicles myself, and this was in fact the very first thing I checked for when I found a safe place to pull over. These were all with OEM mats, BTW, and before the days when these were routinely secured to the floorboard. I also had an old clunker once where the cable linkage liked to stick on occasion, and now this latest incident caused by something completely different. Any one of these incidents could have led to tragedy had I not been lucky.

And if my wife or daughter had been driving instead, then tragedy might have been exactly what happened here, because they probably wouldn't have known what to do or reacted quickly enough if they did. In fact, my wife told me to "quit goofing off" when I threw the car in Neutral (but the look I gave her in return shut up her right away), and it took her a second or two and some extended explaining on my part for her to even understand why I'd done it.

If you disagree that there's much the cop could have done here then you must surely agree that killing the gas pedal would have been a most sensible thing to do.

True intended accel is not hitting anything and the car accelerates. The CAR accels by itself - not via user input. Hitting the accel thinking it was the brake is NOT unintended accel - it is carelessness. The VAST majority is people somehow (I have yet to figure out how) get confused and hit the wrong pedal. Not a car problem, a driver issue pure and simple.

People need to learn how to really drive instead getting in turning a key and taking off without any clue or knowledge of the mechanics of driving. This is why the Tire Rack Street Survival schools are the best thing anyone can do for their teens or themselves.

I have had so many cars, oem, on-oem floor mats and I know of not one persona I personally know, who have had many cars. and none have issues with floor mats - none. vast majority of my cars do have not fastened the floor mats (the last 2 cars have them attached).

As for not believing this argument - I would rather people know how to drive, pay attention, know how the car works, and understand how things work than just -0 get in, turn key, push pedal and if anything bad happens - "its not my fault it must be the car because I don't understand how thing work."

As for the cop - him turning the car off (or taking it out of gear) makes the most sense - period.

Yeah, but as the voice of experience here I don't buy the whole "hit the wrong pedal" thing. In at least one of the floor mat incidents that I ran into, I was pushing down on the brake pedal, the brake pedal was pushing down on the floor mat, and the floor mat was catching on the gas pedal and pushing down on it, too. In another incident I didn't have my foot on any pedal at the time; I was actually trying to coast for a few seconds, but the car kept accelerating because the mat was caught on the gas pedal. And for the latest incident, the two pedals were far enough apart and at different enough heights that it was very easy for me to know which pedal I was pushing (the brake). But if I had my foot positioned just so, on the right side of that brake pedal, and if I pushed it down far enough, the edge of my shoe would catch the edge of the gas pedal, which having little or no resistance just went along for the ride. It took me a few minutes to figure this out, but once I did it was easy enough to reproduce the problem.

And another thing which I just remembered: on one of my current vehicles the cruise control can sometimes go nuts. What will happen is that I will be cruising along and I'll want to speed up a little, so I bump the cruise control up a notch. Only nothing happens so I try this again. Only still nothing happens so I try again. And then I try it again a third time, maybe more. And just about the time that I'm asking myself "WTF is wrong with this thing?", the engine computer will kick in and basically just floor the gas pedal, making me have to quickly hit the brakes before she runs out of control. This has happened to me at least two or three times now - often enough to be scary but not often enough for me to remember that it may happen. I can't really recreate the problem at will, either, even though I've tried.

BTW, on the cop thing, I think they said it would have been dangerous for him to kill the engine because he would have lost the power steering and brakes, and that he couldn't really shift into Neutral either because the vehicle had an unusual shifter arrangement which he was unfamiliar with. But I don't remember all the details, so feel free to research the matter yourself. I don't believe that going through a busy intersection (and crashing and burning and dying) was his first choice in the matter, though, so if he'd thought he had any other option available to him then he probably would have taken that, don't you think?

i had to disconnect the cruise control linkage on the sunfire, it would for no apparent reason activate and try to accelerate to an unknown velocity regardless of what i wanted it to do, freaks you out the first time, second time you get pissed off at whoever re-connected the POS.

That's all a load of stinking bullshit.

Mass hysteria is a well known phenomena. A few reports fall into fertile ground and suddenly there are copycats, scam artists smelling easy money and also just plain weird people who convince themselves as well as others.

I felt sorry for Toyota, I think they went through the same thing as Audi did in the 80s and had to tread a fine line between fighting it, and not appearing arrogant or uncaring.

i feel sorry for these families
»www.cbsnews.com/8301-504 ··· 083.html

it was a 1996, which uses an entirely mechanical system. i know lawyers are supposed to represent their clients, but this is a perfect example of what is wrong with the legal system.

Perhaps you should read up on the matter before making a statement like that. Also, now that I think about it, I believe it was stated that on that particular vehicle there was a pushbutton ignition that wouldn't shut off with the vehicle in Drive unless you held the button down for several seconds. So he may very well have tried to kill the engine but couldn't. I remember reading a discussion by several Lexus owners where they talked about what might have happened here, and they were in general agreement that if he wasn't familiar with the vehicle (which he wasn't, since it was a loaner car) then he could have easily been in a situation which he didn't know how to get out of.

On the Kia that I was driving, the shifter is actually almost part of the central dash - not on the steering column and not between the seats like on my other cars. If it hadn't been for the fact that I had been absentmindedly playing with that shifter earlier in the day, then more than likely I would have automatically reached between the seats to grab it - only that's not where it actually is on that car. I would have lost precious seconds by doing this. As it was, once I put it in Neutral I automatically reached between the seats to put on the parking brake, since that's where the parking brake lever is on all my other cars, but on the Kia instead there's a foot brake near the driver's left foot. So it took me a couple of seconds to get the parking brake engaged. Luckily I was rolling up to stoplight when all this happened, so there was no real disruption of traffic here.

As I recall there was only one situation which was shown to be a copycat, where the guy intentionally two-footed the brakes and the accelerator for an extended period of time and then tried to claim a malfunction. I forget what evidence they had to back this up, but it must have been pretty substantial, and by that point in time they were looking out for this kind of thing anyway.

I remember that guy as well but you only hear about the people who blow it spectacularly, not about the many who tried to join a class action suit or got someone to take a case, then dropped out when the going got tough (or are still fighting).

There is still a class action thing going on and some judge or other has ruled in favor of a group, pushing Toyota to appeal the decision.

Accidents happen all the time when someone stamps on the accelerator instead of the brake and crashes in a carpark or something, in all cars, old and new. Everyone would like it to be a product liability issue, not just user error.

BTW I'm not reflexively for personal responsibility, macdonalds got sued for knowingly selling super-heated coffee for years despite hundreds of accidents, and the junk food industry went into overdrive trying to smear the victim. For that kind of corporate psychopathy take em to the cleaners! I just never thought this Toyota floor mat thing is in the same league, it is just the Audi history, recycled.

I've probably been a party to at least a dozen class action suits by now, none of which I even knew about until I got a letter from some lawyer, and I didn't "join" any of them, because your choice isn't usually to join here at all but rather to "opt-out". If you do nothing then somewhere down the line you might get some token payment from it (a few dollars, maybe), or some semi-useless coupon. Or if there is real money involved you will be sent a letter pointing you to a web site where you have to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to claim that money, because the real point of these is not to compensate the "victims" at all but rather to enrich all the lawyers involved.

Have you paid any attention to the pedals on a modern car lately? It might be true that you could confuse things on an older car, but on that Kia I was in the gas pedal was on the right and small and kinda of buried deep down in the floorboard, while the brake pedal was much larger and much higher and dead center and kind of "in our face" in comparison - yet I still managed to be able to accidentally activate the gas pedal under the right circumstances. Out in the real world, given current pedal configurations, it would be far more likely that you would accidentally hit the brakes instead of the gas, and that is no doubt by design.

And another thing that I've run into: on a cold engine the idle rate is pretty high (1500 RPM or better on one of my vehicles), and on modern cars this is controlled by some kind of actuator, which is supposed to drop the idle down a bit when you put it in gear. If that actuator sticks or otherwise misbehaves for some reason and the idle is just too high or this drop doesn't occur, then when you put it in gear the effect can be the same as having pushed the gas pedal, so if you're foot isn't pushing down the brake far enough the vehicle can take off on you.

Another problem I've run into is a broken cruise control actuator bracket, which caused the cable to shift in such a way as to create a high-idle problem such as described above. There was actually a recall for this just not for my model year, so when I tried to talk the dealer about this they didn't want to hear it. Since correcting the problem is rather expensive, I just ended up rigging my own fix and that has worked quite nicely now for several years.

So there are several things which can and do go wrong here, but for some reason everybody's first instinct is to blame the driver. In most cases I suspect that the only real "driver" issue here is not that they caused the problem in the first place, but rather that weren't able to respond to it in a timely and effective manner.

I understand your point however it is one thing for a driver to have been helped into making a mistake by poor ergonomics and another for a company to have its sales crushed and people demanding massive recalls (to fix what?) and huge payouts on the grounds the cars can drive their owners into a wall.

in my city a mum killed some kid at a corner, the court found her not guilty of anything because the car had a blind spot she was unaware of. Nobody suggests a class action suit over the flaw though.

cars have mechanical issues, they may not be maintained correctly, they may have sub optimal pedals or high idling, etc, but at least as described in the media the recent Toyota thing was a beat up. Excepting a floor mat change in one model what has Toyota done? nothing: the cars are the same today as they were when on the evening news.

Actually, IIRC Toyota's actions at the time were largely voluntary, after somebody in government publicly rattled their cage. And it's a good thing they reacted as quickly as they did, too, because people were still keenly aware of some of the BS antics that they had pulled in the late 1990s, which had gone a very long way in tarnishing their brand image and destroying any trust that their customers had in them, me included. So nobody was willing to just give them the benefit of the doubt here.

I think they ended up redoing something related to the floor mats, and then just a bit later started an investigation into the actual design of the gas pedal system, but I don't recall what came of that. I do know that some university professor claimed to have found an actual defect here, but when Toyota looked into it they said that what he found wouldn't happen unless someone tampered with the system, which is basically what he'd done. Left unsaid was the possibility (at least to my mind) that some latent defect was sitting out there (perhaps an intermittent short or something related to wear and tear) that could kick in at some point and recreate the conditions that the professor had created himself. Bad ground connections on cars are notorious for causing weird electrical situations like that.

And you have absolutely no idea whether or not Toyota has actually done "nothing" here. They've only done a couple of thing publicly, sure, but they may have also done any number of things quietly in the background, including making design changes in later model years or even changing some of the software programming in current models. They wouldn't necessarily make all of this public (especially if they were worried about potential liability issues), nor are they necessarily required to, AFAIK.

they didn't do anything because they didn't recall/replace anything.

the vast majority of their cars are used not showroom new and the sudden acceleration issue vanished as fast as it burst on the scene. Same cars then, same cars now.

O RLY? I guess Wikipedia just made all this stuff up then, concerning multiple recalls related to the problem. I paid attention to all of this at the time because I am a Toyota owner myself, even though my vehicle is too old to have been affected by any of these recalls.

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20 ··· _recalls

And I guess my gas pedal "kill" idea wasn't such a bad one after all. Hopefully they have incorporated something like this in all of their vehicles by now. To me this is such an obvious safety enhancement that it should have just become standard on any vehicle which could handle it ages ago, perhaps with an override option for those drivers who didn't like it.

"In addition, as a separate measure independent of the vehicle-based remedy, Toyota will install a brake override system onto the involved Camry, Avalon, and Lexus ES 350, IS350 and IS 250 models as an extra measure of confidence. This system cuts engine power in case of simultaneous application of both the accelerator and brake pedals."

Edit: Never mind: it looks like they did.

»usnews.rankingsandreview ··· ehicles/

they were basically forced to do a recall by the NHTSA when they didn't fully understand the problem, which is why the "fixes" were kinda stupid.

the spring spacer "fix" doesn't actually fix anything, it just adjusts the preload on the spring giving it more resistance to compression, realistically it doesn't really do anything other then make the pedal return slightly faster and the pedal slightly stiffer during travel, overall no actual functionality change.

IF, and i mean big IF, there wasn't so many people trying to make money off of this, you would have seen an actual investigation into this which would have basically shown the 2 main things that Toyota released. which was pedal misapplication, and floor mat obstruction.

also, someone mentioned Audi, yea they went through this shit in the 80's, except then, people weren't willing to potentially injure themselves or others to make a little cash to the extent that you see now. seriously though, the bandwagon jumping was kinda scary and honestly the average stats for car accidents had to have jumped pretty hard in the following weeks of the news report.

Apparently Toyota actually initiated these recalls, and they no doubt HAD to react quickly in order to avoid massive fallout from this (people were being told to just park their cars and not drive them, and remember that Toyota had already run into severe brand-tarnishing issues in the late 90s and early 00s), and what they chose to do first here may have just been more-or-less shots in the dark. But maybe that gas pedal really did need that adjustment, and maybe those floor mats really did have a problem, and maybe that braking software really did need tweaking.

And I can pretty much guarantee you that whether those particular changes really helped or not, they took their time in carefully reviewing everything a bit later, and maybe even made further changes that we aren't publicly aware of. (BTW, I used to work in the automotive industry, and on any given day I might be surrounded by former GM execs while in the office or by former dealership service guys while out in the field, and those folks told an awful lot of stories about what really went on behind the scenes.)

1. The US Government got NASA to evaluate the drive by wire design. NASA cleared it. »www.nhtsa.gov/UA
2. That 'simulation' by the 'professor' is also a total load of bunk. The same 'simulation' can be done to nearly every vehicle on the road today. »www.autoblog.com/2010/03 ··· stratio/

As it stands, at this time, I think most people understand the possibility (at least in the minds of many) that those who go around trying to spread this kind of rubbish are latent shills for something who are trying to recreate the conditions that are notorious for causing lawsuit feeding frenzy situations like that.