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How Real are the Defects in Toyota's Cars?
- recurser 17y agoHave there been many cases outside the US? This whole thing seems very US-centric, considering these cars are sold all over the world.
- tptacek 17y agoUm, isn't it the case that all this suggests is that some of the incidents were operator error? And didn't we assume that all along? It clearly isn't happening to most drivers. Or even many. Or even a remotely significant sampling of drivers. That's not the point.
- jdminhbg 17y agoNo, unless you're assuming that only old people are capable of operator error. This suggests that 'sudden acceleration' is biased towards old people, and we know that operator error of the wrong-pedal type is as well. It doesn't suggest that only cases involving old people could be operator error.
- tptacek 17y agoThe story on NPR where the highway patrol officer is doing 90MPH for several minutes next to the guy who's trying to pry up the gas pedal with one hand while controlling the car with the other doesn't sound too much like someone getting the wrong pedal. Maybe a bunch of these cases are just the ambient stupidity that we've always had. That doesn't mean there's nothing to the story.
- mos1 17y agoThat story was complete and total horseshit. I've listened to the full 911 tape recording, and none of it adds up... he doesn't sound scared, he doesn't try to put it into neutral, he doesn't try to turn it off (he claims he was afraid the car might flip), but he does claim he tried to pry up the gas pedal (which is an essentially impossible physical move, to do with your hand while driving). Not to mention that he has a ridiculously shady past (bankruptcy, $700k of debt, runs an adult website, entire kitchen of his house was stolen during foreclosure, former business partner accuses him of theft) Honestly... if you're going to cite him as an example of anything, he seems like proof that a lot of these incidents are pretty obviously frauds.
- electromagnetic 17y agoYoung drivers are expected to make mistakes, older drivers aren't expected to make mistakes. This unfairly biases error towards manufacturer. I frequently seeing older drivers failing to signal and many other basic errors expected from an inexperienced driver, so why wouldn't the odd driver catch the gas instead of the break, maybe cause their seat got rearranged or whatever. A young driver having this problem will be suspected of operator error, the first assumption for an older driver should be operator error. A dual-standard creates errors.
- nreece 17y agoI want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. It seems like the Toyota defects are not defects but isolated incidents, which the US congress has exploited to get back to a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry.
- slyn 17y agoSteve Woz was pretty vocal about the Prius thing, I remember seeing a post of his on Slashdot about how the acceleration thing was definitely a repeatable bug somehow related to cruise control. Fake edit: Found it, he details it first in a post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=29973870 http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299... And then it gets its own discussion here http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Scary-Prius-Acceleration-Software-Problem http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Sc...
- sounddust 17y agoI have no reason to doubt Woz, but what's the point of yet another claim with no evidence to back it up? Woz claims it's repeatable. So why not buy a cheap camcorder, get a friend to be the passenger/cameraman, go record an instance of it actually happening and put it on YouTube? It would be on every news channel in the country the next day and Toyota would be forced to respond directly. In fact, if I had the kind of money Woz did and thought there was a real danger here, I'd just buy a camera that installed in the headliner and recorded everything that was happening while the car was on at all times, so that I could easily catch the bug when it occurred.
- evgen 17y agoAn alternative theory is that Toyota, in its hubris-driven quest to surpass GM for automotive production, broke a lot of its own rules regarding quality control and long-term relationships when it comes to part sourcing. A lot of this seems to be driven by the fact that the car maker that has a problem is Toyota; not because they are a Japanese car company, but because they are a car company who have spent decades building a (justified) reputation for high-quality automobiles with a very low defect rate and over the past few months all of that work disappeared in a puff of smoke.
- ghshephard 17y agoAlternative Hypothesis: The Toyota vehicles with this defect are the more expensive brands which typically are purchased more often by the elderly. Younger people are driving 98 Honda Civics, etc...not 2007-2010 Camrys, so they would be expected to make a smaller part of the population. With that said, my gut does tend to find the age-pattern of people experiencing unintended acceleration to be worth following up...
- Jun8 17y agoI second your hypothesis. The data definitely needs to be normalized by the population distribution of Toyota cars under question. First, I wouldn't call 55 year-olds as "old people" who are so senile as to mistake pedals. Second, assuming her data is accurate (a risky assumption judging from the informal tone of the post and total lack of rigor), what if the age-unknown group is included with, say, the 30 year-old group (could be, since the ages are unknown), the conclusion then seems so much weaker. I have noticed that many bloggers and journalists have come to Toyota's aid recently. As another conspiracy theory, could this be somewhat fueled by Toyota's PR?
- johnl 17y agoIt would be interesting to find out the computer literacy of those people involved. For a non computer literate person, having a computer take over for even a second I would think would scare them in doing all sorts of things.
- rdtsc 17y agoIt's very irrational as when they fly on an airplane it is the computer that flies the plane most of the way. (Perhaps I naively think that even a computer illiterate person knows about the use of autopilots). On the other hand, their other experience with "computers" has been seeing blue screens of death and having to reboot to "fix it". But perhaps because of this, Toyota has to engage heavily in perception management. Even if they identify a software problem, they would love to blame it one a 'floor mat' as that makes it clear and predictable in people's minds ("oh it's just a floor mat, I understand that") as opposed to saying it is some electronic brain that is damaged that decides randomly to take over and kill drivers.
- jsz0 17y agoPeople should really focus their energy into demanding better safety features on all cars instead of getting caught up on one defect. We should also be focusing on getting bad drivers off the road and requiring on-going driver education/testing at least past a certain age. In all this controversy with Toyota I haven't seen much media discussion over why "cheap cars" lack such basic safety features of higher end models including some of these throttle fail-safe systems that would have nullified the Toyota problem.
- spudlyo 17y agoWhen I was in college, I once had the accelerator stick on my 1979 Toyota Celica GT. I punched it in order to merge onto a 4 lane highway, and it stuck down. I braked a bit which was not very useful, and ended up putting it into neutral and then killing the engine. Scared the crap outta me. To this day I'm not sure why it stuck, I thought it could have been the floor mats at the time.
- akamaka 17y agoThis happens on my Corolla, which is quite old now. If I floor the gas on the highway, it continues to accelerate for a while after letting go the gas. It freaked me out the first time. The folks in the shop told me that I have a build-up of carbon on the throttle body, which causes the throttle to be sticky. They offered to clean it off, but I couldn't be bothered to pay for it. There's definitely nothing wrong with the pedal or any electronic control systems, it's just a car that needs tuning up.
- caller9 17y agoTime to get a great deal on a Toyota. I had a sudden acceleration incident when I was maybe 12 learning to drive a 80 something Chevy 1500. I was being forced to use only one foot instead of two. When I got close to the house while parking at like 2 MPH mom yelled STOP. So of course I floored it and did a little bumper adjustment and brick relocation. I want to say this was throttle body injected, so yeah 'puter did it.
- minus1 17y agoWhat we're missing here (and in all of the Toyota articles I've seen recently) is a comparison to the number of 'sudden acceleration' incidents reported in non-Toyota vehicles. If this is simply elderly-operator error, I would expect the Lincoln Town Car to have a far worse record.
- sliverstorm 17y agoif it's operator error based, with the driver thinking they hit the brake when they really hit the gas... footwell space and pedal size and spacing- ergonomics, basically- would be very important. It's plausible Toyota's pedal layout is simply a little more vulnerable to this kind of mistake. (not a lot, cause it's still a limited occurrence, but a bit)
- jacquesm 17y agoI doubt it, there is substantial evidence by now to rule that out, some very experienced drivers have had this happen to them. Software glitch seems to be a good candidate.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoA person with 50 years of driving experience is probably not a good driver.
- jacquesm 17y agoDid I mention 50 years ? I was thinking of people like the woz and the guy that had his accident last week. Both of them did not struck me as either elderly or infirm.
- vannevar 17y agoTwo anecdotal reports do not constitute 'substantial evidence.' I'm particularly skeptical about the incident last week, which could very well have been staged in the hopes of a big settlement. No one inside or outside of Toyota has been able to reproduce the alleged defect under controlled conditions, despite the great potential reward for doing so. On the other hand, incompetent, greedy, and crazy drivers are very common. Given a simple explanation (human incompetence/greed) and a complex one (a serious mechanical flaw that cannot be reproduced and displays a bias toward the elderly), we should prefer the simpler explanation. (Update on new questions surrounding last week's Prius incident: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2010/03/questions-raised-on-toyota-prius-sudden-acceleration-cases-san-diego-new-york.html http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2010/03/questions-rais...).
- natch 17y agoThe fine article had some glaring unasked questions. The most alarming one being, if the number of immigrants is so striking, what happens when you normalize the number to take into account the high proportion of Camrys that are driven by Asian immigrants. Same question about the numbers skewing to the elderly: Very few young people drive Camrys, so why is it a surprise that people involved in Camry incidents were not young? Age and immigrant status may still be at work in other ways. Maybe there is a defect, and older but paradoxically relatively less experienced drivers (those who came from countries with awesome public transit and very few cars) simply don't have good coping skills when an actual real defect happens. Most of us would just slip the car into neutral, but some less savvy drivers wouldn't think of it.
- tsally 17y agoRegardless of the details of the actual defect, I think this whole Toyota fiasco highlights a problem in training. The sad reality is that the vast majority of the fatalities could have been prevented if the driver had simply shifted into neutral. It's important to understand our machines instead of depending on them.
- hga 17y agoI would tend to agree ... but what if all the relevant controls are "fly by wire" and there's a problem there? Based on something I just read I'd guess the transmission lever for the Prius is one of those (it was described as being on the dash, quite close to the steering wheel and as very simple: F, R, N and a B to save your mechanical brakes on a downgrade (regenerative braking, no doubt)); I really hope the brake and emergency brake controls aren't (yet or ever).
- nollidge 17y agoOne way to understand cars better is to learn how to drive a manual transmission. You'll become more attuned to engine speed, which gear you're in, the responsiveness of your gas pedal, etc.
- weaksauce 17y agoThat and even if my drive by wire throttle sticks open and the clutch cable breaks(or lose fluid if it's a hydraulic system.) I can still force the car into neutral and stop quickly with the brakes, then shut the engine off to avoid over revving it.