Recall or government attack?

[Samson]

Originally Posted by Lobo1186

it only takes half a brain to figure out how to turn off a car. why some of these people did not is beyond me. not only that, the one case where the man called 911 he was an off duty trooper. Im sorry but that is just sad... this is someone who needs to make good decisions in a moments notice on a regular basis to save lives and he couldn't do something as simple as put the car in neutral or shut down the engine????

I agree that it's a lot of bad engineering, but consider the following:

-It takes 3 seconds to turn off the engine with the stupid trendy push button start that a lot of these Toyotas have. That's a lot of time.
-A lot of cars won't allow you to pop it in neutral with the revs over a certain point (this is to prevent transmission damage when junior learns how fun it is to do neutral drops in mom's Camry)
-Say you manage to get it into neutral with the engine banging off of the limiter... now try to use your brakes. Oh wait, there's no vacuum.
-Ok, now say you figured out how to get the engine off. Ok, now you have no power steering (not that it matters at speed), power brakes, the column might lock, and if you try to restart it, you might have to be in park or neutral.

The one simple, fail safe solution is a brake/gas interlock that always gives priority to the brakes. So even if something does go wrong, when you hit the brakes, the engine power is cut to idle. Maybe bring back functional emergency brakes, but that would make for a lot of rear wheel locking and spinning. Beyond that, put decent brakes on cars. Honda is the same way... I never understood how they can make such incredible cars with severely underrated brakes.