Recall or government attack?
 

Does anyone know of anyone having any of these supposed problems with gas pedals or throttle bodies?
Call me cynical, but this is surely looking like an attack by the owners of GM, who just happen to be the government, on their competition.
I would not be surprised if this spreads to EVERY car company except GM and Chrysler.
Also is a pretty good diversion from other current government problems/complaints.

Sheesh, better go get your bunker ready and if I were you I would not quit your day job to take up prognosticating.

Hey, I have had several Jap cars over the years. They gave us not so boring design, fun to drive small cars with good reliability. If they have one recall compared to GM's, Chrysler & Fords multitude of issues...great, just shows you they are doing it right and I bet it will never happened again. A bean counter probably came up with the design. And every ones knows how Washington works "SEEK AND DESTROY" your opposition.

yes
 

Yes - Last fall a family member of mine was riding in a Toyota that had the gas pedal become stuck while going in reverse. The car sped wildly out of control and ran in to a neighbors garage door. :eek: This was after the floor mat recall; the mats were not in the car at the time of the accident. Thankfully everyone was safe.

From what I've read, it's a real issue that dates back at least as far as '04.

The real problem in my mind is not that the throttle sticks, but that the brakes cannot overcome the engine. Their ~280 hp V6 cars have the same measly brakes as the ~180 hp 4-cylinder cars. That's just not smart.

Another issue is the throttle/brake override. After the Audi 5000 debacle, most (all?) German cars kill the throttle when the brakes are engaged. I'm not sure if it's once a certain threshold is reached or just any brake contact, but that could really hamper left-foot braking (not that 99.99% of car owners would care).

Anyway, I hope this makes Toyota and Lexus used values drop for a little while. I want another IS300. :)

Well that makes me feel better. The talk around here (north Florida) is no one has heard much about the problem. My across the street neighbor is a tech at the big Toyota dealership in the area and he said they had replaced lots of carpets, but no one had complained about any problems with the gas pedals or anything else sticking the throttle.
What made it stick? And if it "sped wildly out of control" did the car step on the pedal itself?
I'm not being fecetious but the pedal can't stick in a position farther than was applied by the driver. This sounds somewhat like the old Audi 5000 claims that they put themselves in gear and opened the throttle. That turned out to be more of a pedal placement issue that had people stepping on the wrong pedal when they acted in an emergency or panic way.
The thing I find suspicious is the magnitude of a problem that was not an issue last week. Then again, maybe it's a slow news week?

Are you sure about that?
At the BrumosU course, I stood on the brakes for the stopping box, with Hurley Haywood in my car, no less, and my size 12 shoe caught the throttle pedal also. The brakes were in anti-lock mode and the engine revved against the rev-limiter.

I'm not sure which manufacturers do and do not use this override. It could be the case that Porsche doesn't, and they just rely on their brakes to slow the car down, regardless of throttle position.

I haven't tried it in my '01.

I wasn't intending to try it on mine, either!! :eek:

"The real problem in my mind is not that the throttle sticks, but that the brakes cannot overcome the engine"

You would think so, but in my experience, that's not the case. Similar to what Kurt did, I caught the gas pedal while braking in my Formula Ford, with a whopping 110H.P., and the car still plowed straight off the track. Brakes just aren't designed to overcome engine torque once the car is moving.

edit: That may not be a good comparison, I was at racing speeds, and the FF actually has a decent power to weight ratio. I may have to experiment this weekend with my beater Integra, though it's a stick shift, so I won't try a "standing start" test and fry my clutch.

A month or so back, there was a report on the national news about this. It was a 911 phone call from someone in a runaway Camry in San Diego. The caller was telling the 911 operator that they were out of control and what road they were speeding down. The road came to a T intersection and they were going too fast to turn. They tumbled down a steep embankment. Unfortunately there were fatalities when the police arrived. It does sound like the stuck accelorator problem is real.

However, if they had time to call the police on their cell, they should have had time to put it in neutral and shut their ignition off.

OK, experiment complete. With my '94 Integra, in 1st gear, below 4000 RPM I could stop the car with full throttle, above that, the brakes couldn't over-ride the engines power. This is with a manual, an auto should have more available torque available at lower RPM. So, it looks like the ratio of H.P. to braking capacity is a factor.

The Pontiac Vibe is included in the recall I believe.

Yes, it is.

UAW built GM Buick Lacrosse: #1 in three year reliability after a decade of dominance by Lexus.

Toyota: 50 million car recall that could costs billions in lost sales and unecessary fixes.

Never thought I'd see the day... :D

+1 on that!

I just think it's shame that car manufacturers get away with waiting for some fatalities to occur then say they knew about the problem but did not think it was a major issue. Does anyone remember the Ford Pinto? I think the bean counter at Toyota did the same thing the one at Ford did many years ago, decided that the law suits from deaths would be cheaper than a recall to repair the problem.

"Call me cynical, but this is surely looking like an attack by the owners of GM, who just happen to be the government, on their competition.
I would not be surprised if this spreads to EVERY car company except GM and Chrysler.
"


I think you're onto something. The death panels in the health care bill prove those Democrats will stoop to anything.

I think they may have known about the problem, but there is always a risk analysis done to determine the likelyhood of occurance. Risk is inherent in any design. And then the variation in manufacturing can compound the factors. And the fact that the majority of drivers... well I'll refrain from making comments about driving in America.

Looks like Honda stock will go up. I still won't buy a Government Motors, Fiat or Ford.

One would think so, no?
I've taught my family from the time they're old enough to pay attention, all the things I've learned about staying safe while driving. The first and foremost is to never stop right on another car's bumper, so you leave yourself manuevering room, especially in a traffic jam on the interstate. So.......what happens to my younger daughter?? She gets in one of those situations on I-95, stops short like she is taught and see's the car coming from behind is not going to get stopped in time, turns to the girl riding with her and says, "This car's not going to stop." She then sits there watching in the rear view mirror as they are hit hard enough to put the license plate of her new Prelude up under the rear window and get knocked into the rear of the car she had stopped with plenty of distance ahead of her. I asked her why in the hell she didn't pull off to the side of the car in front of her, as she had been taught a gazillion times and she said, "I Never thought of it."

"Toyota has also issued some Dukes of Hazzard style maneuvers drivers should use if they're cruising along and the pedal does, in fact, stick, such as shifting into neutral or turning off the ignition (but don't take the key out!). Do they teach that in driver's ed?"-yahoo.com

sign me up! LOL

Yeah I'm guessing econo boxes from Honda and the US are going to have good year.

How on earth does turning the car off or taking it out of gear count as "dukes of hazzard" type maneuvers?

Toyota has really slipped amd fallen hard where quality is concerned. In 2006 I bought a new Tacoma because I believed their quality was above par.
Now I read on-line about the issues Tacomas have with frame rot (850,000 trucks recalled because the frame rots to pieces within a few years, in some cases trucks have broken in half) and while the recall only applies to 1995-2000 model years, several people are compaining about this issue all the way up to 2006 model year (primarily in rust belt states). There was once a time when the body would rot off the frame on these trucks and now the frame rots out from under the body.
There are also several complaints about accelerator pedals sticking on Tacomas and uncommanded vehicle acceleration including the 2006 model that I have. People have written that when it has happened to their trucks it was definitely not the floor mats causing the problem as Toyota originally claimed, but this vehicle is not included in the current recall.
I haven't had any issues with my truck, but I think I'll be practicing the turn the key off but don't remove it while driving thing before I need to do it for real.

Consider the Yahoo.com source!
Anything that involves a "real" car, rather than a computer simulation is "Dukes of Hazard" to them!! :D

Other view
 

Odd, Car and Driver mag (issue I received yesterday) tested several cars and it was only at above 500HP that the brakes couldn't stop the car. And the brakes were surprisingly effective.

They did have several criticisms of the programming of the ECU computer and its sensing that the driver was trying to stop. They wanted the start button delay shortened (it doesn't immediately react lest someone inadvertently bump against it while you are at speed) and for it to react to successive presses as other cars do. And for the ECU to sense that the brakes are pressed and automatically cut the gas being fed to the engine. This in addition to the mats sliding and the pedal itself having defects.

If you think dozens of people being killed isn't proof, well then it is just another conspiracy.

Here is an interesting video:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8980024

Granted, the brakes will stop the car with out-of-control throttle, and granted you can put the engine in reverse or turn off the ignition. However, not everybody is a smart, keenly-aware driver. How about that little old lady down the street? How about soccer mom with 4 screaming kids? How about the idiot talking on the cell phone while merging into the freeway without looking? Okay, it's all their fault, but so what, I still don't want them running into me with their runaway Toyota. Toyota made the problem, they have to fix it.

And the exact quote was, "My advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to the Toyota dealer because they believe they have the fix for it." I don't have a problem with that quote. Stop driving and get it fixed is exactly the right thing to do. This is people twisting statements around for political gain.

http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/showthread.php/34244-Toyota-Tacoma-Owners!/page2

It obviously is a two-fold problem. one is that it is too easy for people to get a license without any real drivers ed. (I took a several month course for 1 thousand dollars my brother in law just took a test.) So we have many incompetent drivers on the road.

two toyota screwed up. plain and simple. they got people killed and should be held liable up to a certain point.

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????

and if he is supposed to be someone who knows more about defensive driving and all the things about drivers safety imagine your average joe.

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.

what you say is true. especially about the brakes. but with enough time to call 911 a car in neutral from the get go wouldnt have impacted at 120. He could have tried everything and done all those things and all failed... or that he lost his head and panicked. we will probably never know but i can tell you what my money would be on.

idk... anyone have a lexus they wanna throwin neutral to see what happens?

Yeah, that was just a bad situation. Panic makes people do strange things.

If I recall correctly, my old IS300 had a limit of 4,000 rpm or so in neutral, so I'd assume that anything over that would lock it out if you're already in gear.

That said, the car had incredible overkill brakes from the factory that had no issue overcoming the engine power.

And, if it came down to it, it had this amazing invention called a key that can turn the car off instantly.

It's a seriously misguided notion that NHTSA has pushed the unintended acceleration issue on Toyota in order to help out GM. The LA Times hasn't been good for much lately, but they can be credited with publishing several articles that have raised awareness of the issue. We now know that there is a design issue with the Toyota accelerator pedal position sensor that can cause increased friction and sticking under certain conditions, as they have recalled the affected vehicles for a "shim" installation.

The puzzling part of this is that Toyota doesn't seem to have a rationality check on the accelerator vs brake inputs. I understand that most vehicles with electronic throttle control do check brake apply status vs accelerator pedal apply status. I know for sure that Chrysler ETC vehicles do this, as they largely copied then-partner Mercedes-Benz's strategy when they introduced ETC on the 2003 Hemi. Typically, engine power will not be cut instantaneously if brakes are applied with throttle pedal applied; it may take a couple of seconds simultaneous pedal application to set a rationality DTC and put the ETC system in some sort of limp-in mode with reduced throttle response. I guess that Toyota didn't want to inconvenience their customers with a fault code if they hit both pedals. So much for Toyota's perceived perfection...

Maybe Toyota isn't being treated fairly, but either way, if you give your competition (in this case, a manufacture owned by US taxpayers) a little rope, they'll use it to hang you...

That's a very interesting video, first time I've seen one where the brakes couldn't overcome the engine. Might become a new test I do on every new vehicle I'm considering. BTW, the advice he gave (put it in neutral, brake until stopped, shut engine off) is the right stuff.

If it is a conspiracy
 

how come Japan is recalling vehicles there? You would presume they would be protective of their industry titan.

Seems like everyone agrees there is a problem...or problems...in a surprising number of Toyota models.

Prius headlights totally and unexpectedly fail and brakes fail on rough pavement being the newest revelation and that came out of Japan.

And it also seems that Toyota has a culture of ignoring problems in the pursuit of growth and profit.

It is an interesting test to perform. I posted my results with a '94 Integra on page 1. It ends up you don't need alot of H.P. to overcome the brakes!
Steve

The plot sickens.....


NHTSA looking into complaints of 2009-10 Corolla steering problems:
http://www.leftlanenews.com/nhtsa-looking-into-complaints-of-2009-10-corolla-steering-problems.html