It wouldn't be hypocritical. Mind you Woz boasts that he owns plenty of expensive cars too. He just chooses to travel via one of his Segways or 'Prius models' most of the time. Why? Buying multiple 'Prius models' is worse for the environment than buying multiple exotics would be, considering most will see little use but Prius production requires lots of nasty spillover costs. I completely respect conspicuous consumption when it isn't combined with ignorance born self righteousness.

Four things puzzle me about all of this.

1) I have never seen one of these famousTtoyota wire by wire throttles but I ASSUME there is more than one return spring in case one spring breaks - is that true?

2) Toyota apparently have some sort of frictional resistance pad to give "feel" and it this pad that they seem to imply is the source of the failure. Was it wise to install a friction device to be overcome by a spring as a part of an assembly which MUST be fail safe i.e springs can weaken, friction dampers can vary in resistance. So how do you calculate that a failure condition of less spring tension and more friction will not ocour. I seem to recall that when Japanese QC superiority was accepted by western mfrs they all got taught by the Japanese about Taguichi analysis etc. that was supposed analyse this sort of thing?

3) Functionally the basic fly by wire accelerator assembly is just like the push button controller for a "scalextric" slot car set, I don't recall many of them jamming IIRC.

4) In fairnes to Toyota I have been trying to think how many mechanical throttle linkages have two springs to be reasonably fail safe. I think many do, but I would swear that every old style cable sysem had two return springs. I am ignoring racing type layouts because I am pretty sure that the UK MSA regs have always required two return springs.

There are also several fatal accidents in which the mats can be entirely ruled out as they were not in the car.

More importantly, there are also now at least two documented cases in which the throttle stuck in a WOT or near-WOT position, and the operator returned the car to the dealer by shifting in and out of neutral and using the brakes, and had Toyota dealer personnel personally witness the failure as it was occurring in real time -- throttle remained open despite kicking the pedal, etc, while right on the dealership lot.

The Department of Transportation and the Federal Trade Commission of the U.S. government are now very keen on learning just when and how much Toyota learned of these cases, as they are in direct contradiction of Toyota's position -- that it had no knowledge of any such events.

The sticking throttle pedal assembly and associated recall are not related to the SUA, in my opinion. As I see it, this mode of failure will produce simply and literally a sticky throttle, no more, no less. I don't believe it can produce the cases of unintended acceleration reported by vehicle owners.

This is a rather interesting point, as Toyota appears to have informed the public that the recall addresses the unintended acceleration, but told the staff of a congressional committee that it won't.

I will tell you, without any fear of contradiction because I can prove it to be true, that my sister had unintended acceleration without touching the pedal, without having a mat within six inches of the pedal and without cruise control.

The fail-safes do not always work.

As for the 'at least one lethal accident' to which you refer, which one was this?

It's clear that Toyota world wide are lying to their customers and the public. They are putting on a great fanfare here in Australia to keep the public from knowing the truth. Their local pedals are 'from a different manufacturer', they are saying, and anyone who goes to their dealer to report the problem is simply sat down and told it was the mats.

If they don't believe it was the mats, two men come from Toyota Australia to tell them (with more authority?) that it was the mats. Phone up, 'it was the mats'. I know, I've done it, my sister has been through it all. Moreover, I have an inkling that this has been happening to that particular Corolla for longer than we know, that it happened to my father before he died.

That's why, I believe, he had the mats right out of the car. The whole lot of them, not even in the boot. I believe he'd had the problem and was set to tell the dealers the next time that "It's not the mats! Fix my new car!" I just wish he'd told me about it at some time, but he probably didn't want my mum to find out.

My sister certainly encounted UA virtually from the moment she took over driving the car.

I think you should offer some facts in support of this ridiculous claim. Even if you are correct about the "spillover costs", subsequent owners are likely to drive the Priui and extract the "life of car" environmental benefit.

Mariner,

1 no (it has a sohort spring inside the main one to give some progression, but if the main one fails the game is over)

2 yes it was wise. a success rate of between 99.99 and 99.999% is not good enough but does at least indicate that it was not designed and developed by incompetents. The denso pedal assy also has a friction device, it doesn't stick

3) you haven't got 8 million of those suckers out on the road for 2 thousand hour lifespans, and if they do jam you just unjam them and put the slotcar back on the track, instead of hosing down the Armco.

4) they only have one spring system. The whole system is more robust than a bowden /butterfly setup, as it doesn't use tension springs, and needs a different approach to reliability. Adding extra springs doesn't deal with an important failure mode, as indicated by the design FMEA.

From the Toyota webpage:


It would appear that they've carefully crafted the words to omit references to "unintended acceleration." Interesting.

Out of curiousity, what do you think is the root cause of the SUA?




Interesting, I would like to read more about that. Links?

Source? Who were the dealerships involved at least?

That would be interesting to see and hear - shifting in and out of neutral at WOT!

Neutral drop baybee!!

Depends on the trans, On a Falcon 4 speed it is entirely possible, and in fact easy. I doubt the trans is as new afterwards, but I have done much worse things than that to one.

http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti.../100209959/1143


http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/RunawayToyot...tory?id=9730328

here is the New Jersey case. There are one or two more going around I've heard of...

http://thesafetyrecord.safetyresearch.net/...ems-continuing/

If the story is accurate, it is sort of amazing to me it would be handled this way... Instead of throwing parts at it, they want to get that car back to the barn and sort it out. Give the guy a new car to drive, whatever it takes. This whole deal has turned into a perfect shit storm. The company seems to be making the wrong move at every opportunity.

My hat's off to these people. You or I would have no trouble thrashing a vehicle in this manner, fun even, but it would have to be troubling if not scary for an ordinary civilian.

I suspect the dealer's priorities are different to Toyota's. They ought to be triyng to corrale as many of these proven UA cars as they can. In fact If I were T I'd say that if someone can demonstrate it on the forecourt in their car, ring us up and we'll fly someone over, don't even switch the thing off.

A Prius has about $7K worth of extra energy and undesirable chemicals associated with its production relative to a conventional car of similar capabilities. Woz still has his various Prius models in inventory in case he needs them for when family is in town. By the time he dumps them, the limiting factor will be that they are old insanely complex low mileage clunkers. Chances are they won't see too many miles before upkeep sees them wasting energy and polluting again as scrap.

How long can the engine last by being at WOT in neutral? I doubt the engine is designed to bounce off the limiter for long stretches of time.

Agreed. This guy is an environmental vandal wearing a green suit.

Hey, he buys a new car regularly and trades it in on the next new one which is bought by a Used Prius buyer, the same as any other fleetcar. Nothing wrong with that, it keeps the economy ticking over.
As for Prius being green a different story as a lot of people have pointed out. But governments buy the things, and lots of fleets.And everybody thinks they are green. I think the Top Gear story summed it well, drive it as fast as possible around their test track following it with a V8 BMW. Then do a mileage check. The V8 BMW used far less fuel!! than the 'green' car

it is a Toyota problem as C1 and 107 are made in a toyota factory in CZ and use toyota petrol engine... In short, problem is with the electronic throttle.. and is concerning only the models equipped with a semiautomatic gearbox as manuals have a normal throttle cable.. I just checked today.

My understanding is the parts were replaced at the direction of a factory rep. From the linked story above: "The dealer contacted a Toyota corporate representative, who authorized replacement of the throttle body, accelerator pedal and the associated sensors and paid for the labor and a car rental for the owner."

Honestly, I am in no position to have an opinion. I think it's in the ECM but I have no way to know what.

I'm not sure how to phrase the asking of this question. The US is a litigious place, especially with regards to these things. Does that have a noticeable, if any, impact on how Toyota are handling things both publically and privately? I imagine if they came out and said "Yes, the problem is X" they might get sued to the ends of the earth, but maybe some of the "uhm...uh, well..." is because they have to?

As is China and the shit is starting to hit the fan here, RAV4 owners are pissed and now the Prius is going to be recalled.

One very bright lady on the news said " I dont think it's reasonable that Toyota sold me a car without telling me the problem first"

Against what the face saving Japanese Toyota said about the problem being US localised, the incident number has just hit 100 in Japan itself apparently not far behind the US incident number.

Oh and on the news some US Guy apparently said the specific Toyota owners should get to a dealer as soon as possible - then later retracted it and said please don't drive the affected models at all!

Hard to say. I have read a bit about this sort of thing. One school of thought is to come out and own up to it, and apologize. Make reasonable efforts to pay the injured parties and cover the costs to owners regarding replacement parts and labor.

The other is the lawer-istic method of denying responsibility and fighting everything.

It looks to me like Toyota is following the lawyer-istic approach, which I personally think will cost them more in the long run in terms of absolute dollar losses as well as pissed-off customers going to other brands.

Only time will tell, eh?

Good stuff, thanks.

IMO if the problem is too complicated to understand (which I have a hard time believing) or the system design is too complicated to discover the root cause, an extensive redesign is in order.

(sorry for restating the obvious)

I'm not sure that's true, or at least we need to define litigiousness. Europe and Asia have more comprehensive government regulation. In the USA we embrace the concept of limited government and personal and corporate freedom, then sue the pants off each other when someone is perceived to have stepped out of bounds. So where the rest of the world has regulatory and criminal remedies, we have civil remedies. And I'm not sure the USA is in general more lawsuit-happy than the rest of the world... guess it depends. In F1, various entities are constantly suing each other over matters that would probably have no standing in an American court.

Why did he lie on his Gizmodo posts and say he has kept them all then? He buys a new one every time Toyota ads another feature and keeps and the old ones as backups. Nothing wrong with it, as long as he knows it is a compulsion and not a green crusade.

I completely agree...and if the problem (s) show up in Japan as well and toyota are found to have buried information we might even see folks attempting to sue Toyota for the pure risk consumers have taken driving their cars, despite not having had a failure...insurance works the same way...that may may be a simplified and incorrect comparison but it is what I have at the moment.


"It looks to me like Toyota is following the lawyer-istic approach, which I personally think will cost them more in the long run in terms of absolute dollar losses as well as pissed-off customers going to other brands."

Only time will tell, eh?
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I suspect it will come to light that the floormat thing was a red herring. People will find out and then sue the pants off Toyota for trying to hide the salami.

I thought you were going to say it's all much ado about nothing. That's my take on it.

As you pointed out, throttles fail WOT more regularly than we are willing to admit. It may be only 1/100,000,000 miles but it happens, carpet interference probably being a relatively common cause. Toyota's throttle doesn't fail any more or less than anyone else's IMO. The fault was that when it did happen, some of their cars (Lexii) had all sorts of impediments in the way of the driver's ability to regain control of the vehicle.

The thing is that Toyota can't just tell the world that "it's OK if a throttle sticks open sometimes, we'll just make sure you can shut down the car from now on". Nobody is willing to accept that (partially answering Ross' question about litigation). So Toyota have dug deep, researched all they can until they found a real, though probably extremely infrequent, failure mode to dig their teeth into and make a visible public commotion about how they are fixing the 'root' problem. There are likely dozens of other equally rare failure modes that are being ignored, but in the end all that matters is that when a throttle sticks open (because it always will somewhere, somehow) drivers have a chance to regain control of the vehicle. I believe that issue, at least, has been addressed by Toyota. Everything else is just window dressing IMO.

The average driver being just that...

If it continues to happen, people will continue to crash. And die.

Might be worth retaining a sense of proportion on this. If there are 8 million of these things on the road and 200 of them have sticky throttles that means 99.998% of them are OK.

On a car with a proper ignition switch you almost always have the non destructive option of switching the engine off. Most of the time a good kicking will unstick a throttle. So to my mind neither the floormats issue or the friction one are really worth getting hot under the collar about. The ones that are a puzzle are the ones like yours where floormats aren't an issue and it isn't simple 'pedal fails to return' type problems, compounded by the idiocy of not having a good engine kill switch (I think 3 seconds is far too long) in some models.

"the system design is too complicated to discover the root cause, an extensive redesign is in order." -any replacement system would be just as complicated as it has to have the same functionality. I have occasionally been slightly involved in safety related FMEAs, and validation of the software. I imagine the same methodology will be rigorously applied to throttle software at Toyota from now on.

The trouble is that the code gets bigger, and slower, as you put in more robustness.

Well there ya go. I don't believe the issue has been successfully addressed yet. They're not close to having their arms around the problem. They certainly don't have a cause or a fix as of today -- or if they do, they haven't launched it. Nor do I believe they have "researched all they can." I see the ball continually dropped at critical points along the way. And if I may correct you on one important point: actually, the incidence rate is many times that of any other make, accounting for 40 percent of the reported cases.

Is the problem great enough to park the fleet? No. Is it great enough for the company to be subjected to the usual overblown media circus and public flagellation sure to ensue, followed by endless lawsuits with obscenely excessive settlements? Yes. It's the only form of correction that corporations understand, being bulletproof to everything else. If they receive anything less, they will depart believing they got away with it, and really they have -- that is the natural cost of a screwup of this magnitude and they knew that going in. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

I welcome all corrections. In this case the 40% number that I also heard somewhere (probably here) is just a matter of a handful of extra reports to the NHTSA, which could be easily explained by the Lexii that had the real problem from the outset. Of course since then the number will have snowballed out of control, and I don't think we've hit the peak of the snowballing either. Of course there's no way the problem is as big as all that, the only thing in the world that can cause as big a commotion as this is our imagination.

Given the apparent number of proven cases and resulting injury/fatality statistics, this is it seems really more of a PR problem than a safety or engineering problem. When you climb into a Toyota, the odds of any individual being injured or dieing from this must be statistically insignificant. People seem to forget that driving or being driven in a car is inherently a significant risk, the baseline risk we've all either come to terms with or we won't get in a car I guess. The actual incrementally added risk from the car you are driving or riding in having an unintended acceleration is probably essentially similar to the likelihood of being killed by a goose coming through the windshield or alien abduction.

That said, whoever thought that having a safety critical vehicle control parameter at the mercy of software code too complex to be easily and definitively troubleshooted-troubleshot(?) or not putting a kill switch in easy drivers' reach was probably not exercising good judgment.

Wonders never cease. I basically agree with you, with the exception of your belief in alien abduction.

Inherently a far bigger risk in a car that has a sticking throttle, in fact accelarates by itself and is hard to turn the ignition off.
A combination of stupid[push button ign] design coupled with poor design [pedals or ECU that cause the car to accelarate]
Clearly Toyota are playing games, and possibly really do not know what is wrong.

And here in Oz today Prius is being recalled because of dodgy brakes, probably the regenaritive system.
And Ford are having similar problems in the US.

What is the number of proven cases and resulting injuries/deaths then? And how many of those are for push-button ignition vehicles?

It really is a PR problem. Take this "new" matter of the Prius brakes. It has been talked about for some time, maybe years. I think there are some threads here that mention it. So why is it being brought up now? It has nothing to do with UA, nothing new has been discovered about the issue, no related injuries/deaths that I can find. But there are "mounting reports" of problems with these cars (mounting since when I wonder?), and they have that very unfortunate nameplate 'Toyota' on the trunk. The NHTSA had to act because the media were going to be all over it. It's all driven by public perception now.

Whoa there. It is quite likely not a software error, but an interaction between software, noisy/failed sensors EMC and whatever. If it was just software then all cars with that software would do it.

Agree about the kill switch obviously.

Sensor makes sense. My latest hack had a curious behaviour: after a while the engine would run very rough, the "check engine" light would come on, then the engine run smooth again. Sometimes, a little later, the engine would run rough again, the light go out, and it would be sweet again.

The glovebox drivers handbook (the size and weight of a breezeblock, and the same IQ) told me the "check engine" sign meant there was something wrong in the pollution equipment. In fact, it turned out to be the camshift position sensor. Replace that, no worries. Modern cars with ECUs rely to a total extent on sensors telling the computer what's going on. Dodgy sensor, dodgy behaviour. Which is why I can't help thinking it's not just a purely mechanical problem.

Incidentally, further up this thread, the accellerator pedal is described as "simple". It looks like it was designed by Cecil B DeMille. Now, my racing Ford Anglia had a "simple" accellerator pedal - a rod, on a pivot, with a pedal pad at one end and a cable connector at the other. THAT was simple.

My take on the proportion is that there is 200 minimum known cars out there risking the lives of 200 drivers, passengers, other cars, property and pedestrians. Don't care about the other 8 million, 200 is 200 too many and the biggest issue is you don't know if your related model Toyota is going to be number 201.
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Statistics are funny. The odds of your individual Toyota suffering an SUA are very remote. However, the odds were equally remote for the owners who experienced the problem, but that did not prevent it from happening. These cars did not suffer a PR failure.

So the cars have a real, physical problem, not a PR problem. The company now has a PR problem as a result of the real, physical problem with the cars, and the finest PR experts in the world won't get them out of this mess. To regard this as a PR problem is the reasoning that got the company into this disaster.

The lesson here is product, product, product. These cars don't have just a strange electrical problem. They also have a badly-designed shifter and an engine stop button that doesn't stop the engine. What was the process that allows these design failures to be recognized only in hindsight? Product, product, product. Screw PR. Let them have an office down the street somewhere. Build a quality product.

I simultaneously agree and disagree. I don't know how to design a system that is 99.999% reliable, to be honest. Or at least, I couldn't figure out where one that is 99.9999% could be allowed to fall over. Especially since in the real world I only get to see say 300 units before we go into production.

I agree and disagree (sorry to repeat Greg Locock's post). Statistically if Toyota's design was "six sigma" (often thought of as "near perfect"), assuming perfect manufacturing there would be 3 bad cars per million. One could look at the commonality of the parts across all product lines as resulting in a multi-million unit production volume, resulting in a number of failures across the fleet.

Is it possible to make a 100% perfect design that is 100% perfectly manufactured all the time? No. Which is why I think Toyota screwed the pooch. Rather than taking an approach of "this is not a problem from a statistical standpoint" and then turning this into what we are seeing now, they should have taken what I think is a more reasonable approach of admitting there is a problem and compensating injured parties accordingly.

I do totally agree with you on the engine stop and shifter designs. Seems like a perfect shitstorm of bad or questionable designs coming together.

How do these various QA programs accommodate for software? While there is room of variance in physical products, software would be same for product #1 to product #999999; essentially it changes only when you develop a new version.

Personally, I am certain that the mats and pedal explain all the SUA type complaints in Toyota cars. The rest sounds like X-files stuff.

It's too early to talk about victim compensation, etc, and there is not a lot they can do about it. That will all work itself out in a process involving people in robes.

But you are absolutely correct. In order to establish a QC-style failure rate you first must identify a cause or mode of failure. Find the part and put an arrow on it. To qualify a failure by the incidence rate of the problem is gaming the process backward -- i.e., we don't have a problem because the incidence rate is too low. But in reality, you have no idea how big a problem you have until you know WTF broke. Otherwise, for all you know every single one of them could fail next week. To me, there was an internal decision that this was a floor mat problem and that became the operational reality.

Here is an excerpt of Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post. Clearly, he knows no more about cars than my dachshund knows of organic chemistry, and he doesn't really understand the distinctions of software, firmware, and hardware, but still he comes amazingly close to nailing the root problem:

"Automobiles used to be mechanical devices. Now they are collections of mechanical parts that are told what to do by computers. In most cars, the gearshift, pedals and steering wheel are nothing more than proxies for electronic controls. When something goes wrong with a car, you don't start by opening the hood and unbolting pieces from the engine one at a time, the way we used to. You plug in a reader device and ask the vehicle what its problem is.

Technology has made automobiles much safer, more efficient and less damaging to the environment. But a computer is only as good as its software. Some experts believe that Toyota's acceleration problems may actually be caused by faulty programming, not a faulty pedal. And the brakes on the Prius, which are used not only to stop the car but also to recharge the hybrid's battery, have already undergone one software rewrite, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Toyota's competitors should go easy on the gloating. Their cars are fly-by-wire, too, and thus equally at the mercy of information-age technology -- the fire we purloined from Olympus. Raise your hand if you think it's a great idea to make our cars precisely as dependable and problem-free as, gulp, our personal computers."

Except for that dead cop case in which police investigation revealed that the pedal had indeed become stuck due to floor mat.