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Automotive News & Views Toyota in decline in 2009?
3864 messages, Last post on Dec 09, 2009 at 11:15 AM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: steve_ (Nov 04, 2009 11:48 pm) |
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Nov 04, 2009 8:19 pm) don't forget CR had almost no braking from 80 mph will maintaining throttle after doing the same test at 60 mph. i am not willing to make assumptions about what should work based on what happens in normal situations. systems can have unexpected reactions under stress. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Nov 03, 2009 7:39 pm) Starting price was about $2,300 with all the attachments, $2,000 for just the base unit. After a while of saying the price was way too high, they came down to like $1,650. After a lot of questions; humoring them, I said no, and they started to packup and get ready to leave. JUST right before leaving, he said, how about you buy it at my cost, $1,327.... I thought about that price for a minute, because that's starting to enter the reasonable range (though really high still (but all attachments included). I said no, after they left, I looked in CR 2009 guide. Kirby is ranked #4 (that's good!) but the price listed is $1,350. So his supposed "cost" was the actual retail price/value! LOL.  I'm glad I said no.
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is it just me or is that a ridiculously high price for a vacuum cleaner? $1,350? I could buy me some really nice duplicate Lancer floor mats for that price.  You know, just to have 'em around!
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I've never had any unintended acceleration in ANY vehicle by any manufacturer. Unintended acceleration sounds like driver/operator error to me all the way. And equipment malfunction in and of itself is no reason to cause an accident or injury. As many have said, the CHP is known by some in the loop to be incompetent in every way imaginable or listable, so it's no surprise to me that it was driver error in the Lexus in question. There are many ways to slow down a vehicle, but it seems error, panick and ignorance got the best of some people out there.
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Nov 05, 2009 4:31 pm) However, the salesmen cry when you call it just a vacuum, they want you to know it's a SYSTEM, not just a vacuum cleaner. It would have come with all sorts of attachments and gizmos to clean anything you can think of, including a shampooer mechanism. They should probably lower the price to $999.99. I think they'd sell a lot more that way. But I guess there's enough suckers out there that'll pay $2,000+ that it's more profitable to gouge. |
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Replying to: andres3 (Nov 05, 2009 4:00 pm) That includes all attachments including shampoo unit., IIRC> |
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Replying to: andres3 (Nov 05, 2009 4:31 pm) I even reported it to NHTSA, and someone from the agency later called me back to query me about the incident. Months later, I realized what likely had happened. I was wearing boots that day, and these had wider soles than my dress shoes or sneakers. The right edge of the sole had caught the gas pedal while I was depressing the brake pedal. 
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Replying to: 210delray (Nov 05, 2009 5:33 pm) After the interesting article.. As a Crash Scene Investigator (CxSI), I have an advantage: I previously was the Auto Safety Engineer for Consumer Reports. There, I test drove the Audi 5000 when it was new. I knew that this car had large wide tires to accommodate the powerful 5 cylinder engine. There is a bulge on the left side of the space for the brake and accelerator pedals. This displaced the pedals toward the center of the car more than on most automobiles because of the wide tires. Because of that lateral shift, it was easy to press on the accelerator pedal with the right side of your foot while also pressing on the brake pedal. It occurred to me that drivers, especially older drivers with degraded hearing, would start the car and place it in gear quickly, without hearing the engine revving much faster than idle. Then when the car took off, they pressed hard on the accelerator, thinking it was only the brake pedal. What do we know about other cars that had unexpected acceleration like this? A CSxI who is working with a possible client has a demonstration to show that the problem was misplacement of the driver’s right foot. I could take almost any car with an automatic transmission to show how unlikely a real runaway would be. Even if the car had a powerful V-8 I would start the engine and shift into Drive normally. Then with my left foot on the brake pedal, we would mash the accelerator pedal. The driven tires might begin to spin and make blue smoke but the car would remain in place. All four wheels had locked brakes, but the engine was overpowering only two of them. The front brake and tires were very effective if we started that with the car not moving. If I attempted this demonstration when the car was going 60 mph, overcoming the inertia would be more difficult – maybe impossible. I could get a runaway under another scenario. If we pumped the brake pedal while the engine was revving hard, that would deplete the power-brake vacuum booster reservoir. Then the brake effect would be like having non-power brakes – requiring greatly increased pedal force to hold the car back. That was good reason to adopt another means of assuring that the brake booster is not dependent upon engine intake vacuum. Audi did that. We proved that the “ghost under the hood” was not real. Runaways were the result of careless drivers. True, the Audi made the error more likely with the weirdly placed pedals. None of this seemed to affect the adverse publicity generated by the TV show “60 Minutes”. The result was greatly reduced sales for Audi. Another result of this scandal was the adoption of the brake-shift interlock mechanism that made it necessary to depress the (real) brake pedal in order to get the gear shift out of Park. |
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