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Automotive News & Views Toyota in decline in 2009?
3863 messages, Last post on Dec 08, 2009 at 7:02 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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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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So this post is saying the state patrol officer had his foot on the accelerator and the brake in the ES? Otherwise the article is nicely written, may be true or not true, but has no relevance to the Toyota at hand.
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| it still doesn't excuse the servicing dealer for plopping an extra mat over the other one, eh? What's the point there? Covering up a muddy mat with a clean one from the wrong Toyota vehicle? Or what? Seems simple, but that mistake shouldn't be repeated over again. | |
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Nov 05, 2009 7:58 pm) If it had just been one of these things by itself, maybe the wreck could have been avoided.
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Replying to: steve_ (Nov 05, 2009 8:01 pm)
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Replying to: imidazol97 (Nov 05, 2009 6:21 pm) There were two interesting parts of that post. The CR results are very informative and probably the basis of what every vehicle maker will be doing in the future....or they better be. The other is the unsolicited testamony of an expert in the field based on his own experiences. His conclusion as I read it was that such errors are almost always driver-induced errors. In the Cali case I think as Steve said it was a combination of errors but IMO originally caused by the mats being where they shouldn't have been. |
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| by putting the mats where they were. That's preposterous. But I think you're right, kdhspyder, it's the All Weather mat placement that caused that accident. | |
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Nov 05, 2009 8:21 pm) Of if the car had a key switch instead of an on/off button. Lots of ifs. |
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