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Automotive News & Views Toyota in decline in 2009?
3741 messages, Last post on Dec 04, 2009 at 8:18 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: lemko (Nov 08, 2009 11:11 am)
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Replying to: gagrice (Nov 08, 2009 1:23 pm) |
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Replying to: berri (Nov 08, 2009 1:27 pm)
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Replying to: houdini1 (Nov 08, 2009 1:36 pm) Again no independent reputable agency of any kind has found any substantiation for unintended acceleration in these reports. To me that speaks most loudly. All these reports have one vector. They come from the operators but no one can verify any of them. |
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Replying to: houdini1 (Nov 08, 2009 1:36 pm)
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Replying to: gagrice (Nov 08, 2009 1:23 pm) The highest speed limit in the US (and Canada I think) is 80 mph on about 500 miles of I-10 and I-20 in west Texas and on 2 stretches of I-15 in Utah. Why does any car in today's traffic need to go above 90 mph? If you say you need reserve power at 80 mph to get out of a jam, I'd find that hard to believe.
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Replying to: steve_ (Nov 08, 2009 12:17 pm) A friend of my wife's is big into horses. They have several including one that can trace its ancestry back to the big French warhorses in the middle ages that were bred for huge size. They had to be very big to hold not just the armored knight but the armor of the horses as well. This horse is enormous before it was even full grown, less then two years old it was already a good foot taller then me at the shoulder and is supposed to grow another foot or more. Only horses I have ever seen that were bigger are clydesdales and they weren't that much bigger. |
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Replying to: surrfurtom (Nov 07, 2009 4:49 pm) Well, the other day, on a whim, I tried it on my 2000 Intrepid, on the way to work. On a back road, I stomped on it, and once I got up to around 50 mph I threw it into neutral, with my foot still on the gas. The revs had been climbing, and were around 4,000 rpm when I shifted to neutral. Once in neutral, it cut back a bit, to around 3800. Also, I think most modern automatics are designed so that they're impossible to redline. FWIW, redline on my Intrepid is around 6500 rpm. If I stomp on it, usually it upshifts at around 6,000-6100 rpm. And even if you try to manually hold shift into the lower gears, it will upshift on its own. Plus, there isn't a place on the gearshift for 1st gear, so the lowest you can ever downshift to is second.
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Replying to: berri (Nov 08, 2009 2:09 pm) It's not just one company (Toyota) or two (counting Audi from the 80s). Here's a quote from the self-styled expert, Sean Kane, who runs Safety Research and Strategies, Inc. Manufacturers may deny SUA [sudden unintended acceleration] exists, NHTSA may declare that it isn’t worth its time to thoroughly investigate these incidents, but consumers continue to lodge complaints about sudden unintended acceleration – and they can’t all be little old ladies in the first stages of dementia. The complaints data show clearly that some manufacturers and some vehicles are outliers, with significantly more complaints than their peers. In the last 10 years, the agency has collected some 24,000 consumer complaints (source: www.VSIRC.com). When these complaints are sorted by manufacturer and vehicle and charted, the vast majority of automakers flat-line at the bottom. The trendline of complaints for four manufacturers—Ford, GM, Chrysler, and Toyota, however, float above their peers with occasional spikes, leading one to conclude that either these manufacturers have a problem, or the most confused consumers gravitate to their vehicles. Could the 4 cited manufacturers "float above their peers" because they happened to sell the most vehicles in the US until very recently? Kane doesn't say anything about a complaint rate. Full link here (caution: tiny white font on a black background -- get out your reading glasses). |
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Nov 07, 2009 7:58 am) My intent, which most on here probably understand, was to see how much the brakes fad at full throttle in a lower gear with some time to apply the brakes if vacuum assist was totally lost. I still had braking fairly easily after using the brakes on and off for several seconds after the power assist was depleted from the reservoir. It would have stopped the car against the motor in 2nd on a downslope. The officer's ride was not completely downslope; it was a downslope at the end if I recall correctly. Otherwise he would have been below sea level always traveling downhill. I cannot believe someone panicking (as I would) over not being able to turn off the "missing key" nor to get the car in neutral wouldn't have stood on the brakes hard at the beginning. Long before driving 2-3 minutes heating up rotors. Long before heating of brake fluid. And I'm sure he was much stronger than I am since he was a working officer. What about the emergency brake--it doesn't use hydraulic fluid. Wouldn't someone press the emergency brake? Frankly, it just doesn't add up here. Sweeping the problem under the mat as the sole problem just doesn't pass the test. As Judge Judy says if it doesn't sound right then it's not the way it happened. Where is the black box report?
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