Thai
Elite Member
I thought that the ES350 is on the recall list????
The REAL STORY??????
- Thread starter inscarguy
- Start date
I thought that the ES350 is on the recall list????
charlier180
New member
Yes the Lexus lady might be full of crap. Then again what if she is not?????
Sorry, with all due respect, saying Toyota does not have a problem because Audi did not have one is a weak argument in my book.
FYI, the gear selectors in Toyotas are not without their problems. Take the gear selector in my 4Runner for example.
It had electrical problems that caused it to light up MULTIPLE selector positions (ie Drive, Reverse, etc) at the SAME time and throw CEL codes.
It was replaced under my extended warranty, no questions asked
I read the C&D article. They used ONE Camry for their "test"??? :lol:
I knew there was a reason I stopped subscribing to that magazine 15+ years ago.
bradj
New member
An estimated 19 people have died in crashes related to unexpected acceleration in Toyota-made vehicles over the last decade. This has led to a national uproar, dominating the news cycle and flooding dealers with recalled autos to repair.
In a year, Toyota drivers, if they are like other drivers, put about 11,400 miles on their vehicle.
Ten years of driving (114,000 miles, give or take), times
the number of vehicles involved in the recall (8 million), equals
the total miles driven by recalled vehicles over 10 years (912 billion miles; that’s 9.12 x 10^11 for you exponentially-minded people).
So dividing the number of deaths (19) by the total miles driven gives an estimated risk of death from sudden acceleration:
2 deaths per 100 bn vehicle miles traveled
To put that in perspective, in 2008, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calculates your risk of dying from an automobile accident at 1270 deaths per 100 bn vehicle miles traveled.
Hmmm. That means that you are over 600 times more likely to die in an automobile fatality in ANY make of car than you are to die from Toyota’s flawed acceleration system. Statistically speaking, stuck accelerators and faulty floor mats just don’t matter.
Getting in a car is inherently dangerous.
Rift
New member
I propose a third option:
What do you do as a company if you discover that there is indeed a greater problem than just accelerator pedals and sticking floor mats, but you can't find the exact problem? I'm not condoning the idea of publicly pretending the
issue doesn't exist, but it is a bean-counter's mentality to accept a certain amount of risk and pay out for it.
I'm wondering if they didn't just recently start to make strides towards what they believed to be a genuine solution and then, after basically spending millions of dollars in lost wages, production time and replacement parts, figure out thanks to all these complaints coming out of the woodworks that their solution wasn't a 100% fix. I can't imagine why they would have come out with such an expensive fix as that new gas pedal unless they thought that was it. It's just bad business to shut down production if you don't have to. I also think the admission that they don't believe this issue is fixed is telling: They're back at square one.
But as for this expert ABC found re-enacting the issue, if you have to jack with the onboard programming to do it I'm not sure how reliable that is. The ECU may not be spitting out an error code because it has absolutely no idea what to do with the command the hack is giving it. This is where I'll place my faith in Toyota: if they can duplicate that short in an ECU with stock code, there's your problem. If not, move on.
Yes I read the article, but I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on your assertion it was very unbiased and truthfull. You accused ABC of dragging Toyota through the mud and your opinion was that the tester they used was questionable, because he had worked as a plantiff's witness. Fair enough, and point well taken. My opinion is that none of us are naive enough not to recognize Car and Driver has received far, far more money from Toyota ads over the years, than the SIU gentleman will ever get from a few lawyers. By your own definition Jed, that makes the Car and Driver test questionable.
Secondly we have the test itself. Or better said; What Test?? Car and Driver took professional drivers to a controlled course. Then they told them to drive cars to simulate sudden acceleration. Most importantly there was no traffic, stop lights, stop signs, or any other cars except for other professionals who were briefed in a driver's meeting ahead of time.
Come on now...is that really an "unbiased and truthful" comparison to suprised and afraid housewives, blue collar workers, and business people driving on real streets, with real traffic, stop lights, and stop signs, not to mention pedestrians? No, of course not. The Car and Driver article was set up, and to present it as relevant to Toyota owners driving the streets was a diservice to readers. This "test" was about as real world as The Bachelor or the World Wrestling Federation.
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simple
Senior Member
When I first started reading this I thought you were disproving my theory. I was like, 'damn, now I need to google lightning strike deaths'. But very nicely put together. And I agree, its ridiculous how much attention this is getting. And while I definitely think Toyota was wrong for sitting on this, when you put it into perspective like that, it would almost really make sense to not really take it that seriously.
What was really great about this article was that the Camry, with throttle stuck open, actually stopped quicker than a Ford Taurus! I agree this electronics issue is a bad thing but it can be amended; however, I disagree with the assertion that it led to multiple deaths. If you can't handle a vehicle in that situation you shouldn't be behind the wheel in the first place. You are placing yourself, and everyone else around you, in danger. Period.
Not only was his assertion correct but a stuck throttle cable can happen on ANY car, as well as an improperly secured floor mat. I've had a throttle cable stick on a full-size Chevy Blazer and a motorcycle before. I am still alive and didn't find it too difficult of a problem to control.
This lady was a moron. Worst-case scenario you just turn the engine off. regardless, go out and drive your truck and throw your transmission into reverse and see what happens- I personally will give you 1,000 dollars if your engine doesn't shut off. Sure, my 1,000 dollars won't even scrape the surface of replacing your 10,000 transmission but your engine WILL turn off.
Uneek
Super Moderator
:iagree: Toyota needs to come clean. I mentioned it before, first it was floormat entrapment, then the gas pedal. They better hope for their sake, it's not something else. Otherwise, they're doomed.
Another reason why Toyota can't duplicate the problem, because some times it only happens once and that's it. It's electronics/computer. How many times have we crashed a computer doing something, but we can't replicate the problem? I work in tech support, having supported telecommunications devices and vehicle telematics. People swear up and down they have an issue with our product. Yet it works perfectly in the lab and we cannot duplicate their problem. But when we're out in the field exactly where they are, we can replicate the issue some times just once after repeated tests. For us, it's telematic devices, no one is hurt except for the managers who can't get their employees' metrics.
Uneek
Super Moderator
Yes, full braking power only on the first couple times the brakes are applied. But there is brake fade. Which in the C&D test, IIRC, the Camry lost its brakes after the third or fifth brake. A similar result was found by that blogger who did his own testing with the Lexus ES350.
Car and Driver almost consistently ranks Honda and BMW in all tests above Toyota and Lexus respectively. The Accord has been on their 10 Best for the last 25 yrs or so. The 3-series has made 10 Best just as much.
In that C&D test, Infiniti's G came out the winner in design, having the brake override and the engine start/stop button shutting down the engine after repeated presses. Quite simply, Toyota dropped the ball in factoring in fail safes and panic situations.
And you know all of this how...because you drove the Lexus in question? You tried to shift the gears in that transmission? Are we forgetting it has been widely reported the CHP driver who died with his family in San Diego did try to turn the engine off. The lady who testified, who must be moron because an anonymous Internet poster says so, was trying to get the car in neutral. Several people here have insisted this is so, so easy. Yet the car wouldn't shift into neutral. When her husband arrived it not only still wouldn't shift gears property, but something in the electronics caused the car to try and self start. $1,000. or $10,000. is irrelevant if the electronics aren't working and a transmission doesn't shift.
A long time mechanic wouldn't give someone's Toyota back, because the shop staff drove it and the vehicle tried to run off on them. There have been thousands of reported cases about this. So are all of these people morons...or is there something wrong here? The CEO of Toyota USA admitted in his Congressional testimony yesterday, that the current recall won't fix all the problems. Did anybody else catch that? No one really knows what the problem is, do they.
Deny, deny, deny if it helps make someone feel better. Call everyone a moron if that helps someone to believe this is about bad drivers who can't put a car into neutral, use their brakes, turn the engine off, or stomp on the brakes. Did I miss any of the surefire cures we've heard over and over? Yet the facts are irrefutable; the biggest car manufacturer in the world swore this was all about floor mats, NOT electronics. Then they insisted it was actually about gas pedals, NOT electronics. Now the head cheese is under oath, and we find the story going through yet another metamorphisis. However it's still for sure NOT electronics. Are we seeing a trend here? Isn't this starting to look like Toyota will say anything...as long as it's NOT admitting they may have a electrical gremlin.
Look we already know in internal memos Toyota bragged about saving 100 million dollars by convincing the NTSB not to make them do a large recall. They blamed owners with the fantastical "evil floor mat" bit. They hired a company to "investigate" their issues, then trumpeted the company reporting there was nothing to worry about. A company who was paid by the tobaco industry for a report that said second hand smoke doesn't cause cancer. A company who didn't even look at single vehicle reported to have experienced a problem. Sort of the equilivent to having a doctor give you a clean bill of health...by giving your neighbor a physical.
At what point do we stop believing anything Toyota says about this??
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I never said that. I never even implied that. I simply said that one lady claiming that she had both feed on the brake pedal, but her car kept accelerating was similar to the claims of Audi owners back when they were having the same problem. In fact, I also said that the difference was that no defects were ever found in Audi vehicles. I guess you must've skipped over that part of my post.
How many should they have used? 10? 20? 5000? Seriously, what would it take to convince you? The guy on the ABC news story only used one car too. It only takes one car to test and publish the results. We're not talking about statistics here, we're talking about how a car will react (and to some extent, speculating about how a driver would react also) under particular circumstances. Of course doing tests like these will be repeated with mulitple cars. That should be very obvious to you.
I think Toyota knows exactly what is cauing the problems. I also think there's a good chance that it is a combination of factors. Yes, they have identified the potential for faulty accelerator pedals. They have also said that they will change the programming of the ECU to disable the accelerator pedal upon application of the brake pedal. And that's something that some other car companies are already doing. Seriously, the media is making it seems like this whole thing is more complicated than it is....when you look at the sub-systems of a modern automobile, it is not rocket science. It's just not that complicated. Toyota will engineer a fix to these problems, there's no doubt about that.
But in your theoretical scenario, I believe that ethics should always come first over a "bad" business decision when it comes to the potential for loss of life. In other words, if people are dying because of a design flaw (and that of course is debatable....most of the people who died probably would have been alive today if they just would have thought to put the car in neutral) and Toyota knowingly delayed recalling the affected vehicles, then that's unethical no matter how you slice it. In the short term, maybe it did save them money, but in the long run, it will come back to bite them for sure. It's shocking that a big company like Toyota wouldn't learn from the past. Look at the whole Tylenol scare years ago. I'm not trying to compare capsules and cars, I'm just saying that is how a company should handle a problem with its products. They teach that stuff in Business School 101.
I can't argue about advertising dollars spent, because I'm sure that they have received a lot of money. That still doesn't make me think that they would intentionally rig a test to make Toyota good. Personally, I have more faith in their credibilty than that. Of course your opinion may not be the same.
As for the test, I think you are COMPLETELY missing the point. The test wasn't conducted at all to even consider the human variable. It was simply to test the machine itself. Sure, they can talk about what people should do in such a situation, but the fact of the matter remains that they were EASILY able to stop their test Camry under wide open throttle. It only required an additional 16 feet. Think about that...who would have thought it would only require 16 more feet? Even I thought it would take more than that. But again, the whole point of that test was to determine if the car would stop. In the real world, people react differently....there are other variables to consider...no doubt about it. But it is still valuable to know that the machine is capable of stopping under wide open throttle. And to me, that was the point of the test. I'm not even going to get into the whole "put it in neutral" debate, because that brings the human variable back into the equation.
I heard that story too. Are you saying that has happened thousands of times? Because I only heard about that one specific case.
It is important to put this into perspective. First of all, the world is full of morons. They are all around, you just have to look. The problem here is that any of these morons (like the Lexus lady) have instant credibility because of the recent media frenzy over Toyota vehicles. If the Lexus lady story would have happened a year ago, nobody would be paying attention to her story and she would just be another idiot who doesn't know how to drive her car.
But to really put it into perspective, realize that it is probably about 0.00001% of Toyota owners are coming forward saying their vehicles had an unintended accleration problem. And knowing that the world is full of morons, imagine how that would skew the numbers.
Again, I don't think anyone here is saying that Toyota is innocent or that they don't have a problem. It is just unfortunate for them that the media latched on to the stories of morons like the Lexus lady.
Thai
Elite Member
Yup, page 2 of this thread:
The bottom line is that you have 2 groups of people...one group will side with Toyota and the other will side with what the rest of the population thinks.
Exactly. People are focusing on the electronics these days because the old style cable systems are a thing of the past. But it is important to realize that the old system wasn't infallible either and plenty of people had to deal with stuck throttle cables causing unintended acceleration.
I think people fear what they don't understand. I read a blog yesterday where someone claimed that a computer glitch could cause a Prius brake pedal to acclerate the car. The poster obviously had no clue about the Prius braking system, which is still a mechanical system. There is absolutely no way in the world that the brake pedal can cause a car to accelerate, computer glitch or not. But like I said, people fear what they don't understand.
Yes, and that right there is Toyota's biggest problem. I've heard about that internal memo, but I've never seen it. If it turns out that the report is accurate, then I'm quite sure Toyota will have a HUGE problem to deal with...much bigger than the actual problems with the cars themselves.
What was the timeline on that memo? When exactly was the memo dated? It would be interesting to see if the memo was written after the whole media firestorm had already started.
