Is the floor mat really a Toyota specific problem? What is so damn awful about their floor mats that you end up in an accident?
I had a Ford and I put in rubber floor mats on top of the OEM carpet ones. No problem upon installation, but overtime they slipped up behind my pedals and I had problems with braking/acceleration. I stopped, got out, pull the floor mat back 3", and everything was fine. Now if I feel the floor mat creeping up I just pull it back. If you took 3 seconds to open your door and look at the mat behind the pedals it was an obvious problem.
I've had the exact same problem with the rubber floor mats on a Mazda 6, Subaru Forester, and Ford Explorer. The solution everytime is the same, pull the floor mat back into its proper position. It really isn't that hard.
So Toyota gets blamed for something that can happen to anyone, anytime, using any car and any floor mat. Why is that?
(On the other hand, Toyotas are far from perfect, on my girlfriends Toyota the sun visor is so far out of position in order to lower it you need to rotate the rearview mirror out of its way about 2". How did that pass QA?)
The floor mat replacement was a red herring. I've used aftermarket mats in cars without proper pins, and it's a matter of using your brain to not get them tangled up in the accelerator (which is actually hard to do). Stupid people do stupid things, and the stupid media celebrates stupidity for the sake of stupid viewers.
It was a floor mat from a suv(bigger) put in a Lexus sedan. The reason the thing was such a media darling because it had all the trappings for news ratings: Borrowed luxury vehicle, police officer off duty, 911 call up until the end, 90 plus mph, flying off a cliff to a huge crash and fire that killed the whole carload of passengers. If it was an accelerator getting stuck and crashing into a pole from a red light it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention.
The first time I read this account, my immediate response was that the police officer was an idiot. Regardless of why the accelerator is stuck, it seems as though a trained police officer should know that you can shift a moving car into neutral with the flick of a wrist. Yes it might ruin the engine, but who cares.
The fact that he had time to call 911 and didn't do this first is shocking to me. I knew this trick since I was 16 - and cars aren't even my thing.
I've read that when the engine is racing, it can take some force to get the transmission into neutral. Don't know if that's actually true (never tried, and I usually drive a manual), but it would explain the failure.
Nope, usually pretty easy. In 1999 I had the the throttle linkage break on a 5-ton truck I was driving up I-10. It instantly went to full throttle, accelerating as madly as a heavy truck can, and I simply put it in neutral and signaled for the next exit and pulled over to the shoulder. The engine was screaming, it wouldn't shut off with the key (diesel) and I finally got it off by putting a book over the intake. Then I fixed the linkage with some wire and drove home.
My '09 Toyota Corolla has hooks that keep the floor mats in place. The only way to jam the mat underneath the brake pedal would be to do it deliberately.
I had a Ford and I put in rubber floor mats on top of the OEM carpet ones. No problem upon installation, but overtime they slipped up behind my pedals and I had problems with braking/acceleration. I stopped, got out, pull the floor mat back 3", and everything was fine. Now if I feel the floor mat creeping up I just pull it back. If you took 3 seconds to open your door and look at the mat behind the pedals it was an obvious problem.
I've had the exact same problem with the rubber floor mats on a Mazda 6, Subaru Forester, and Ford Explorer. The solution everytime is the same, pull the floor mat back into its proper position. It really isn't that hard.
So Toyota gets blamed for something that can happen to anyone, anytime, using any car and any floor mat. Why is that?
(On the other hand, Toyotas are far from perfect, on my girlfriends Toyota the sun visor is so far out of position in order to lower it you need to rotate the rearview mirror out of its way about 2". How did that pass QA?)