I think the most important detail is that he slammed on the brakes and the car continued to accelerate. Cars with a computer controlled accelerator should be able to stop accelerating if the brake pedal is pushed.
I would also expect that he would recognize it if the accelerator pedal had been stuck on a floor mat.
I think it's interesting that even in a small forum such as HN, we still have an anecdote. It's also interesting that car owners still claim to experience the acceleration problem after the two (mechanical) recalls.
It reminds me of the Therac 25 incident, where there were only "anecdotes" to be found for _years_, and the company concluded that a mechanical switch had to be the fault. It's very interesting that we now have evidence that the software _can_ be at fault.
> I think the most important detail is that he slammed on the brakes and the car continued to accelerate. Cars with a computer controlled accelerator should be able to stop accelerating if the brake pedal is pushed.
Actually this points to his story being incorrect. If he slammed on the brakes and the car continued to accelerate than he probably slammed on the gas by accident instead. Testing shows that if you slam on the brakes while the engine is pegged at full throttle, you'll still come to a screeching halt. The brake system vastly overpowers the engine even in high powered cars. In a Camry V6 it actually takes just 16 feet further to stop from 70mph with the throttle wide open at 190ft vs. 174ft.
And the brake system is not drive-by-wire like the throttle is, so it's not susceptible to faulty ECU problems.
you don't have to talk about me in the 3rd person man. I'm right here. you can ask.
If i pushed the accelerator instead of the brake, you can sure bet I would have done more than just "bump" the taxi in front of me.
The brake was fully pressed to the floor. The engine downshifted and revved to try to move forward. Dunno what else to tell you. Sure seemed like the computer going crazy to me when it happened.
That's possible, but I don't think it's likely. The feel of an accelerator is very different from a brake pedal which normally will not go all the way down. Of course, more details about the story would be nice.
Btw, there have also been Prius recalls due to faulty ABS software, so while you'll probably always have some control, braking action can certainly be affected by software issues.
ABS is an independent pump. It can fail and you'll still be able to slam on the brakes.
Also hitting the wrong pedal is not exactly uncommon. People don't like to admit they just made a mistake, hence claims of "unintended acceleration". But just like the claims against Audi back in the day, the modern claims against Toyota appear to be unsubstantiated.
I don't think they appear to be, after numerous recalls affecting millions of Toyota cars. That there have been real cases on unintended acceleration related to Toyota is not really in dispute, unless you think Toyota did the recall mainly as a PR effort.
Some people might be unwilling to admit that they stepped on the wrong pedal, but the likelyhood that some random HNer would do that and then make a post about it?
ABS brakes work by relieving _or_ reinforcing brake pressure, so depending on the system you could end up with uneven, little or no braking action after a failure. Or you could end up with locked wheels.
You might want to actually take a look at some of those recalls, they're pretty bogus (like the whole "bring it in so we can adjust the floor mats" thing). And yes, I do believe Toyota did the recall as a PR effort. Take a look at what Audi did instead. They, correctly, stated there was nothing wrong with the cars and they took an insane PR hit and sales plummeted. There continues to be no actual evidence of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.
And I don't think HNers are somehow less likely to hit the wrong pedal or refuse to admit it. There's always that possibility that they don't even know they hit the wrong pedal.
..and the 400% increase of unintended acceleration events (from the testimony) starting in 2004 is also a complete accident, or brought on by some witchhunt?
Aren't you stretching the limits of what is a reasonable assumption in order to maintain that opinion?
The problem is cars have weird incentive schemes. Namely: fault, because it's related to insurance and they're expensive. If you have an accident, the absolute last thing you ever do is admit fault.
There's also no specific reason to think the driver would identify various mundane fault conditions - i.e. if your car lurches forward and you hit a taxi, then such an impact would be enough to unwedge a stuck carpet.
There's also lots of unknown detail - i.e. if the car was accelerating out of control while you road the brake, and you hit something at 5mph, then did the car stop accelerating at that point? Was the engine damaged and it stopped then? Why not shift into neutral if you're cognizant of the fault condition? Did the car not shift or what happened etc. In these cases make and year model - in Thailand - is pretty important too, since its a market which would have a lot of old used cars. A 1980s model minivan is going to have rather different throttle control.
It's all the hallmarks of urban legend, replete the buy-in line of it being foreign cars - which is how the story always goes and is played with the media. Sure, I'm willing to believe there are real control system issues, but it seems odd to me that no recall notices go out for ECU updates.
Well, if you read the testimony, it seems clear that Toyota is overconfident in their software. They have updated the ECU software, but still as of 2010 they managed to implement the brake failsafe in the same software task that senses the accelerator, so if that task dies the brake failsafe won't work either.
That there have been tens of deaths and millions of car recalls because of unintended acceleration in Toyotas cars is at least not an urban legend. Of course it will be very difficult to locate the exact problem, but this testimony is interesting in that it shows how that can be the case (contrary to what Toyota has claimed) [Edit: And they have actually been able to reproduce unintended acceleration by memory corrupption].
> I think the most important detail is that he slammed on the brakes and the car continued to accelerate. Cars with a computer controlled accelerator should be able to stop accelerating if the brake pedal is pushed.
The transcript from the toyota case reveals that a crash on the control thread (managing acceleration, say) would also crash the brake control system until the car was restarted.
In Toyotas, the accelerator and the breaks are (were, before this) separate systems.
The downside is that hitting the break would not cut the gas.
The upside is that you would need two separate isolated systems to fault in order to have out-of-control acceleration. Even if the accelerator system is broken, slamming on the breaks will generally always win at the hardware level.
> The upside is that you would need two separate isolated systems to fault in order to have out-of-control acceleration. Even if the accelerator system is broken, slamming on the breaks will generally always win at the hardware level.
IIRC, I think for the court case, the brakes for the particular model of car could physically not stop the engine if the engine was going 100% acceleration at highway speed.
indeed. I tried to recreate the scenario afterwards by pushing both the brake and acclerator at the same time (on an empty road of course). The car didn't try downshifting to compensate for my pushing the brake and it stopped the car.
my minivan is a toyota innova. dunno the year, a 2011 or 2012. And this happened BEFORE i heard of any software glitches. And right when it happened my first thought was "MY GOD THE COMPUTERS GONE CRAZY"
edit: oh and one more thing: I'm a 1 foot driver, and i could tell if my foot wasn't on the brake! ;)
I would also expect that he would recognize it if the accelerator pedal had been stuck on a floor mat.
I think it's interesting that even in a small forum such as HN, we still have an anecdote. It's also interesting that car owners still claim to experience the acceleration problem after the two (mechanical) recalls.
It reminds me of the Therac 25 incident, where there were only "anecdotes" to be found for _years_, and the company concluded that a mechanical switch had to be the fault. It's very interesting that we now have evidence that the software _can_ be at fault.