63Corvette

NEW YORK — The Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of black boxes in Toyota vehicles involved in accidents blamed on unintended acceleration, finding the throttles were open and the brakes were not engaged, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

That suggests that drivers of the speeding cars were stepping on the accelerator rather than hitting the brakes. The vehicles investigated came from a sample in which the drivers said they were braking but failed to stop the car before crashing, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the findings.

Transportation Department officials declined to confirm the report and did not comment. Toyota spokesman Mike Michels said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not shared its findings with the Japanese automaker but said their own findings from investigations of unintended acceleration are consistent with the report.

The black boxes, called event data recorders, are devices that track a number of details about a vehicle around the time of an accident, including which pedals were applied and how fast the car was traveling.

Toyota has recalled more than 8.5 million vehicles worldwide since last fall due to faulty accelerators, floor mats that may trap gas pedals, and brake problems in Priuses, among other problems. The largest problems were due to unintended acceleration, which the automaker has sought to address by fixing the gas pedals and floor mats.

The government has said unintended acceleration in Toyotas may have been involved in the deaths of 93 people over the past decade. The agency has received about 3,000 complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas.

Daniel Smith, NHTSA's associate administrator for enforcement, told a panel with the National Academy of Sciences reviewing unintended acceleration last month that the agency had not yet found any defects beyond the two problems cited by Toyota: pedals that can become entrapped by floor mats and sticking accelerator pedals.

John Shiels

the only strange thing is when yoda went to wireless controls their cases of unintended spiked a lot higher.

mgarfias

Wireless, or do you mean electrical vs mechanical?

CorvetteZ51Racer

Drive by wire - cableless. The unfortunate thing is that the safety is rather easy and straightforward, so long as a failure in the servo motor hardware and circuiting doesn't result in the throttle going open instead of closed. It makes me wonder if GM and all of the others who have DBW throttles (which is most everyone now) has had similar rates truly attributable to DBW failures, or if there is a real design difference in the circuiting and safeties.

Bill Dearborn

Based on what the OP posted it seems Toyota was needlessly reamed in the press just as Audi was in the late 80s. Hopefully, we don't get any unneeded regulation out of this like we did after the Audi issues.

Bet this doesn't make the headlines. Too many experts would have to apologize.

Bill

BrianCunningham

Then why did they come out with another fix

This one involves a hacksaw and bubblewrap BTW

http://jalopnik.com/5586073/latest-t...aw-bubble-wrap

johninar

Toyota vindicated? Not hardly.

Zoxxo

Questions come to my mind (assuming this is all true):

If Toyota was forced by all this publicity into a "massive recall" to fix the problem, then just wtf were they "fixing" on all those cars if nothing was wrong with them in the first place? I mean, what was being done to all those cars that were brought to the dealers for the recall???

And why just Toyotas? How come the same people who allegedly can't tell the gas pedal from the brake pedal in a Toyota apparently have no trouble telling the difference in all the other cars on the planet?

Just strange all around.

Z//

longdaddy

all automakers have complaints about unintended fat feet. every year, on most models.

toyota owners got an easy out with the media frenzy so they started getting a little more brave with "reporting" the "problem".

here's an example, notice how Ford has more unintended acceleration complaints than Toyota but Toyota owners attribute twice as many crashes to it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/bu...pagewanted=all

toyota decided to not call BS on their customers and people elected by their customers so they went through the motions of silly recalls. good decision too - biting the hand that feeds is a bad business strategy

John Shiels

Why are all manufactures putting in place an over-ride to the throttle which will be probably mandatory? yoda had a much higher rate of problems when they went throttle by wire. Why did yoda tell Exponent whom they hired not to write anything down while the investigated?

Sure some peoples claim were BS but I doubt all. Audi had the problem of pedal design as I remember.

L98Terror

They had a higher rate of reports because once someone hears a report of a throttle problem they want to us it as an excuse for their poor driving everyone wants to point a finger.

Hell I had my throttle stick wide open on my low 12 second C4 as I was heading straight for a freaking wall and I didn't hit anything. Paying attention and average driving skills you should be able to avoid most incidents.

IMO Yota should go after everyone that make a false claim, people trying to cash in is BS

SouthernSon

I dunno guys. I keep thinking about that state trooper with his family that tried everything to stop the vehicle for 2 miles until crashing into another vehicle at an intersection and killing everyone. I believe the vehicle got up to 120mph. I would think he tried brake, key, gear shift, emergency brake (useless) and whatever else for a distance of 2 miles. His son even had time to call on the cell for help.

DarkMastyr

The state trooper incident was the only one attributed to vehicle problems: stuck floormat. The investigations showed that in all the other cases, brakes were never even applied.

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/13/b...pplication-in/

John Shiels

brakes did not over take the engine because? OK if mat was trapped why does everyone say the brakes will pull a car down easy? The brakes on his car were burned up. I doubt the other cars where previous fatalities happen were even around to go back and look at.

They did know they had peddle problems so the recall was not for nothing. I had a 95 STS caddy where the mat pinned the peddle at 130 mph. Because I am used to going fast it was no big deal. The average person could really panic.

John Shiels

Some are just fraud and others are people stepping on the wrong pedal. Not sure they were none cause by wireless control. If it is so great why no brakes by wire? They have the technology now to do it just like power steering. They are not allowed to use none mechanical brakes.

They also had the problem with the bushing material in EU England / Ireland months before they did anything here in the USA. The lawyers will find the answers.

yoda e-mails also confirmed they were bragging internally about delaying / implementing safety recalls and changes to saved 100 million in a few years.

John Shiels

Zoxxo

All the other investigated cases. I'd love to know how those cases were selected. Did Toyota have *any* input into the choices?

Given Toyota's long, well-known history of lying, delaying, cheating, and purposeful obfuscation in recalls, lawsuits, etc., I sure wouldn't be all that quick to give them a pass on *anything*.

Two of our four cars here are Toyotas (pre fly-by-wire) and they are damned good cars. All the more reason for them to be up front about everything. Their BS actions do far more damage to them in the long term than any recalls or safety issues (as can be easily seen by what's transpired for them over the past couple of years.)

Z//

redrckt97

I still don't get why shifting to neutral would not work -- how would the electronincs prevent that from happening????

SouthernSon

But I have a problem with discounting the other actions the trooper must surely have tried. That notwithstanding, I am suspicious of their wording when they say, "Even so, this case was chalked up as an incident where the floor mat trapped the gas pedal". What does 'chalked up' mean. Interior was so disheveled that one could not determine where the mats had been? The mats were jammed from impact into pedal mechanism? I would think if the cause were definately determined the wording would be more than 'chalked up'. ...I'm just sayin'.

ScaryFast

Mercedes had a production brake by wire system called the EHB (electro-hydraulic braking) in the E-class from 2003 - 2006. It was dropped due to several factors, most importantly was cost. The system was also loud as the pump had to run often to keep the line pressure up. Customers complained.

The amount of failure analysis for a brake system or steering system vs. throttle is exponentially higher. For that Mercedes system there were still back up mechanical brakes. It's not as easy as it sounds.