2010 throttle override safety measures

No. Unless it happens over 100mph. That is as high as I was willing to test it.
Modern engines and ECUs use a rev limiting function so that your engine will not rev higher than a number specified in the ECU. It will just sit at the rev limit and "bounce" off it as we tend to call it in the racing world.

This is what it sounds like when you "bounce" off the rev limiter. Watch the blue Trans Am near the end of the burnout and you hear the studdering sound of the engine bouncing off the rev limiter set at 6,500rpm.

http://www.fatalfoo.com/Movies/f8lypony_pass.mpeg

 

I didn't word that correctly. I didn't mean just turning off the "engine." I know the steering wheel works in EV mode with the engine off.
I meant turning the car completely "OFF."
The car can remain "ON" even with the fob out of range and the gas motor off.
What happens with the electric steering when the car is completely off?

 

It's just harder to steer. That's all. At 5mph, it's relatively difficult and would require a little muscle, at speed, it's just heavy (use two hands.)

 

Agreed and at speed it is fairly easy to steer. I drove for 3 years in a raced-out 87' Mustang GT with power steering disconnected.

 

I know that's the way old hydraulic power steering has traditionally worked, so that's normal for an '87 Mustang.
I don't want to assume anything based on the way other cars have worked in the past.
I wanted to make sure people are answering based on the 2010 Prius.
People were saying the new electric steering is like "drive by wire" electronic control that needs power to work at all.

 

The steering in the Prius (all 3 generations) is power assisted not "steer by wire". The steering system senses when you put pressure on the steering wheel and uses the electric motor to help you. When the car is turned off you have manual steering that is actually easier than the manual steering you get when hydraulic power steering is turned off or failed. This is because you don't have to use the steering wheel to push the power steering fluid around in the system.

If you drive down the highway and turn your Prius off you may not even notice the difference in the steering until it slows to below 25 or so MPH, then it will be a little harder to turn as F8L mentioned. The brakes will also operate normally unless you use up all the fluid in the accumulator then they become non-power manual brakes and will require more pedal pressure, but the accumulator holds enough for at least one stop, probably more.

But if you have a highly unlikely emergency situation, such as a floor mat wraped around all the pedals so they won't move, put the car in neutral by holding the shifter in N for 1 second. Then you will still have power steering and power brakes, the engine will go to idle speed when the car goes into neutral.

 

No. It is electrically assisted, not steer-by-wire. The steering becomes stiffer, but still works fine.

No. There is no steering wheel lock on the Prius.

No. Holding down the power button while moving at speed forces the Prius into N while keeping the electronics powered up. Unlike N, you cannot shift back into drive without first cycling the power off and back on.

Tom

 

I'm not sure if anyone answered the OP's question, but

The prius and TCH have throttle overide from the brakes. They are not like other toyotas

IMHO Toyota should have started this in all of their cars soon after the unintended accelleration issues first started getting spun and ignored in 2004. If they had done that, as all the german automobiles did, they may have prevented a number of deaths. Often accidents are caused by a number of things going wrong.

That is good to know.
Is there a reboot button is the prius like on my desktop?

 

If Microsoft had designed the Prius, reboot would be <parking brake><accelerator pedal><left turn signal>.

Tom

 

That is how I answered the question -- I tested it with my car completely shutdown 'OFF' and parked overnight.

 

I don't believe consumer electronics have yet reached that level of reliability and fault tolerance to put pure "drive by wire" into things where failure == death. Because of that, steering and brakes still include a purely mechanical backup path.

Engine failure is much less dangerous, so it can be made "drive by wire".

 

Stay away from Airbus and modern jetfighters, then, lol... Anyway, just wanted to put one idea out there as well that I saw in a previous thread: to avoid the 1-second hold-in-Neutral delay, simply shift into Reverse. The nice thing about computer-controlled transmissions is that it will not ruin the engine, but simply put it into 'N' without the delay (at least that's what was alleged on a previous thread, not owning a Prius (yet) I cannot confirm/dispute this claim)

 

Neither of which is falls into the category of 'consumer electronics'. Their price tags are about 4 decimal places out of range.

[note: fixed unintended double negative in my original post]

 

And even Airbus had their share of update problems. One of my pilot friends flew the early fly-by-wire Airbus, and he cringed every time a new update came out. He said they would fix one problem and reintroduce old problems. He and the other pilots liked to joke about putting down the flaps and having all of the toilets flush.

Fortunately, I don't think any of the update issues were catastrophic.

In the area of automobiles, I think we will see auto-updates fairly soon, but not in the area of control systems. The first area for automatic updates will be navigational systems, where map data changes frequently and people are already comfortable with the idea of updates.

Tom

 

If anyone on this forum sees a scary video of a shaking Lexus steering wheel at startup now making its way on YouTube, et al, it came from the Lexus IS Forum on Club Lexus, and it indeed does show a violently R-L shaking steering wheel at vehicle startup. The wheel moves from about 10 AM to 2 PM about once a second with strong force. The Lexus also has electric power steering but...What is on the Forum but not making it's way to the video being circulated is that the owner installed an aftermarket HID kit and placed tha ballast right next to the electric power steering ECU and apparently has fried the ECU via the heat from a poorly insulated ballast. He's found others with aftermarket HID who have had similar problems. I could not post the video link here for some reason, but thought I'd educate anyone here with the back story and facts. I guess now the car manufacturers will have to protect everyone from not only their own engineering but anyone else's who has the lowest cost aftermarket product.

 

Go to thedecelerator .com, it is an override completely separate from the car's computers.

 

Even military and civilian aircraft have lacked purely mechanical backup for a long time now. Long before fly-by-wire we had fly-by-fluid: the control column actuated servos that routed hydraulic fluid to elevators and ailerons, and the yaw control at the rudder was also by hydraulic fluid alone.

A catastrophic failure of the hydraulic systems resulted in loss of control. I have posted links of these failures: the United Airlines DC-10 that crashed in Sioux City, IA, and the JAL 747 that crashed in Japan, were the direct result of total hydraulic failure

When I still used to do that sort of work, it was EXTREMELY stressful. In an era when a lot of "professional" people had already no longer smoked, this was one of the few "professional" occupations where most of the folks chain-smoked in a perpetual cloud

The only way to predict - with any sort of certainty - how a given update will impact the control system, is to perform very rigorous and costly lifecycle testing. For obvious reasons, the vendors are reluctant to do so

Keep in mind one of the most serious Airbus fly-by-wire problems involved a purely mechanical glitch: the sidestick transducer was susceptible to spilled coffee, dirt, etc, which sent voltage spikes to the control system

Software changes, maintenance of the sidestick, and a field-installed resister (To dampen voltage output), took care of that problem

 

I'm counting the brake-by-fluid in common cars as 'mechanical' -- in the event of total car power failure, driver muscle power alone can still operate them.

 

Information on the "thedecelerator.com" web site is a bit sparse, but I understand that it installs between the throttle sending unit and the ECU. Thus it might isolate a stuck throttle, but what about a crashed ECU? I don't see how this is a true failsafe device given just the information on their web site.

Regarding the discussion of fly-by-wire, I recall taking a tour of an Air Force C5-A Galaxy about 25-years ago. This is a huge aircraft, second in size only to a Russian transport, if I remember correctly. At any rate, I looked under the cockpit control panel (dashboard) and what did I see but cables and pulleys! Is this fly-by-wire? I can't imagine human muscles being strong enough to actuate those huge control surfaces, maybe the cables led to hydraulic control actuators under the flight deck?

 

All the controversy has motivated me to find out one simple thing I did not know about the Prius drive train: Neutral works.
That is, putting the car in Neutral while driving feels just like Neutral in any other car: the engine/motor does not drive the wheels.
The wife and I have practiced putting the car in Neutral and applying the brakes while driving, pulling off the road and Pushing the Start Button for 3 seconds to kill everything.
My next practice will be to find an abandoned parking lot, and find out what happens when you push the Start button while driving at 20 miles an hour.
These are things people need to know: just as we learned how to operate clutch and shift gears in the older cars. And practiced pumping the brakes on slick roads, before ABS brakes.