WSJ: Release of Toyota Documents Blocked, Ex-Official Says

lol

 

DO keep in mind that with a GII Prius (and GI and GIII I'm led to believe) if you floor the gas pedal and then apply the brake the engine goes to idle. From the video I've seen Sikes (yikes) had a GII. I've tried this and the engine does indeed go to idle. So applying the brakes will -ONLY- be fighting the kinetic energy of the car. Sikes repeatedly accelerated and applied the brakes. THAT'S why he overheated them. The police report did confirm that this is what he did. He was/is a know lair and insurance fraud so make your own conclusions.

 

Having been in the computer hardware & software R&D business, mostly real time process control, since ~1969 I can readily understand that there might be a not readily detectable design flaw in Toyota's engine control firmware that keeps the system, for instance, in the cruise control accelerate mode.

Should that flaw, or the like, exist, it would explain all 4 currently
unresolved instances of SUA. And remember that Mrs. Smith testified that she noticed that the CC light was on and turned off CC as part of her actions in an attempt to stop her Toyota.

But yes, I suspect that with ANY properly operating
Toyota HSD equipped vehicle, even the earliest ones and including Ford, stepping on the brake pedal with the gas pedal still fully depressed will always put the system in regen braking mode.

 

...

 

Apparently nobody including Sikes who ignored the 911 advice. It wasn't until a police officer risked his life to match Sike's joy ride and call out the instructions that Sikes finally did what he was told. But back to your question, the Saylor driver failed to shift into "N" and who died. Smith's car, another Lexus, right?

Many of us have held the accelerator to the floor at a wide range of speeds and found time and time again, our Prius shifts into "N" without a problem. Piece of cake and what is needed to save one's life.

Shift to N and live.

As suggested before, do the experiment and share the results:

• 20 mph
• 30 mph
• 40 mph
• 50 mph
• 60 mph
• 70 mph

There is no reason to live in fear of one's car.

Bob Wilson

 

I not only don't remember reading anything saying Sikes ever did shift into neutral nor do I remember anything being said that indicated Saylor DID NOT try shifting into neutral.

The testimony of the witnesses to the Saylor incident seems to indicate that Saylor recognized he had some sort of problem, and then pulled to the side of the road to resolve the problem. Apparently thinking whatever happened previously had been successfully resolved Saylor pulled backed onto the roadway only to have the run-a-way incident begin (again??).

 

Watch, and LISTEN, to the video.


Consumer Reports Cars Blog: NHTSA buys sudden acceleration Lexus ES 350 to test

 

I thought sikes said that he didn't wanna shift into neutral because he didn't want the car to suddenly flip over or some bullshit reason like that?

 

"..or some bullshit like that.."

NOT...!!

He was actually on fairly firm ground with that statement.

Let's say a person, any person, has just a slight or meager understanding of the HSD CVT/PSD system. Say just enough knowledge to know that shifting into neutral is NOT as simple as declutching or disengaging a gearset. Now put the engine ROARING at ~5,000 RPM, WOT, and that person might very well be reluctant to moving the shifter to ANY position other than the current one.

From my own fairly in depth knowledge of the CVT/PSD I would most definitely be concerned over the possibility that I might suddenly get really SEVERE braking on ONLY the front wheels should I shift into neutral. Were my life at serious risk I would not hesitate to declutch a manual tranny with a runaway engine or shift an automatic into neutral, ENGINE BE DAMN, let the thing blow itself UP.

But with the ICE in an HSD FWD system in a runaway state and traveling at >60 MPH I
would think long and hard before moving the shifter into neutral.

The HSD system's MGs multi-phase drive electronics system may not even have the capability to rotate the MGs fast enough, turn them in REVERSE, counter to the engine's 5,000 RPM PSD input, CONSTANT input, to bring the PSD's output drive shaft to zero rotation, let alone the firmware being designed to match the PSD output to current roadspeed with the ICE persistently turning at 5,000 RPM.

One of those "corner" conditions that engineers deem will never happen so no design preparation for same.

 

Wwest, you can spread all the fertilizer you want. Our words aren't going to change your mind. The demos on the web aren't going to change your mind. The only way you are going to have a problem stopping the car is if the shifter jams when the throttle sticks and the brake pedal is blocked. In that event please drive to the nearest airport & drive around until you run out of gas.

 

The brake pedal need not be "blocked", it appears to have been fully operational in the Saylor and Smith incidents and most likely so even in the Sikes incident.

 

Strange that a retiring NHTSA department head reports that Toyota favorable info report is being sat upon by the Dept head's office and someone wants to treat Sikes and Smith and Saylor as . . . the only three experts and final absolute sources of the facts and data in this case.

No need to consider the man with 20+ years on the job.

Many years ago I attended a going away party for some brilliant GE engineers. Sitting in the back, I was sad they were going away and as the 'hosts' were wishing them a fond "Good luck and GOOD BYE" I realized the wrong people were leaving.

From that day, I stopped attending going away parties for those I like but on their last Thursday evening, I invite them to 'bend an elbow.' The only going away parties I attend are those of the ones who I want to make sure leave . . . so I can attack anyone who tries to change their mind.

Bob Wilson

 

Who is willing to bet that the report will come out after GM IPO is done?

 

So your saying that your going to assume your own judgment is of greater depth when an emergency 911 operator, which has been briefed on how to slow down uncontrollable cars, is asking you -multiple times- to put the car into neutral?

Yeah ok. Why would toyota install a "self destruct" lever as an option when shifting? Think man. Brains. Use them. If your in a panic situation and you can't think, then why the hell are you calling 911 when you don't follow their advice?

Lets say your in a burning building, and the firemen are telling you to jump. Will you jump? OH WAIT, perhaps that window will suddenly teleport myself into a black hole if I break it?! THE CONTAINMENT FIELD WILL COLLAPSE THE BUILDING ON ITSELF! HOLY SHIT! THAT MUST BE RIGHT. The firemen are LYING.

 

Dayum, Bob, the fear of getting caught in a burning building is bad enough...now you add that.

 

I'm sticking with fairies. After all, their existence has never been disproven, and a bunch of fairies with a mean streak would explain all 4 unresolved instances. Yup. Fairies.

 

Personally I would go with an upset or crazed programmer, a really GOOD programmer/coder, that embedded a trojan horse buried deep in the engine control firmware.

Or simply an accident of coding.

Mrs. Smith's testimony indicates that the cruise control came on spontaneously. So her's and all the other incidents could be explained by the cruise control code section continuously executing the CC "accel" function to the detriment of all other capabilities.

I would think virtually everyone these days has had to restart a seemingly "dead" pc. So why is it so hard to understand, accept, that a firmware coding flaw, and even a processor hardware design flaw, could have this effect...??

 

Thorough training of the 911 operator or not, a 911 operator is not very likely to know about the uniqueness of the HSD CVT/PSD "transmission". And listen to the testimony of Mrs.Smith of TN, she even put the Camry/ES350 into reverse with no positive effect.

That would seemingly indicate that the engine control ECU was so busy doing other tasks, or simply locked in a deadly embrace executing ONLY the CC accel function, that it was not polling the shifter position electrical switches that would have indicated that a gear change was requested.

And note that Mrs. Smith was apparently only able to bring the car to a "stop" after actuating the e-brake, parking brake. Rear implemented parking brake over which there is no ABS override capability.

And the engine stopped WOT "driving" once the roadspeed dropped below 32MPH......

 

I can accept that it's possible. I cannot accept that it is at all likely without any shred of evidence or reproducibility. Driver testimony in SUA events is known to be extremely unreliable.

You have 40 years of experience, but you'll compare a commodity PC to a real-time system? I'll stick with fairies.

 

As it happens my company has literally thousands of "commodity PCs" throughout the world running real time process control tasks. The secret is to not allow any third party programming to be used/loaded along with our application, just US and Windows/XXX.

And in my experience code faults, on a relative basis, are just as likely in a real time process control environment as in a cleanly written application. Maybe even moreso since the real-time coding environment most be coded much more carefully.

"..without any shred of evidence or reproducibility..."

That's EXACTLY the world "we" live in...!!

Other than the aftermath software flaws/bugs almost NEVER leave a shred of evidence, direct evidence. And my team often spends week after week 24/7 attempting to replicate a customer experience/complaint. Millions of code path executions without a flaw and then the specific event occurs just once. And hopefully the logic analizer was hooked up properly and recorded that one event.