Unintended Acceleration -- While Parking

Sooo...wanna sell your car?

The problem with all of this is of course that this forum is extremely suspicious of those who would Hoax the Prius or misdirect personal failures to the car because about this time last year...a similar act occurred (remember the guy driving the prius down the freeway with the cop next to him yelling that he could not stop?)

The timing of Your Friends complaint is pretty suspicious...about 1 year to the date of that other infamous hoax...Also "all those posts being liars" is still a representation of .0001% of all Gen III US Prius owners so it also appears to be a very small number of people claiming unintended accel. It is statistically insignificant and perhaps indicative of people who may have lied or may be mistaken but even if they were all correct you would by that basis be more likely to win the lottery or be thunderstruck than have your Prius Accell unexpectedly...In fact a friend of mine had the right front wheel come off his GM Escalade...it was practically new and I count 105 posts about similar issues with the Escalade wheel...wow imagine that happening at 70 mph...HMMM lets get all worked up about Escalade safety for the sake of those poor owners....

My point is this...a statistically insignificant number of complaints coupled with suspicious timing is going to get your friend no sympathy on this forum and probably not scare any of us so why keep this thread alive? Are you trying to save anyone or just Punk us?

 

The fact that the "engine kicked in and made aloud noise" is exactly the expected behavior in the case of fully depressing the accelerator instead of the brake.

 

have you been living under a rock? toyota already investigated. nothing. the government investigated. nothing. nasa investigated. nothing. if it ain't broke, you can't fix it. your 'friends' situation is not going to change anything.

 

Why didn't you say earlier that you were there and saw where his feet were as the event happened?

 

Going back to the Audi's UA problems in the 80's, and other incidents with UA problems in a variety of vehicles, the one common element found was that people actually believed they had their foot on the brake pedal when in fact they were pressing down on the accelerator. Toyota has proved this to be the case in countless examinations of "black boxes". So, sorry if the majority of us here express doubt because not one piece of evidence has been found outside of the "floormat wedged up against the accelerator" issue that points to a defect other than the driver's right foot.

 

It was not an unintended acceleration fix, but rather a lack of deceleration that kicked in when the car ran over rough roads and the brakes were not firmly applied. The software fix was to adjust response time during a deceleration event!

 

Weirder stuff has happened....

 

No offense to the original poster, but it's videos like this that really support the "coincidence" that all the reports seem to happen only "while parking".

 

Back in the fall of 1971, I was at a drive-in theater with three other friends watching the movie "Woodstock" and consuming mass quantities of alcohol and weed. When we the movie ended I proceeded to pull out of the space when suddenly my foot slipped off the brake pedal and landed squarely on the gas pedal pushing it to the floor. The car a 1969 Cadillac accelerated out of control into several other cars. When the dust cleared nobody was hurt but the damage was severe. Looking back at the space we had previously occupied there were piles of beer cans on either side. This was an absolute case of unintended acceleration! True story!

 

I have direct, first-hand experience with an ICE surge in a very similar parking situation, about a decade ago with about a quarter century of driving experience. This experience very strongly colors my view of similar events.

The differences:
() The event was halted before any collision occurred;
() The car was not my Toyota, but a very old manual transmission Honda;
() It was resolved purely by reflex -- hit the clutch, and released / reapplied the brakes as if the tires were sliding on glare winter ice. No thinking was involved.

If you would have stopped this in mid-event and asked about my degree of certainty of the situation, I would have bet a very large amount of money that my foot was on the brake, not the gas. But hindsight noticed two points of evidence to the contrary: () the engine surge calmed the instant I released the 'brake'; () when the brake was reapplied (and it did work correctly the second time), the pedal felt different, and it somehow had shifted itself to the left.

Based on this event, and on the many odd statistics surrounding the events that happen to others, and the various studies of the Prius and earlier episodes, I now demand considerably more evidence before putting too much weight in these reports. Things needed to change my mind include:

() Reports from drivers who released and reapplied the brakes, and the engine did not calm while the brake was released;
() Reports of runaway ICE surges in manual transmission versions of cars with the same electronic throttle controls (only possible in models with choice of tranmissions);
() A balanced age distribution of the statistics, not the current strong skew towards older drivers.

This misrepresents the Prius brake system. While there is a computer control layer in there, Prius still has the same mechanical footpedal to hydraulic system found in other cars. In the event of computer failure, most able-bodied adults should be able to use brute muscle force to push right through that computer layer, the same way they must in a regular car or SUV when the brake booster suffers a complete power loss. My first decade of driving produced considerable experience with this due to engine stalls.

I cannot say that all engine surges are driver error. But mine was. And based on the considerable evidence that has been publicized, I strongly feel any real computer glitch events are greatly outnumbered by, and hidden beneath, a vastly higher rate of human error.

 

"The black box recordings work when the computer is functioning correctly. But what happens during a glitch? I read one of the complaints where Toyota told the customer the black box showed he applied the brake and throttle simultaneously more than 160 times. His comments were pretty funny."

Yup, I believe that was the "weirdo" over here in SAN driving east on I-8. It was pretty much proven that there was absolutely no problem with his Prius, and that he apparently deliberately "pumped" the brake and accelerator pedals alternately intending to get a bunch of money from Toyota.

Anyway, let the black box tell the story. It's possible that there was a mechanical malfunction; but I'll put my money on driver error.

 

How do you know from the complaints that the cars actually were accelerating?

People could for example feel a momentary reduction in deceleration and believe it to be acceleration.