Senator ask NHTSA to revisit allegations of Toyota Safety concerns

Yet another attempt to hurt Toyota and drive Government Motors sales.

Who has Grassley been talking to?

 

Yes, Certainly 2009 Camry's accelerated out of control because of prototype unit testing of LS460 that was never sold in the USA.

As soon as media reports of Toyota becoming #1 surfaced, i knew they will move on Toyota again.

 

Grassley is an idiot, just on an Asian bashing binge for his more devolved constituents.

 

if this is political, it's only gonna make o'bama look good. doesn't make any sense to me. he must have another agenda.

 

Aren't they supposed to be laser focused on jobs?

 

its nothing secret, it was CNN story 5-6 months ago or something like that, it was discussed here, it was pre-production testing of adaptive cruise control on LS460 that was never sold in the USA (full speed AC). During the testing they tried to introduce various failures so they can test the failsafes, CNN got hold of testing document and said it was proof Toyota might have had problems... which is silly, since first of all it is testing, and second was that the "failure" was nothing special for even production car let alone pre-production testing.

He basically claims that investigation didnt show that it unintented acceleration cant happen, just that they didnt catch them yet.

It is like say that you could kill a person, possibly, and the fact that you didnt so far doesnt mean that you wont... it is just silly.

 

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

President James Madison to W. T. Barry 4 Aug 1822
Opening line reads "The liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded."

and also

"I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse."​

"All power in human hands is liable to be abused."​

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."​

"America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat."​

​

"I weep for the future" Ferris Bueller's Day Off

 

The 'tin whiskers' part of the Grassley questions has merit. My testing of failed NHW11 accelerator encoders revealed symptoms and corrective action consistent with the 'tin whisker' hypothesis. By using a wall-wart to burn-out the whiskers, I was able to clear the encoding problem of all of my failed NHW11 accelerators. As for his other questions about development system tests, pure nonsense.

Now if Grassley would start asking questions about the NHTSA reports concerning hybrid risks to pedestrians . . .

Bob Wilson

 

Hmm, while the senator may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, the "English" used in the report SUCKS. So much for "professional journalism".

 

They have tried to repeal Obamacare 30 some times, so the very idea of NO seems to elude them.

Some Senators spend public money building roads, others funding witch hunts.

 

Agree that "tin whisker"s should have been investigated by NASA. It makes you lose faith in the government. That should not be hard to test in the UA cars in the future. Its likely that grassley just wants the spotlight that issa had when he attacked the volt. I think this only hurts politicians that exagerate the dangers.

That sounded like an exgeration, so I looked it up, you were low 33 times
14 reasons why this is the worst Congress ever

 

I did not use an exact count as it would be wrong by the end of the week. Sigh.

 

I was replying because your number looked way to high, but is actually a little low. Thought that was clear. But, hey even the really low estimate in my head was bad. If these guys can't even pass a budget, you know their job, why are they able to play politics with something like UA or car fires days after a lab crash.

 

Because it is easier than governing. Unfortunately the electorate doesn't do it's job & puts up with it.

 

NASA's Toyota UA report does discuss tin whiskers, has a table describing the location and length of 17 of them, and pictures two of them.

 

it is not a question if tin whiskers can appear or not, but if there are failsafes in question which would make pedal not missbehave. Which is what NASA tested - various ways of making pedals and rest of the system fail and see if that causes the vehicle to accelerate - it didnt, because there are a lot of fails safes against that.

In fact, just like in that preproduction LS460 test that senator is talking about, what happened was that engineers introduced a failure in sensor that told it to accelerate but another failsafe stopped it from accelerating.

It is a witch hunt - because you can not ever prove that something hypothetically cant happen under any condition... you can prove that it didnt happen only.

 

This much is known:

• tin whiskers can cause a Toyota accelerator encoder to fail from random and even non-linear resistance
• an encoder resistance network can induce acceleration

As improbable as it may be, the resistances have to be added in the right sequence and values. Tin whisker growth shares these properties. Fortunately, all of the failed NHW11 accelerator I worked with were detected by the HV ECU causing the car to go into a "safe home" mode. But it was an intermittent "safe home" mode and the owners often just parked the car and temporarily cleared it by restarting the car.

Personally I think the NHTSA should have asked for every failed accelerator they could get from Toyota and other manufactures who use similar encoders. The NHTSA could survey what they found in light of the tin whisker hypothesis, a mapping of resistance characteristics of a couple of hundred failed accelerators, and that should be enough for a credible model. I suspect this is a vanishingly small number slightly above zero.

Fortunately, the Toyota ECUs record both brake and accelerator inputs. In the NHTSA study of accidents claiming unintended acceleration, they found application of the brake in those that had data but it was a small sample set. Since knowledge of the 'black box' recording and availability of read-out boxes provided by Toyota to the NHTSA, the reports have died down. Still, a forensic analysis of the larger population of failed accelerators in light of the Gilbert resistance model would give a quantitative number.

Bob Wilson

 

Once you quote Gilbert, all credibility goes through the window. There is nothing to discuss here. Cars are not made to be temper safe - what Gilbert does in his "research" is try to induce failures by tempering with the wires that can not and never did happen in real life. It is literally as if cutting the brakes and claiming it is unsafe design because someone can easily cut them. Gilbert works for the plaintiffs suing Toyota and he has no credibility whatsoever. His stunt on the ABC was rejected by scientific community as improbable.

There is nothing fortunate about this fail safe modes you encountered. Cars have hundreds of fail safes for various problems they could encounter. It is not done by the accident.

NTHSA and NASA have studied every report of the failure and cars that failed and never once they found the issue with ETC.

What are we even discussing Bob? Hundreds of engineers from various sources, including Gilbert and who knows how many of those like him, have tried to make this stick, and could not.

Now the crown evidence is something that has nothing to do at all with any of these reports, or tin whiskers or anything crazy like that, but adaptive cruise control on preproduction model, feature never sold in the USA and failure that had nothing to do with tin wiskers or pedals.

Now their thinking is - if during preproduction testing, Toyota had to fix this, maybe they forgot to fix something else in production? It is laughable.

And it happens 1 month after Toyota becomes #1 brand sold in the world.

Again.