note to self, must put car into neutral gear if it starts to race .
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Toyota/Lexus deaths - Dial 911 or switch of ignition?
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Posted 2 years ago #
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We’re in a Lexus. . . and we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck. . . we’re in trouble. . . there’s no brakes
I repeat
there’s no brakes
Folks. This isnt directly linked to the sticky accelerator pedal when cold or condensation. Its potentially a different problem.
This guy was a Highway Patrolman. RIP and have some respect for some of the comments hypothosising on what we would do.Posted 2 years ago # -
She said there were no brakes but when under severe pressure people have a tendency not to be able to get the right words out.
Posted 2 years ago # -
PMSL
So if you couldn't cut the ignition, you couldn't get it out of gear and your brakes had failed then what would you have done? Tell us oh Driving God?Posted 2 years ago # -
molgrips - Member
You can't put it into park, that would destroy the tranny for sure.
hmm tranny or your life! i wonder??
We are talking about putting it into neutral which you can normally do. Are you even reading the thread?
unfortunatly yes, seems like some people have no idea of mechanics
Posted 2 years ago # -
I have plenty of idea about mechanics thanks. I've never tried putting an auto under full load into neutral tho. Have you?
Oh and as for having no idea about mechanics... when you engage park it sticks a pawl like thing in the final drive I believe, which would cause either the pawl or the gears to break apart if you did it at speed.
Posted 2 years ago # -
lol well you wouldnt put the car into park function if you were speeding out of control?
hmm ok
ofcourse no one has tried to put the car into neutral before because we are not in the situation
but if i were i would break the car before i was
Posted 2 years ago # -
So if you couldn't cut the ignition, you couldn't get it out of gear and your brakes had failed then what would you have done? Tell us oh Driving God?
Hit the brakes as hard and sharp as possible (thus not allowing them the chance time to boil) and stuck it into the nearest available immovable object that wouldn't hurt anyone else whilst the car was still going slowly enough for no serious harm to be done.
Probably...
Are you into eugenics? Those who have less than stellar intelligence should die? Just thought I'd ask.
Not at all, though it would perhaps be a good answer to the worlds rapidly increasing population and lack of resources!!!
(JOKE BTW, for those without a sense of humour!!!)Seems odd about the brakes not being able to dissipate the car. I mean they can slow it from 70mph faster than you can accelerate to that speed.. so surely they should be more than a match?
Confused.
Exactly what I was thinking too. 272bhp and 400Nm ish of torque can accelerate said vehicle to 60mph in approx 8 seconds, but the brakes will stop it from 60mph to a standstill in less than 3 seconds. Suggests to me that the brakes are capable of delivering torque far in excess of the engines capability.
molgrips - the brakes would have boiled. Bear in mind the brakes were trying to stop a 272bhp car weighing a couple of tons that was on full throttle. No contest sadly
It takes a fair length of time to boil the brakes on a car, certainly a lot longer than is required for a single stop from 60mph or so. On a trackday in my old Beemer, repeated slowing down from 120mph to 40mph or so, it took 4 laps before the brake pedal went long on a totally standard brake setup, on an almost equally as heavy car (BMW 5 series) with similar power output (286bhp in my case). Brakes don't boil THAT quickly! Unless they were perhaps being dragged and not stamped upon.
Brakes will cook very quickly when working against full engine power. The best thing you can do in the situation (assuming you can't get it in neutral) is to slam the brakes on as hard as possible as soon as possible. Gradual braking is absolutely sure to cook the brakes - the fluid won't normally boil, even under very hard use, but the pads burn up and the escaping gases force them away from the surface of the disc, massively reducing their effectiveness.
Agreed, though even though working against the engine, the brakes would still not boil instantly.
Posted 2 years ago # -
if it was a petrol engine with a vacuum servo on the brakes it wouldnt have any "servo" power as with the throttle wide open it wouldnt have manifold depression to power it .
Posted 2 years ago # -
Also a bit worrying is all these people out there who are driving with their foot to the floor.
Horrible way to go though.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Well, the Popular Mechanics website states that you actually can stop a car at full throttle in gear by pushing as hard as poss on the brake. The brakes are more powerfull than the engine, Sounds right to me unless your brakes are knackered.
This seems to make sense as cars are alpine tested with a load trailer down a very long downhill alpine pass with the handbrake on...repeatedly, till the brakes boil and then some. The cars brakes have to work in that situation otherwise you cant legally sell them.
Engine off, the brakes will work but with no servo assist (so the brake pedal will be harder) but also most cars will loose their power assisted steering in this situation. Handbarke will always work as its cable actualted. IIRC electronic handbrakes are on an emergency system so should be independant of the ignition.
If you're in a manual car the first best course of action is to stand on both the clutch and brake pedals as you retain brake servo, power steering etc. Had this happen to me a few years back in a car where the floormat moved forwards and got stuck over the accelerator...scary but easy to stop the car provided you stay calm.
Autos are a different issue but you still have some manual control over the gearbox. You should be able to at least change down, not sure about getting the car into Neutral under full load though but I cant believe that you cant...hmmm, can you crash change it?. If you cant it seems the best option there is to cut the ignition, stand on the brakes with both feet and pray.
Oddly enough a lot of uncontrolled acceleration incidents in the UK are due to people mistaking the accelerator for the brake, then pressing harder when they start going faster...
Posted 2 years ago # -
certainly a lot longer than is required for a single stop from 60mph
Whilst under full throttle? Maybe going downhill too? It clearly wasn't enough since evidence showed the brakes were applied. Would you only have applied PART brakes if you thought you were going to die due to excessive speed? I mean really.
What knottie said, anyway.
Posted 2 years ago # -
well i can see why he didn't knock it in to neutral ( even if it was a auto or a mmt gear box ) and as for no brakes i can't under stand why the epkb was not pumped or pull on . the artical is about the accelerator pedal under the carpet / mat and not a sticking issue , at lease toyota have been up front for there faults were as some manufactures arn't
Posted 2 years ago # -
The fact is that if you pussyfoot around at all - dabbing the brakes here and there whilst trying to get the pedal back up, you will exhaust the vacuum and the servo assist will go. I've braked cars with no servo vacuum on odd occasions, and it's very difficult even at walking pace.
Doing it against the engine would made no difference at all.Posted 2 years ago # -
Didnt Toyota state the brakes are new/gas and a possibly faulty design?
Posted 2 years ago # -
I still think you can work the brakes pretty effectively with out the servo, sure you got to press a LOT harder, but they still work. Hell of a lot of cars out there of a certain age with the servos on the way out, its only a rubber diaphragm in most of them to my knowledge and that disintegrates with time and exposure to heat and petrochemicals.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I still think you can work the brakes pretty effectively with out the servo, sure you got to press a LOT harder, but they still work.
Yup, they work a bit, but I'm a 6'1 bloke who can squat more than twice my body weight and I can't overcome the automatic box and 3.5litre engine *at idle!* in my dads car when the servo isn't working (I've tried!).
well i can see why he didn't knock it in to neutral ( even if it was a auto or a mmt gear box )
You can't always knock the box into neutral - remember its the US so mostly auto, and most autos are just an electronic switch that tells the box a change is required, you can't force many things on a modern auto. If it were a manual I'm fairly sure a cop would have had the brains to press the clutch and knock it out of gear.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Keyless ignition designed to require 3seconds push when the car is moving before engine is stalled, this is deliberate and prevents your kids messing with stuff when your driving and causing a crash.
Gearbox on the lexus was of the non mechanical shift type, ie like the stupid i-drive BMW thing = confusing..
Dont understand why you would not be able to select "N" even under load as the gearbox requests torque from the engine relative to accel pedal and drivers gear selection. If you select "N" the gearbox should request a reduction in engine torque and speed limitataion, this would override the accel pedal input (no sane reason why this is not the case).
The most important question that is being missed so far is;
When we had a mechanical link between the driver and the throttle their was no capability to offer a safe failure mode to the driver should the throttle stick open.
Today with us having electronic engine / gearbox / braking control it is possible to offer a safe failure mode by comparing brake input to accel pedal, this can be done in a way that still allows left foot braking / track use but still gives the driver a way to slow the car.
Regardless of if the cause of your stuck accel pedal is the plastic in the pedal Or a footwell mat, or inadequate space around the pedal IT IS POSSIBLE to offer the driver a way of overriding the accel pedal.Pressing the brake pedal with full effort in a +200bhp vehicle when at mway speed will only result in masssive brake fade. stalling the engine is bad as you then loose steering and brake assist, surely overriding the accel pedal is the way forward.
such a system may be found on a car/van having a certain german engine control units.
brake servos not as effective today as in the past, modern engines dont support much vac.Posted 2 years ago # -
A modern automatic transmission will select neutral when the Neutral button/stick position is selected. Being on full load doesn't make a difference. I'm 99.999999% sure that the 'full load' element will not make a difference to older, non electronically controlled, planetary-auto transmissions too, but I don't know that as a fact.
A 2009 model Lexus would not have an old style planetary-auto (i.e. non electronically controlled) however.Of course there could have been other failures present on the car such as a faulty shift lever that could have stopped neutral being selected. If so, the driver would have been very unlucky to have suffered multiple failures.
Posted 2 years ago # -
My thoughts are with the family of the four. **** futile way to go.
On a sidenote, Toyota knew of a problem with the accelerator last year but probably protecting their 'brand' ...decided to wait. I hope they sleep well at night.
Posted 2 years ago # -
My Fiat Van, if you left foot brake with your foot on the gas, it kills the gas, so you are not able to left foot brake, I know other fiat cars are like this and I would think other brands with "fly by wire" throttles are the same ?.
Going on what the guy from Toyota was saying on JV Radio 2 programme today its all in the electronics in the pedal and condensation causing the problem.Posted 2 years ago # -
It's a big, heavy, expensive car. I think there's a good chance it has a separate vacuum pump for the brake servo anyway.
You can't engage Park in an automatic when moving - the lever will shift to that position but the pawl just clicks until the speed is low enough to lock in. It will put the box into neutral though.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Tried braking whilst accelerating in my Vito yesterday and its cuts the power immediately. Gonna find a auto to try it on today but i suspect its the same.
Posted 2 years ago # -
On a sidenote, Toyota knew of a problem with the accelerator last year but probably protecting their 'brand' ...decided to wait. I hope they sleep well at night.
There has been a problem for a while and Toyota have been investigating it for ages too - this has been rumbling in the US for months if not years. We are talking about (I think) single figures actual crashes in 8 million cars that are being recalled, that's got to be hard to find in lab testing. There have been no crashes in Europe I seem to remember hearing, and that's in 1.1 million cars.
Posted 2 years ago # -
No, there has been no cases of fatal crashes in Europe but it was amazing how many came out the wood work on the Radio 2 on Thursday and they had been palmed off with the drivers mat getting stuck under the pedal.
Posted 2 years ago # -
To me this seems like another case of technology overcoming common sense.
Lets have fancy buttons and electronic cards for everything and then find we cant just use the key to kill the engine.
So will Toyota fit a huge red kill switch on the top of the dash to stop them getting sued in the future ?
Course not, that will hurt sales !
Posted 2 years ago # -
It's that internet forum game again.
Half a story gets reported in the media and everyone has a go at guessing the rest of it.
As a mechanic, I could add my own guesses and experiences, but why bother.Either it is possible to shift to neutral while under power or it isn't.
Either pressing the brake pedal disables the throttle or it doesn't.
Either the brakes will overcome the power of the engine or they won't.Toyota know the answers and won't publish them.
Any decent journalist could hire a car and take it to a test track to find out, but won't because it's easier to write speculation and opinion than proper journalism.Posted 2 years ago # -
cut n paste from email sent to me.
"There was bad news for God this week as the popular deity was forced to recall thousands of examples of His popular Human Being after reports that the model could be prone to unexpected attacks of unbelievable stupidity.
Initial reports of blithering idiocy emerged from the United States last year but these were thought to be isolated incidents caused by people who are so thick that if a floor mat was touching their accelerator pedal would prefer to scream ‘Aaaaaaargh’ until they drove into a river rather than simply moving the mat backwards with their foot. However, it now seems the monumental stupidity is more widespread and may cause some Human Beings to decide that the best course of action in the event of being in a car with a throttle that won’t release is to telephone someone rather than to, for
example, put the ****ing car into neutral and bring it to a halt using the brakes as normal.Jesus Christ, a member of the original God family who now runs his Father’s business, is expected to make a full statement shortly. In the meantime, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a senior manager at God’s UK operation, has told reporters that there are almost certainly Human Beings here in Britain that will need to be examined for signs of being so sodding thick that they probably shouldn’t have a driving licence in the first place. “It’s too early to say how this might affect people in the UK,” Mr Canterbury is quoted as saying. “But we have every reason to believe that there are some Human Beings that may being so brain fartingly stupid that if the throttle in their car became stuck, they would never think simply to depress the clutch and coast to a halt”.
However, it is understood that God’s representatives in the UK are keen to manage any recall as quickly and efficiently as possible, thereby minimising the number of mithering suburban ***** who ring in to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 and witter on about how they’re too scared to drive their Yaris to such a blindingly crass degree that listeners eventually start to get a sense of what it would be like if the editor of the Daily Mail did a **** into a syringe and then used it to inject vile reactionary **** into their ears.
As God seeks to clarify the extent of the stupidity problem and establish how many Human Beings will need to be recalled, theologians have been assessing just what has caused the problem of quite extraordinarily thick behaviour in the first place. “I suspect the problem lies in the rather clever engineering God has given the Human Being,” noted Dr Peter Cockandballs of St Gobain College, Oxford. “The modern Human Being is actually remarkably durable and reliable, capable of lasting well over 80 years, but among its clever systems is something called Cognitive Reasoning. Normally this works very well, but over time Human Beings get used to being spoon fed blindingly obvious information such as those signs on motorways that say ‘fog’, and eventually they can just give up trying to have any discernment or ability to think rationally. Basically, the Human Being becomes a stupid moron. Hence the popularly of ITV’s Loose Women”
Posted 2 years ago # -
Bruneep: You seem to be making two points here.
Firstly you're saying that the driver of the Lexus was 'monumentaly stupid' - heaven forbid that you and your familly are ever in an unfamiliar car that was out of control doing 120mph on a dual carriageway through a built up area. But if you were, it would be interesting to see how you got on. The guy was a traffic cop.... I would have thought he was not monumentally stupid and had tried all the obvious solutions first. Personally I think you're completely wrong.
I would have thought that if it was possible to put a Lexus into neutral while above a certain speed, Lexus would have said so. Why wouldn't they?
As MG said aboveToyota know the answers and won't publish them.
- maybe it's because they know that the software/firmware wont let you put the car into neutral above a certain speed.Secondly. Your point about [Yaris] drivers above a certain age...... you may well be right.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Sharkbait
No I'm just cutting and pasting................
Posted 2 years ago # -
Bo**ox..... that makes it alright does it? Why didn't you say you disagreed with it then? Or if you do disagree with it, why post it?
Posted 2 years ago # -
Ok then.....
I neither agree or disagree with the shameless cut n paste wot i did previously.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Thing about this is that no one knows - even if they have a car to play with. If it was a software issue then presumably the same software that is crashed in the accelerator handling would be the software that was supposed to be dealing with the gear stick input. It should be isolated in the software, but in my experience working with firmware from several similar large engineering companies the isolation is often only a very loose software thing and the firmware guys often get up to some disgusting things to hide bugs - i've seen real production systems where basically the firmware reset itself every 30 seconds because the engineers couldn't fix some bug that happened after 40- 50 seconds - they just rebooted, making the system stop responding for 25ms twice a minute, rather than working out the bug.
The general problem out there is that the big engineering companies (particularly japanese ones) employ lots of hardware guys, but because nowadays most of the complexities are actually in the software which they don't really understand so well. A big part of why Sony (big hardware company) are getting screwed over by Apple (software experts who now make hardware) in the markets where they compete - sony hardware is nice but the usability and stability sucks because they don't know how to write the firmware for it. Potentially the toyota thing could just be this same kind of problem rearing it's head in the car industry.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Any decent journalist could hire a car and take it to a test track to find out, but won't because it's easier to write speculation and opinion than proper journalism
BBC News did this. They took a car to a track with a bod from Advanced Motorists and asked him what people should do in that situation. His advice: depress the brake and clutch, then turn off the ignition
Yes, well done, so your advice is just come to a pretty normal stop? That's completely sorted that then. I'm sure the guy on the interstate didn't think to try stopping.
Posted 2 years ago # -
sharkbait, a stranger is baiting you on the internet, that's all...
Posted 2 years ago #
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