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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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”
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 above
- maybe it's because they know that the software/firmware wont let you put the car into neutral above a certain speed.Toyota know the answers and won't publish them.
Secondly. Your point about [Yaris] drivers above a certain age...... you may well be right.
Sharkbait
No I'm just cutting and pasting................ 😉
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?
Ok then.....
I neither agree or disagree with the shameless cut n paste wot i did previously.
🙄
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.
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.
sharkbait, a stranger is baiting you on the internet, that's all...
joe: I agree it will probably turn out to be a software issue, but they'll obscure it with talk of multiple failures, dodgy floormats etc.
I've worked on automotive software, you'd be amazed how much software there is in something as simple as a door!
sharkbait, a stranger is baiting you on the internet, that's all...
true........... and breath 🙂
As far as the brakes vs engine thing goes, if you go on a track day in a ferrari or some such they make it very clear (from their experiences), that if by accident you press the brake and the accelerator at the same time, the engine will win, every time. Yes, we're talking about 400bhp cars here but this is against supercar brakes.