Toyota hybrid runaway story a hoax?

The British Army took delivery of fifty Toyota Prius early this month. The cars will be used by the White Fleet, which is the Army’s non-combat corps of administrators and officers. Sources say that they did test the Prius with a 30mm canon on it, but that the recoil crumpled the car’s roof, so the plan to field them as ultra-efficient combat vehicles was scrapped. ;o)

I have had a couple of clunker cars in my life, and every one of them had a gas pedal that sometimes had to be pulled by hand back to idle! Purely a mechanical thing, like you I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the linkage and its lubrication.

What these people are describing is different it seems to me. When the pedal would stick the car would not slow down when you let off the accelerator. But it would not speed up and try to run faster. I would have problems with unintended continuing at the same speed, but never with unintended acceleration!

This is really a tough one. Only a test pilot or maybe a fighter pilot would tend to have the skills to override the pure panic of sudden, unexpected, rapid acceleration in traffic! And maybe a race car driver.

Imagine the confusion of having it happen and not being able to figure out what was going on. I suppose it’s possible some electronic glitch could cause something untoward with the speed, but off hand I can’t think of anything.

My money would be on the floor mat, that happened to me in 1990 in my stick shift Honda Accord. Took me a bit to figure out what had happened and then a second or two to reach down and get the mat out of the way.

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