Posted on 03/12/2010 6:03:29 PM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
“A friend of mine wrecked her Toyota a couple of days ago. The accelerator stuck and she said she could not get the car in neutral.”
Where, what day, and what time?
Sounds like your friend was freaked out. I can easily shift gears up and down in my Lexus and can shift into neutral just as easily. Your friend’s alleged complaint still doesn’t explain why no other countries are reporting this problem. You say you have an axe to grind against Toyota, so that make me think none of you complaints are true.
I'll cry myself to sleep tonight worrying about what you think.
Well, obviously. I was talking about examining the models in the showroom.
Lots of knee jerk responses from younger, newer members. I happen to agree with your remarks..Toyota has a problem, irrespective of any outside influences.
Oh, and I am a member for the last 12 years,and pay monthly...
So save any troll remarks for those tempted. It used to be we had rational, thoughtful discussions. Now it seems our membership is content to shoot from the lip without checking things out.
Evidently several drivers have complained, even during the acceleration event, that they couldn’t get the transmission into neutral. There are a couple of things I’d like to know about this.
First, were they unable to even move the shift lever to neutral, or did they mean that they moved it to the neutral position and the transmission remained in gear?
If the former, either they were panicking and therefore unable to exercise normal motor (muscular) control, or there exists on these models some kind of mechanical lockout on the shifter that happened to go haywire at precisely the wrong time.
IMHO, no such lockout would ever be designed into an automobile, so I regard the likelihood of being unable to move the lever to neutral by applying the standard motion to it, to be nil.
If they successfully moved the lever to neutral and the transmission remained in gear, it means the car had an electronically controlled transmission without a mechanical backup (”shift by wire”). If there was a computer glitch, it might max the accelerator (not the pedal, but the throttle) and also ignore the shifter at the same time; a bad kind of failure.
The only worse one would be if it also ignored the ignition switch, like the Colossus Project or the God Machine.
Thanks for the link to the story. I have two observations:
1. The modification that Ford is talking about will idle the engine if the controller notices hard or perhaps prolonged application of the brake in the presence of high throttle
(Goodbye power-packing at the start line, I suppose).
They should be able to accomplish this in firmware which can be downloaded to the engine control unit. If they have to install anything mechanical, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
2. The spokeslady in the video clip said that Ford have given carte blanche to an outside testing organization to uncover any problems. So far, she maintains that no electronic (including software, one assumes) malfunctions have been discovered.
This may seem to be at odds with the recall and retrofit, but not exactly. It adds a layer of fail-safe, with the significant exception that if there really is an intermittent computer lockup, and the fail-safe is in the firmware, the fail-safe may itself fail.
I’m pretty sure they will be putting further realtime selfchecks into the firmware, as well as attempting to catch anomalous accelerator events and record them in EEPROM, just as they do with airbag deployments. These can be read back by a standard diagnostic readout device.
Not necessarily...get a car with launch control.
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