Unintended acceleration

[joyridin']

I don't buy the whole thing. Sounds like a set-up for a huge lawsuit. The car accelerated, the brakes wouldn't work, and he/she/it couldn't shut it off and didn't have enough intelligence to shift into neutral?

Maybe Toyota can counter sue the driver and the state for letting a person this stupid behind the wheel of a car.

[Tommy]

In today's report on the Prius story, the 911 operator reports the driver did not respond to repeated instructions to put the car in neutral. The driver claims he did not hear much of that because he had put the phone down so he could use both hands to steer. (I assume he's never driven a manual transmission that requires one to steer with one hand while shifting with the other.) He also claims he was afraid to shift into neutral because he thought it might cause the car to flip over. .... As I said at the beginning, I think driver error is the major contributor to most of these incidents. And I agree with joyridin that this sounds like someone looking for either a lawsuit or escape from paying for a Prius.

[Mark IV]

Now if one of the "Oscar Nominees" had arrived at the red carpet in an "out of control" Prius, THAT would have made the Academy Awards worth watching!

Tearing a swath of destruction through a crowd of "B" listers and hangers-on would have generated carnage and a mushroom cloud of silicone.............giving James Cameron the chance to remake "Gone with the Wind" via CGI.....................

[bomelia]

I remember when Audi went through this. This was before computers ran automobile sub-systems. IIRC, that's where the "step on the brake while shifting into drive" procedure came from. It took Audi more than 15 years to recover from that debacle, even though no one ever proved definitively that there was a problem (in fact, some in the media helped fabricate evidence). But with computer systems running the show, anything is possible. Computer programs can get so complex that unknown behaviors can occur with no way of being able to predict it or even find it!! This sounds like a heisenbug or borhbug.

Mike

[1ntCobra]

Originally Posted by joyridin'

I don't buy the whole thing. Sounds like a set-up for a huge lawsuit. The car accelerated, the brakes wouldn't work, and he/she/it couldn't shut it off and didn't have enough intelligence to shift into neutral?

Maybe Toyota can counter sue the driver and the state for letting a person this stupid behind the wheel of a car.

I said something similar to one of my coworkers on Monday and he told me he heard that the Toyotas have a safety mechanism that prevents them from being shifted into neutral when the car is moving??? That just sounds wrong.