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does anyone think this will hurt Toyota resale value? i am not aware of how that market is calculated...but the question remains: why buy a used Toyota now? or a Toyota, period?
seems a lot of other viable choices are around, new and used.
It sure does. Kelly Blue Book dumped it over a 1,000 already. And that was last week. I should have bought one from Japan that wasn't recalled.
The problem is very simple and extremely rare. It's amazing the lack of capabilities some people have.
Yep, for once.
Toyota screwed up, but the hysteria around all this is way overblown. If people do not know how to control a car in an emergency, they should not be driving.
I am curious, have you suffered this fate? It reads like you have. If you have I would be interested in more details.
The one issue i can see now is the ECU is likely seeing little engine vacuum, and telling the brake master to turn off, which is a screw ball idea, but so is fly by wire.
So then there is little to no assist and it might take both feet to stop the brakes for some effect.
Parking brakes are just that, and are wrongy called emergency brakes IMO.
I do not understand why shifting to neutral, would not engage neutral, and wouldn't understand why the ecu would be or could be made to lock the tranny out in the first place, but right now and with no first hand experience on my part not much of this makes sence other than Toyota bought some would be engineers cheap, and this must be group of wanna be engineers have no dirty hand on experience and never will.
I am a X foreign car tech and in all my years i have never seen bad frames like this, then replace to go bad in months, run away cars, failed steering??!, and all the problems that have come to a head, not the surface before. It is like everyone forgot How To build a car.
No, I have not suffered or experienced this problem. I am trying to call to people's attention to the lack of common sense and good reasoning to accept that these people's brakes didn't work, the parking brake didn't work, and the transmission can be put into neutral or any gear and the vehicle would not stop, skid the rear tires or even slow down. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Ask any mechanic.
Try driving down the road (at any speed) in a front-wheel drive vehicle and fully apply the parking brake. You'll lock-up the rear tires.
Try driving down the road (at any speed under full throttle) and try to put the transmission into neutral. You'll have no problem doing it, and the engine's power will be disconnected from the drive train.
Try driving down the road (at any speed under full throttle) and apply the brakes hard. The vehicle will easily come to a complete stop.
All three of these things are separate systems, therefore for them to all fail (along with a failed ECU) it is really impossible...especially with multiple vehicles.
Last edited by highcotton; 02-23-2010 at 08:59 PM..
Location: Still in Portland, Oregon, for some reason
890 posts, read 3,701,207 times
Reputation: 743
Quote:
Originally Posted by highcotton
Try driving down the road (at any speed under full throttle) and apply the brakes hard. The vehicle will easily come to a complete stop.
The first time it will. But once the brakes heat up, hang on because you're in for a fun ride.
Somebody tried it with an ES350 and got the same results I did when I gave this a whirl one night with my Santa Fe. Even under full throttle at 65 mph, full braking application with cold rotors gave a hard enough stop that my jacket slid off the passenger seat. After the second try with the rotors hot, the brake pedal began to feel hard and bordered on unresponsive. Following the third try, the brake pedal felt like stepping onto a concrete curb. There was very little response and a tremendous amount of effort was required to achieve a reaction from the brakes. Under normal conditions, the brakes had definitely faded but under a full-throttle situation, they would have been useless.
When I stopped the car, I could feel the heat radiating from the discs from feet away and I could smell burning pads.
The first time it will. But once the brakes heat up, hang on because you're in for a fun ride.
Somebody tried it with an ES350 and got the same results I did when I gave this a whirl one night with my Santa Fe. Even under full throttle at 65 mph, full braking application with cold rotors gave a hard enough stop that my jacket slid off the passenger seat. After the second try with the rotors hot, the brake pedal began to feel hard and bordered on unresponsive. Following the third try, the brake pedal felt like stepping onto a concrete curb. There was very little response and a tremendous amount of effort was required to achieve a reaction from the brakes. Under normal conditions, the brakes had definitely faded but under a full-throttle situation, they would have been useless.
When I stopped the car, I could feel the heat radiating from the discs from feet away and I could smell burning pads.
Wouldn't you think that a driver experiencing unintended acceleration would only try bringing the vehicle to a stop just once...instead of trying it numerous times?
How 'bout that parking brake? Why are people experiencing UA saying it didn't work, because they will lock-up the rear wheels very easily?
How 'bout that transmission not being able to go into neutral?
Last edited by highcotton; 02-23-2010 at 09:16 PM..
You are confusing the ECU with the onboard entertainment systems, which are not connected in any way. You seem to think that just because it is electronic it is connected. Yet you seem to have the intelligence to at least parrot the S&C requirements for modern aircraft design. So I will be slow...
I am an aerospace engineer who has been working with Flight Controls of aircraft for some time now. Inherent are the safety and reliability requirements and what to do when there is a fault detected. It's called vehicle health & monitoring systems, or monitors for short. Aircraft have, since electronic computers have been on airplanes (pioneered by Boeing and its heritage companies), had monitoring systems to see if there are shorts, grounds, erroneous data, or unbelievable inputs like air data coming from the pitot probes.
I saw the ABC news special where they interviewed the professor who designed a board to short out a segment of the ECU, and proved that Toyota does NOT HAVE ANY INDEPENDENT MONITORING SYSTEMS WHATSOEVER WITH THE ENGINE CONTROL UNIT. That seems very dangerous and it bewilders me that they do not have rigid safety fault trees to determine where monitoring is required. Aircraft have monitoring on anything that may fault with more than 1,000 hours of flying. Then, by design, the rest of the stuff that doesn't has redundancy and is considered minor and will be logged in the maintenance computer. This system has been used, safely, by Airbus and Boeing, for decades. They're in fact advancing to the point that single failures, if present, will still not present a problem and the pilots will be able to fly normally without special input with minor failures.
So, while I cannot comment whether Ford and other companies do the same, all I know is Toyota better learn quality and safety processes that have been in the software world for decades and apply it with the same rigor they applied the safety and reliability processes to car mechanical components.
That was a long-winded explanation that drive-by-wire systems need not be dangerous or this mystical thing that somehow, by osmosis, is connected to the onboard entertainment and that somehow by calling Auntie Anne with the Bluetooth system will cause an uncontrollable acceleration.
Slow down Professor. My second paragraph was dripping with sarcasm, I was in no way attempting to make the point that electronic entertainment was interconnected to the ECU/PCM/et al function of the vehicle. I re-read my post and still can't figure out for the life of me why you would infer such a statement out of my post.
And just so we're clear, since you seem to think I'm merely parroting something I found in wikipedia, no need to 'slow down' for me there. I hold two aerospace engineering degrees myself; I am also a B-52H pilot, with enough operational first-hand knowledge of the intricacies of high performance military aircraft, to include fly-by-wire systems, since I've both researched them in a formal education capacity and strapped my pink softie to them in an operational one; I'll have to leave it at that for operational security purposes and the safeguarding of safety privileged information. Poor form on your part to throw a gratuitous appendage measuring contest jab just because I alluded to aircraft systems in my argument. That's what you get when you aSSume. Turns out you're not the only one with braggin' rights at the dinner table Jack.
Back on topic, my point was to highlight the unnecessary nature of these electric-slaved power control systems in low-performance transportation modes (passenger cars). Mechanical linkages would suffice. Likewise, doing without the constant need for creature comforts would yield a light enough vehicle where all these gizmos, which are merely attempting to regain the lost performance due to the monstrous added weight of people wanting their cars to be their freggin' house creates, wouldn't be needed in the first place. I'm not saying go back to the model T, but entirely drive-by-wire setups in passenger cars is plain dumb, and only driven by economies of scale (which is the reason Toyota's ECU is garbage to begin with).
Location: Still in Portland, Oregon, for some reason
890 posts, read 3,701,207 times
Reputation: 743
Quote:
Originally Posted by highcotton
Wouldn't you think that a driver experiencing unintended acceleration would only try bringing the vehicle to a stop just once...instead of trying it numerous times?
Some people might be so relieved they were able to bring the car's speed down that they will get off the brakes by force of habit. Also, if people apply the brakes slowly or pump them, they will heat up very quickly and thus, loose their effectiveness.
I would like to try that short circuit the guy found and do it in a way that nobody tells me when it's going to happen. That way you get as close to a random, unexpected sudden acceleration event. Even the ABC special showed the driver knew it was coming and still hit the brakes by habit.
Toyota screwed up, but the hysteria around all this is way overblown. If people do not know how to control a car in an emergency, they should not be driving.
So well said.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hindsight2020
Slow down Professor. My second paragraph was dripping with sarcasm, I was in no way attempting to make the point that electronic entertainment was interconnected to the ECU/PCM/et al function of the vehicle. I re-read my post and still can't figure out for the life of me why you would infer such a statement out of my post.
And just so we're clear, since you seem to think I'm merely parroting something I found in wikipedia, no need to 'slow down' for me there. I hold two aerospace engineering degrees myself; I am also a B-52H pilot, with enough operational first-hand knowledge of the intricacies of high performance military aircraft, to include fly-by-wire systems, since I've both researched them in a formal education capacity and strapped my pink softie to them in an operational one; I'll have to leave it at that for operational security purposes and the safeguarding of safety privileged information. Poor form on your part to throw a gratuitous appendage measuring contest jab just because I alluded to aircraft systems in my argument. That's what you get when you aSSume. Turns out you're not the only one with braggin' rights at the dinner table Jack.
Back on topic, my point was to highlight the unnecessary nature of these electric-slaved power control systems in low-performance transportation modes (passenger cars). Mechanical linkages would suffice. Likewise, doing without the constant need for creature comforts would yield a light enough vehicle where all these gizmos, which are merely attempting to regain the lost performance due to the monstrous added weight of people wanting their cars to be their freggin' house creates, wouldn't be needed in the first place. I'm not saying go back to the model T, but entirely drive-by-wire setups in passenger cars is plain dumb, and only driven by economies of scale (which is the reason Toyota's ECU is garbage to begin with).
Nice job, professor. I mean Engineer.
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