Edit: and the title got edited to be the NYT title, which obscures the relevance to Hacker News. Ah well. This settlement is directly related to the court case Toyota recently lost, with expert testimony about the poor quality of Toyota's embedded safety-critical firmware...
The people making comments about killing the engine is a monumentally bad idea. If the car has a conventional key ignition, turning the key even to the accessory position can engage the steering wheel lock. Without a running engine, you could lose power brake and steering assist. Not all power steering systems are hydraulic, some are pure electric and some are electro-hydraulic. The majority of braking systems are assisted by a booster driven off of engine vacuum. You have two or three pedal pumps before the vacuum is gone.
The handful of cars I've checked (after Bob Pease wrote about it) won't lock the column unless you remove the key. Some might lock, but only when the tranny is in park. Worth checking out.
Do you even want/need power steering assist in a runaway situation?
When a car with power-steering loses power, it doesn't become like a car without power-steering. I've had a car shutdown at highway speeds, and turning the wheel is incredibly difficult. At the time I was a fairly muscled weightlifter, and I could not turn the wheel more than a few degrees (I managed to change one lane into a turn off).
mzr's comment above gives good advice: don't turn off or remove the key in a moving vehicle. Shift to neutral if the gas pedal is stuck.
This is correct. In cars with hydraulic-assisted steering, you're forcing fluid back through the pump, which is quite hard to do in addition to the fighting the bulk of your car and steering rack. In cars with electric-assisted steering, like the Prius, you're working against the electric motor using a belt and pulleys.
Which begs the question: why isn't the electric-assist motor designed to freewheel when power is lost? Losing steering assist at speed would be a more manageable situation.
> Do you even want/need power steering assist in a runaway situation?
In my sole unintended acceleration incident (floormat) I was beginning (but committed to) a turn. I put the car into neutral and came out of it okay. (people forget that any modern engine has a rev limiter so neutral is really pretty safe)
It would have made a bad situation worse for me if I had lost my steering. I've lost steering on that car (lost the generator for a few seconds in the wet on two separate occasions) and I can confirm what someone else said about the steering getting quite heavy.
The people making comments about killing the engine is a monumentally bad idea. If the car has a conventional key ignition, turning the key even to the accessory position can engage the steering wheel lock.
If the key is in the ON, or ACC position the steering lock will not engage[0]. I do agree that killing the engine should not be the first thing to do. It should introduce a fuel or ignition cut to lower RPM (like some cars do in neutral to avoid users from doing neutral to drive WOT drops).
But after the engine stops, which would hopefully take no more than a second or two, the key can be quickly returned to the ignition point, without actually restarting the engine.
So at worst the steering would be locked for only a second.
While I think some of the claims of consumers about the car were overblown, and the testimony of a few consumers who basically claim the car caused them to speed down the highway (what you never heard of using the emergency break) was more amusing than "scary", I think that this does show how as software starts to do things that could threaten a consumers life that we need to have solid protocols for how that is dealt with.
Do we say "nobody use your toaster until the firmware is updated" or do we do the traditional recall thing and offer an exchange to those who registered their product, or do we go full in and use the internet to say, "your toaster will not work until it is updated".
We see some of this in Windows 8. It routinely says you need to install the update in the next hour, your PC is going to reboot, do so now or later. This is an attempt to keep your computer safe even if it creates a bad user experience.
Should cars do the same thing? Should Toasters? How unsafe does it need to be to warrant preventing use?
The emergency brake is not powerful enough to overcome the throttle. Additionally, I'd love to see if your reaction in an emergency like that would be any different.
Humans react very irrationally even with training. It's easy to sit in your chair and say someone did the wrong thing.
> They stepped on the wrong pedal, it's that simple.
Did you read the article?
> Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals... Investigators discovered internal Toyota documents that acknowledged serious problems with its vehicles.
America car companies issue recalls all the time. That is what's getting Toyota in trouble from the start. A company I worked for was involved in those decisions made with days of discovering a slightly wrong raw material grade was shipped. Because that wrong part didn't meet the spec and MIGHT cause a problem in the part after it wore down five years from now. They paid for testing and proved the raw material was equivalent in performance and didn't have to recall. But it happened in days/weeks long before the parts would have had any failures.
American companies took to using recalls as "preventive" measures decades ago. They learned to have a lot of them without the government forcing them so that the really nasty ones get buried in the shuffle and the mechanic just replaces the parts he's told...
Toyota fought the government hard every step of the way, even in making the design materials and manufacturing information hauled off to Japan... mostly because the pedal issue already had large lawsuits before Toyota even acknowledged looking at the problem. If they issued a recall, all that was going to hit the lawsuit train.... Not to mention in Japan companies just don't get hauled over the coals like this... They thought they'd fight it.
Having personally experienced the floor mat issue in a Toyota 4Runner, I definitely didn't hit the wrong pedal. I intentionally hit the gas pedal. I had floored it for about a second or two, lifted my foot and the pedal didn't come with it. Thankfully I realized what had happened really quickly and was able to pry the pedal back up with my foot. Prior to that event I would have never even considered a possibility of the accelerator getting stuck like that.
> what you never heard of using the emergency break
Put yours on, put it in drive, and you'll find that applying throttle will likely easily override the emergency brake. It's there to stop the car from rolling down a hill, not to fight the engine.
Hell, I once drove my parents' car about a mile without realizing it had the brake on.
Probably varies by car, but I'd guess you didn't notice partly because you weren't paying very close attention to just how much gas you were applying versus just what your acceleration looked like. I've also ever driven with the brake engaged, and pretty quickly noticed due to the different handling. Beside that, kinetic energy grows with the square of the velocity, so even if it only shaves off 10% of your speed that's close to 20% less energy in the wreck (on top of marginally improved reaction times). It may degrade maneuverability though.
Why use the emergency brake, use the real brake! Or shift into neutral.
On my Passat, conflicting inputs (ie, pushing both brake and throttle) would result in the throttle being cut. I seem to remember Toyota implementing a similar system after this.
Not in all cars or for all drivers. My rear drive car barely slows, and I can control the skid in my front drive car. These are as tested by me at 80+ mph on a racetrack.
"Although sometimes known as an emergency brake, using it in any emergency where the footbrake is still operational is likely to badly upset the brake balance of the car and vastly increase the likelihood of loss of control of the vehicle, for example by initiating a rear-wheel skid. Additionally, the stopping force provided by using the handbrake is small and would not significantly aid in stopping the vehicle."
On the other hand, and contrary to what a lot of people think about their government, lawyers for the DOJ are often at the top of their profession and if they aren't making a lot of money right now... they will be.
The really unfortunate part of this is that when the reports started surfacing of this issue, Many people reacted with SCORN.
No "lets wait for the facts" but outright derision about stupid drivers hitting the Accelerator and then blaming the car. The fact that there were many reports and many consumers affected did not seem to matter.
Well $1.2 Billion proves that not everyone was mistaken which "pedal" they hit.
When will people start going to jail over this?
Why do people have to go to jail? One of the fortés of our economic system is its tolerance for failure. Stupidity, while a liability in civil court, is not criminally prosecuted.
Fraud, gross negligence, etc. are. The bar for proving guilt of those offences is high. I do not believe that high standard has been met, at least not yet. The situation deserves criminal investigation, perhaps. But jumping to the conclusion of jailing those involved is rash.
Scorn may be a strong word, but the reality of the situation is that a driver faced with an unintended acceleration incident can avoid disaster by applying the brake and/or putting the car in neutral. No Toyota's engine is strong enough to keep the car moving with the driver mashing the brake with all of his or her might. Previous incidents of unintended acceleration such as the infamous Audi 5000 were usually found to be caused by the driver flooring the accelerator while thinking they had their foot on the brake.
The problem comes because when your car starts doing something completely unexpected and terrifying, most people panic, so if your gas pedal gets caught on the floormat, you won't have the presence of mind to go through a mental checklist of things you can do to stop the car. My guess is that to the extent that floormat problems caused gas pedals to stick, for 99% of the drivers, they hit the brake and kicked the gas pedal free and they were fine. But 1% of the people, in their panic, hit the gas by accident or just freaked out and froze, and crashed their cars.
Now, since it appears that Toyota tried to cover up the fact that there was a legitimate engineering or design problem at play, then they probably deserve the fine. Even if panic and driver error contributed to each and every incident, it doesn't mean that Toyota wasn't responsible for creating a situation wherein a driver had to cope with a terrifying, unexpected car malfunction.
What this whole incident proves to me is that we're very cavalier about the dangers of having millions of poorly-trained, distracted operators of powerful machines zipping all over the streets of our planet. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.
44 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6636811
Edit: and the title got edited to be the NYT title, which obscures the relevance to Hacker News. Ah well. This settlement is directly related to the court case Toyota recently lost, with expert testimony about the poor quality of Toyota's embedded safety-critical firmware...
Do you even want/need power steering assist in a runaway situation?
mzr's comment above gives good advice: don't turn off or remove the key in a moving vehicle. Shift to neutral if the gas pedal is stuck.
Which begs the question: why isn't the electric-assist motor designed to freewheel when power is lost? Losing steering assist at speed would be a more manageable situation.
In my sole unintended acceleration incident (floormat) I was beginning (but committed to) a turn. I put the car into neutral and came out of it okay. (people forget that any modern engine has a rev limiter so neutral is really pretty safe)
It would have made a bad situation worse for me if I had lost my steering. I've lost steering on that car (lost the generator for a few seconds in the wet on two separate occasions) and I can confirm what someone else said about the steering getting quite heavy.
If the key is in the ON, or ACC position the steering lock will not engage[0]. I do agree that killing the engine should not be the first thing to do. It should introduce a fuel or ignition cut to lower RPM (like some cars do in neutral to avoid users from doing neutral to drive WOT drops).
[0] I used to work on cars for a living.
So at worst the steering would be locked for only a second.
Do we say "nobody use your toaster until the firmware is updated" or do we do the traditional recall thing and offer an exchange to those who registered their product, or do we go full in and use the internet to say, "your toaster will not work until it is updated".
We see some of this in Windows 8. It routinely says you need to install the update in the next hour, your PC is going to reboot, do so now or later. This is an attempt to keep your computer safe even if it creates a bad user experience.
Should cars do the same thing? Should Toasters? How unsafe does it need to be to warrant preventing use?
Humans react very irrationally even with training. It's easy to sit in your chair and say someone did the wrong thing.
They stepped on the wrong pedal, it's that simple. Oh, and they weren't an American car company.
Did you read the article?
> Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals... Investigators discovered internal Toyota documents that acknowledged serious problems with its vehicles.
American companies took to using recalls as "preventive" measures decades ago. They learned to have a lot of them without the government forcing them so that the really nasty ones get buried in the shuffle and the mechanic just replaces the parts he's told...
Toyota fought the government hard every step of the way, even in making the design materials and manufacturing information hauled off to Japan... mostly because the pedal issue already had large lawsuits before Toyota even acknowledged looking at the problem. If they issued a recall, all that was going to hit the lawsuit train.... Not to mention in Japan companies just don't get hauled over the coals like this... They thought they'd fight it.
Put yours on, put it in drive, and you'll find that applying throttle will likely easily override the emergency brake. It's there to stop the car from rolling down a hill, not to fight the engine.
Hell, I once drove my parents' car about a mile without realizing it had the brake on.
If I didn't notice much difference at zero MPH, it's unlikely to make any sort of difference at highway speeds.
That should certainly have enough force to hold a car stopped or at least stop a pair of wheels from spinning.
On my Passat, conflicting inputs (ie, pushing both brake and throttle) would result in the throttle being cut. I seem to remember Toyota implementing a similar system after this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_brake
"Although sometimes known as an emergency brake, using it in any emergency where the footbrake is still operational is likely to badly upset the brake balance of the car and vastly increase the likelihood of loss of control of the vehicle, for example by initiating a rear-wheel skid. Additionally, the stopping force provided by using the handbrake is small and would not significantly aid in stopping the vehicle."
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
No "lets wait for the facts" but outright derision about stupid drivers hitting the Accelerator and then blaming the car. The fact that there were many reports and many consumers affected did not seem to matter.
Well $1.2 Billion proves that not everyone was mistaken which "pedal" they hit. When will people start going to jail over this?
Why do people have to go to jail? One of the fortés of our economic system is its tolerance for failure. Stupidity, while a liability in civil court, is not criminally prosecuted.
Fraud, gross negligence, etc. are. The bar for proving guilt of those offences is high. I do not believe that high standard has been met, at least not yet. The situation deserves criminal investigation, perhaps. But jumping to the conclusion of jailing those involved is rash.
The problem comes because when your car starts doing something completely unexpected and terrifying, most people panic, so if your gas pedal gets caught on the floormat, you won't have the presence of mind to go through a mental checklist of things you can do to stop the car. My guess is that to the extent that floormat problems caused gas pedals to stick, for 99% of the drivers, they hit the brake and kicked the gas pedal free and they were fine. But 1% of the people, in their panic, hit the gas by accident or just freaked out and froze, and crashed their cars.
Now, since it appears that Toyota tried to cover up the fact that there was a legitimate engineering or design problem at play, then they probably deserve the fine. Even if panic and driver error contributed to each and every incident, it doesn't mean that Toyota wasn't responsible for creating a situation wherein a driver had to cope with a terrifying, unexpected car malfunction.
What this whole incident proves to me is that we're very cavalier about the dangers of having millions of poorly-trained, distracted operators of powerful machines zipping all over the streets of our planet. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.