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Unintended Acceleration Again!

Team Unintended Acceleration

It’s been about fifteen years now since the issue of unintended acceleration was the big thing in the publics mind. At that time auto maker Audi was the one who got the majority of the blame for this supposed action whereby cars would accelerate away all on their own. Today it’s Toyota. But fact is nearly every car at one time or another have had reports of this happening. Quite frankly the issue is not with the cars but in majority of cases caused by drivers PUSHING ON THE WRONG PEDAL! In some really sad cases this error has caused injury and death. People didn’t want to accept this accident as driver error, especially if you were the one who’s momentary error caused an injury or death, it had to be a fault with the car and the big bad uncaring corporations who built them. I remember the woman who ran over her child with her Audi, you had to feel sorry for her as she described the accident and you could understand exactly why placing the blame on the car was far better for her mental well being than dealing with the reality of the event.

Well Toyota is now the maker suffering from this Unintended Pedal Confusion issue. The problem is the executives at Toyota have not learned from Audi’s mistake. They seem to be afraid to call the issues like it is, too afraid of offending customers and in the process looking guilty as hell. There also is no shortage of trial lawyers who will be glad to sue a major auto makers for $$$$$$$.

This does not stop media hype from playing on peoples fears. Audi suffered a decline in sales in the USA because of a report on TV’s 60 Minutes which purported to show that Audi automobiles suffered from this acceleration problem. Independent investigators concluded that this was most likely due to a close placement of the accelerator and brake pedals on Audi’s automatic transmission cars. You see unlike 1970 era American cars with their wide brake pedal and small gas pedal, Audi used pedal placement more in line with European tradition and derived from it’s manual transmission cars. Many Americans were now buying these cars due to higher gas prices, and being use to the American pedal arrangement found they had a tendency when not paying attention to confuse the two. It’s not like Audi was putting the gas pedal on the left and the brakes on the right, you could make a case that doing so would be negligent, but using a pedal placement that millions of drivers both American and Foreign have had no issue with is not reckless. Get into most cars today and you will find this European pedal setup is very common.

The only thing that seems to be a legitimate issue in the Toyota case is improperly installed floor mats, and not just floor mats but the heavy rubber floor mats. On some cars these rubber mats are designed to REPLACE the carpet mats and NOT to be placed on top of the carpet mats. These can get pushed forward and cause the gas pedal to stick. But again this looks to be a problem of the drivers improperly installing them or removing the mats to clean and then not using the floor attachment hooks to hold the mats in place or breaking the hooks when removing the mats.

If you know anything about cars you know no car with operational brakes can overpower those brakes. Even it the throttle sticks wide open you only need to step on the brakes and the car will come to a stop, it may take longer but it will stop. If you push on the brakes pedal and put the car in gear and push the gas pedal to the floor, the car will go nowhere, you may damage the transmission in the process but the brakes will hold the car. it would take a car with very poor brakes and lots of power indeed for the engine to overpower the brakes. When you hear of drivers claiming to push on the brakes with both feet as the car accelerates always you have to ask yourself “do they really have both feet on the brakes?” or is it a common bad driving habit you see with far too many drivers, that is driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. I am sure you have seen it before, a car cruising down the freeway, brakes lights on because the driver is slightly pushing on the brake with their left foot. Not only does this make it impossible to tell if the person is really stopping but it causes the brakes to drag causing heat to build up in the pads and rotors, this heat can decrease the efficiency of the stopping power of the car when most needed. You can also see that in a panic situation a left foot brake person may well find themselves mashing on both the gas and brake at the same time. PLEASE! If your habit is to use your left foot to operate the brake, please stop now, This is just piss poor driving and dangerous. Hey, maybe it’s time for cars to have vocal warnings to prevent drivers from pushing on both pedals at the same time.

Here is the situation in a nutshell. If these cars were in fact running away at full throttle and at the same time the brakes were refusing to work you would certainly see someone who could reproduce the situation and prove their point. If it were a mechanical issue you would see investigators with parts showing these mechanical problems like broken return springs or stuck accelerator actuators. So far all the facts point to driver error or improperly installed floor mats.