Edmunds dealer partner, Bayway Leasing, is now offering transparent lease deals via these forums. Click here to see the latest vehicles!
Popular New Cars
Popular Used Sedans
Popular Used SUVs
Popular Used Pickup Trucks
Popular Used Hatchbacks
Popular Used Minivans
Popular Used Coupes
Popular Used Wagons
Comments
How would YOU know...?
And....which computer...?
The engine/transmission ECU that is supposed to disable the A/C clutch during WOT, or closely nearby, engine operation...?
Or was it the one (or 2) in the A/C control "head" that didn't fail...?
Or was it the one (or 2) in the A/C control "head" that didn't fail...?
if the A/C can't handle WOT without destroying itself, that sounds like a design and engineering issue, not a computer issue.
But how would we ever know that, couldn't it have just been a poorly assembled compressor?
Wouldn't an ECU malfunction trigger a Check Engine light or some other warning light or readable error code.
Yes, but I was "rebuting" the statement that there was no computer "failure" associated with the compressor failure.
"...Would an ECU malfunction trigger..."
Possibly not, the A/C monitor firmware will provide an indication and throw a code if the compressor is enabled but NOT rotating cognizant with engine RPM. The inverse case is a "corner case" and would be mostly needless.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
That was the actual intention.
Hogwash !!
NOT.
The proposal by the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a result of a highly publicized 2009 crash of a Lexus ES 350 and a subsequent flood of complaints about incidents of unintended acceleration in Toyota and Lexus vehicles."
Federal regulators want brake override systems in all cars (LA Times)
"Mercedes-Benz is recalling all-season accessory floor mats sold in model year 2012 and 2013 ML-Class vehicles because they could cause the car's gas pedal to get stuck."
Mercedes-Benz recalls floor mats from ML-Class (Detroit News)
The results for 4 cars..Sante Fe, Camry, Accord, and Malibu.
# of complaints : total sales
Sante Fe - 1 : 6,404
Camry - 1 : 2,960
Accord - 1 : 31,360
Malibu - 1 : 60,640
The complaint rate for the Sante Fe is 10x that of the Malibu and the Camry is 20x.
There are plenty of reports coming in for Toyota even after their recall, and Hyundai isn't trending very well either
#complaints : total sales
Ford Crown Vic - 1 : 26,450
Toyota Prius - 1 : 3,060
These complaints are made mostlly only after an accident of some kind and most reported multiple instances before the accident where the accelerator pedal stuck or responded abnormally. I am sure these are only a small percentage of actual occurances of UA.
I think it is safe to say that there are definitely instances of driver error where the accelerator is mistaken for the brake, but that does not explain the much higher rate in some makes, even when pedal positions and floor mat placement is taken into account. Luckily this is rare, but apparently real, and in all probabiltiy having something to do the the electronics and computer control.
This happened to a couple in their 60's in Korea in a Hyundai Sonata:
Sonata UA Video
Toyota SUA settlement website
BTW, the most likely actual cause was not covered at all in the filing. It's not a bad sensor or bad code. It's nothing mechanical. It's simply that the computer froze up and got locked into doing the last thing it was doing. You didn't have acceleration so much as the throttle stayed exactly in the same position where it was before the computer froze up.
This happens to PCs, industrial equipment, and even aerospace components. Sensors and microchips often get stuck in a "livelock" (endless loop of repeating code) scenario when they unexpectedly crash.
I'm still holding out for tin whiskers myself. :shades:
While the the examination showed no smoking gun, there were many instances of poor programming practices - something that you would not expect to find in code as safety critical as controlling the throttle. From what I heard, the code was certainly not anywhere the robustness that you find on critical flight software for an airliner, for instance.
I think that it was because of these findings that Toyota is caving in to the inevitable.
None of this is general public knowledge, BTW.
Nobody ever has tested the thing for abuse. As in literally hit the thing with a stun gun or physical shock and crash(software/hardware, not THE car) the thing while the car is running. What happens?
Think of is as closer to the power supply on your PC. how often has it crashed where doing the three second reset hasn't worked? I bet it has happened to you at least once in your lifetime where you had to unplug the computer from the wall and restart it manually. The biggest tip-off is the start button not working to turn off the car. I suspect that the start button is really a power supply switch and it simply froze up.
I do know that if a car was having UA, unplugging the battery lead would kill the engine as it would physically disable the injectors and coil packs regardless of whatever the computer might be trying to tell it to do.
Is this Toyota's fault, though? Likely not. Computers crash for all sorts of non-code related reasons and none of them are covered under any warranty or service plan that I know of. So why does this matter to me, then? Because I see the same idiot designs in multiple cars and UA isn't confined to just a few Toyotas, either. The vehicles have to be designed to be fail-safe when it comes to the computers freezing while the car is running.
Maybe, but i bet the large majority of PC crashes/hangups/BSDs are cause by software problems. Improper garbage collection, errant pointers accessing memory it shouldn't, etc are probably at the root of most crashes.
none of them are covered under any warranty or service plan that I know of
The typical shrink-wrap disclosure you're probably thinking of I don't think applies here. Did your car come with a lengthy EUA (End User Agreement) that says that none of the software on the vehicle is guaranteed to do anything correctly, and that if it does something wrong that causes loss of property or life that the SW vendor is not responsible?
Toyota can't really be sued because of outside influences, corroded wiring harnesses, vibration and shock, and so on. At most, they would be forced to change their design, though, which would be a good thing. But there's no money in that, really, so the lawyers don't bother.
ie - what this entire "challenge" was about was not about finding the overall cause (no proper fail-safe designs in any of the drive-by-wire systems), but finding a cause that could end up in Toyota being sued for damages.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
I can see where a loose floor mat or other loose object might interfere with the gas pedal, but even in that unlikely event you would still have a lot of options.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
hence the idea that 'cause was poor drivers and greedy lawyers' does not seem consistent with the court results!
So the settlement has nothing to do with presuming that electronics caused the UA. The two have no direct relationship, only a correlation in the lawsuit.
The cop case doesn't seem connected to the usually over-50 "drivers" of runaway Camrys and Prius.
I'm very leery of trials for such things when the people making the decision usually have zero knowledge of cars, driving, engineering, et al.
Evidently, the courtroom in Oklahoma had to be emptied at times when testimony was going to cross certain lines. Even much of the publicly available testimony has been heavily redacted in some places to protect the guilty, and corny terms such as "Software Routine X" used in place of the real name, real variable names replaced with a generic VarY, that sort of stuff.
I'm afraid I find your comment unclear. Are you saying the bit flipped due to software error, or they manually flipped the bit to cause the UAE? The first would be a major problem, the second simply a side note that the code is (correctly) not flipping the bit. But bits don't flip themselves, and if they observed that under debugging conditions, they could easily find out what happened - and issue a software fix. I have not read of any software fixes...
Bit flips are not all that uncommon given the small feature sizes of todays memories. The problem is that Toyota/Denso did not provide error detection and correction (EDC/ECC) on their memories or registers, even those holding critical variables. This is a no-no for safety critical applications, particularly when those techniques are widely known and employed in other areas.
The bit-flip mentioned caused the software module/routine to die.
I'm all ears to hear how that happened.
Have you all noticed that it isn't happening anymore? Now why is that?
Here's the one that discussed the dynamometer test of an '05 and '08 Camry.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319966
And one of the more telling excerpts from that article:
However, we have confirmed in other vehicle testing that I'll talk about later, that if the incident begins with the peddle, [sic] brake peddle [sic] pressed at all, even lightly then the unintended acceleration will continue, potentially, forever unless the driver tries the risky thing of letting go of the brake while the car is driving away with him.
In this case, the driver has to do something counterintuitive - release the brake, then reapply it while the car is accelerating.
I find it rather fascinating!
Nor does it explain the inability to shut off the ignition.
Well, if we're looking at it from a legal standpoint, by which I mean convincing non-technically oriented people of something, the question remains...
Why did the UA incidents go away?
Certainly the recall could have an impact, but no recall even gets close to 100% coverage of the recalled vehicles being repaired/modified. And, since we are talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands of "potentially" affected vehicles still running around without any fix being applied, it seems to me that one would need a bit more proof to convince people on a jury that a real problem exists, or ever existed.
Just because something "could" happen in no way means it "will", or "has" happened.
Tesla Model S Involved In 'Unintended Acceleration Incident (autoblog.com - 9/25/13)
Unintended acceleration is claimed in New York accident (consumeraffairs.com - 11/26/13)
Oh, just got sidetracked - the tin whiskers theory lives on:
Genesee County judge orders Toyota to turn over documents in fatal unintended acceleration crash case (mlive.com/)
The Audi case lives on - this one isn't going anywhere fast either.
And it doesn't even touch on what level of competence we expect from a "driver" of a modern vehicle.
Based on this "evidence", what prevents someone from suing a car company that built a car with a big blind spot, thereby "causing" the driver to have an accident?
How To Spot a Conspiracy Theory:
1. The "official story" from the suspected party is always a lie
2. The alternative explanations, no matter how convoluted, are always more credible than the official story
3. Any evidence that contradicts the alternative explanations are only proof of the depth and cleverness of the conspiracy.
I don't know if it makes much of a difference in the end.
The legal system is all about opinion, and much less about the actual facts.
Just ask anyone freed by the Innocence Project that were previously convicted because a small group of individuals found them "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt".
We will all be long dead and gone before the final chapter is written on Toyota and UA.
I completely agree.
Who does history hold to blame for the Titanic sinking, the Captain or the shipbuilders?
Most historians would place the blame squarely on Cap'n Smith's shoulders, even though there were (clearly by today's standards, anyway) "issues" with the ship's construction.
IMO, it seems that some believe there will be a magical "Aha!" moment, at which time all facts will be revealed, clearly identifying Toyota (in this case, anyway) as knowingly negligent in manufacturing cars with UA an inevitability. Even if that were to happen, I can see them looking like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler after it gets dragged through the US court system, wondering what happened...
Still curious to me that most of these incidents happened to older drivers in cars usually not aimed at those who are "with it", so to speak.
The driver and her passenger were not injured, but eight customers inside the store were hurt.
Although the investigation is ongoing, there is no indication that impairment, age or cell phone usage was a factor in the crash.
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/10/5989688/suv-crashes-into-starbucks-in.html
"there is no indication that impairment, age or cell phone usage was a factor in the crash. "
According to the badge carrying demographic, the Paul Walker/Roger Rodas death car was only going 40-45, too.
The Lexus is also a first gen RX, no newer than 2003, if it matters.
"God Intervened" to slow her car to ~35mph. Someone should have asked
"What number did you dial? did it contain the digits 3 and 5?" no one did
Cell phone frequency ranges of 800 MHz to 2100 MHz give a wave length of
WL=Light Speed / Frequency, where W.L. varies from 14" at 800 Mhz to
5.3" at 2100 MHz. Now an FM "T" antenna of half wave wire lengths will
RECEIVE these RF signals. So any wire length of 7" protruding into cockpit
will pick up 800 MHz, can we say CRUISE CONTROL lever, using turn signal
So when Rhonda Smith dialed her phone she sent a digital signal thru the
turn signal arm directly into the CPU for Cruise Control and it responded
Why did gov't DOT NOT say anything? Last thing gov't needs is another
car company to bail out, so better to say nothing, just like when they
finally realized Tobacco fields were full of poisonous Arsenate of Leadd
Just zip you lip and let tobacco plants suck up all the poison, hey, the
stoopid smokers are gonna' die from Nicotine and Tar poison anyway so
who cares?