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Comments
Then, when you call, say "this is regarding case #123" and they know the parent company is keeping an eye on things.
I DID just hear back from SoA saying they are looking at any other solution to help me.
Opinion...should I tell them I will dump my car with the dealership, ask for a loaner and let them deal with it on their end?
So, after everyone's advice to get a loaner car and tell them it needs to be done ASAP, they miraculously called me and let me know the field tech was available the NEXT DAY! So, I dropped the car off and they gave me a Forester loaner. I wanted to be there with the tech, but they stated he is unreliable about timing so I might end up waiting for hours.
The Field tech drove the car "for a long while" and said that they transmission was running "perfectly" and the rattling was probably the heat shields because it was occurring at lower RPMs. They re-welded the heat shields (this is the 2nd or so time), drove the car again and said any that the remaining rattling that is happening is "normal operating sounds".
So, I am both relieved and unsatisfied. Happy that the transmission shudder and rattling are normal, but unsatisfied that I just have to settle for these quirks.
I guess it comes back to what I have been used to with my Subies. My 2001 was constantly rattling for 40,000 miles and they had no idea how to fix it and for the 8 years I owned it, I lived with the cold NH-induced piston slap and the dreaded Head Gaskets.
I waited about 6 months to find an H6 LL Bean Outback as I wanted to avoid replacing Head Gaskets. I did it twice on my 2001. Anything else I should be concerned about in regards to the 2008 Outback H6 engine/model???
Thanks again!
A few weeks ago I did a 'bailing wire' job on my shields to keep them quiet. I guess in truth they set up a resonance throughout the car that I could feel as well as hear. Maybe that really is what you were experiencing? I debated whether to cut them down, but in the end attempted to save them.
Kidding. :shades:
Glad to see they finally gave it the attention it deserved. How is it driving now?
If your smart phone has the ability to record video, ask a passenger to record if you ever feel/hear the shudder and noise again.
Well, the car is running the same. The rattling sounded a little better for a day, but totally back to normal. I actually have tried to record the noise, but you can hear it along with the road noise so it was hard to capture the full impact. If I capture the noise at like 35 mph, I can hold the gas pedal at a constant speed and it just turns into a loud constant drone.
The vibration still exists too but now assume it is the way the car shifts normally.
At this point, I am just going to assume that they were correct and the car is fine. I have an extended warranty for 10year/100K so I feel better about that.
This might sound really silly, but have you tried running it on Premium Unleaded for a few tanks at high speed. I don;t know why but Subarus are particularly sensitive to fuel and some seem to respond to Premium Unleaded; my '99 Outback did so and a friend's Forester was similarly sensitive.
If I ran my Outback on 91RON fuel it bucked horribly on gentle acceleration.
The other thing to check is whether there has been a fuel additive engine cleaner run through recently. In Australia, Subaru typically specify that this should occur every 15,000km.
Cheers
Graham
Sure, we all know that there are some crazies out there that will do anything for money & fame, but there are also some real cases out there, such as documented by this recent disclosure. It certainly doesn't explain the 'runaway vehicle' phenomena described by some, but it does explain totally unpredictable behavior and a non-linear application response. Certainly enough, to perhaps drive thru the back wall of your garage when goosing the pedal a little bit.
http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2011-NASA-GSFC-whisker-failur- - - e-app-sensor.pdf
I chuckled a bit at the "shock" approach to restore proper working order of the potentiometer for a short period. That lends a little merit to the "man" method of smacking something to get it to work correctly! :P
http://jalopnik.com/5877037/how-ronald-reagan-became-a-secret-subaru-test-driver- -
Note that the original bed-mounted, rear-facing seats have been removed.
Bob
In operation these sensors are low voltage and very low current. Otherwise, the system might have been somewhat 'self cleaning' by blowing away these tiny leakage paths.
The NASA analysis sort of covers this in their review of the law of unintended consequences. It's well known in the FA (failure analysis) community that the very act of observing something will often change it's very nature and behavior. In this case, measuring the short can destroy it or not show it as even being a short, resulting in a "No Defect Found" outcome (their build a better ohmmeter). No doubt plenty of these pedal assemblies have made it back to Toyota's internal and contract labs, and yet the finding to date have been negative. Perhaps they unintentionally damaged the goods (obliterated the failure) or were unable to capture a reading, and thus could never see the truth? Whisker shorts is not a new event. But if you don't know where to physically look first before attempting electrical diagnostics, and don't consider this as a possibility, you could simply miss it. Ask me how I know of such things.....
Curious. Given the sensitivity of the "whiskers" to current, perhaps that could be a solution to the issue versus replacement of the part. Just isolate it, then "blast" it with enough current to fry the whiskers, but not the components. Hook everything back up, and viola; come back in five years.
Edit: corrected the name, it was Saylor. Sikes was the porn site guy in the Prius SUA hoax.
Only one time did we find the opposite to happen, and we used it to precondition parts for a special application. Wrote a paper about it in 1994. Random single bit failures in an embedded memory on a digital signal processor were seen as an early life problem in accelerated stress testing. We baked the piss out of them, and from then on these parts were a rock of stability. We never did figure out why....
CTS supplied those pedals, and I remember reading they were sealed. I read the report a bit and they say contamination could have been a factor, so I wonder if it was something at the CTS factory?
In all cases, releasing the accelerator pedal closes the throttle, and brakes are fully operational
So not a factor in the Saylor case.
It's the cars that rammed thru the garage back wall, or the ones that smashed into a parked car during a parallel parking or parking lot maneuver, those are the ones that should now be subject to a fresh re-examination. The quick, unrecoverable lurch forward situations.
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120118/OEM11/301189806/1491-
This part made me laugh as well: "The panel recommended that regulators require event data recorders in cars and that the safety agency research the design and placement of accelerator and brake pedals to minimize the risk of drivers mistaking one for the other."
Seriously?! How long have vehicles been around with the EXACT SAME placement of pedals? I'm sorry, but if anyone thinks that people might mistake one for the other, it is time to replace the drivers, not the equipment. In so many ways, that report looks to be an epic FAIL. :sick:
It doesn't make sense to start chasing ghosts. Call it what it is, either human error or pedal entrapment.
I've been doing this crap for 30 years. We're still learning.
I have no skin in this. I'm just applying cold, hard logic. If we can find one or two examples I'm onboard with you. The fibers are not enough-- I don't dispute they are there. I want to see them cause the issue and it needs to be repeatable at least one in a thousand times. This is a very low bar I've set.
I am utterly unconvinced by someone observing fibers and theorizing that maybe they could cause an electrical issue.
But what this sort of sci-fi explanation does is that it robs people of the real solutions--
A) make sure your floor mats aren't capable of sticking your pedals (any/all). I have personally experienced trapped pedals more than 10 years ago. It sucked, and I was alarmed, but I didn't panic and thankfully (I'm sure due to some skill and no doubt some luck) I didn't crash.
I got a link to that NASA report from another industry source. I wasn’t looking for it, but it’s published data, and in the public domain. I could have found it if I had poked around using our internal tech pubs resources. NASA is a public funded agency, and searchable to some extent with proper subscriptions, much as I’ve gotten stuff from Sandia National Labs and other investigative & development agencies on other topic.
Did Toyota or it’s supplier know of this issue before NASA disclosed it? Have they done independent analysis since? To my knowledge they have neither confirmed or disputed the findings. If they thought the NASA report was BS, I’m sure that you would have heard their PR machine crank up. They suspected *something*, enough to replace some 8 million of them with a newer design. What’s different in the new design and what did they find in the units they took back? Unlikely they’ll ever tell. All is quiet Like it never happened.
Again, we’re not talking runaway acceleration here. This is the surge problem that reportedly caused some low speed incidents. Lift off the pedal and all is well. But in that split second, something happened, and a root cause for the submitted case was found.
CTS supplied those, they're even made in the USA, FWIW.
Thing is, they are sealed up. There's no way Toyota quality control could have picked that up without cutting them open and ruining them. The paper mentions how careful they were to open them without causing damage.
Thing is, the media got hysterical and they believed every story about SUA, even the infamous porn guy hoax, Sikes.
NHTSA actually tested Sikes' Prius and it operated just fine. It even had a brake-throttle override, so even intentional throttle application did not create a runaway car.
In 1998 I was honored by the Department of Defense’s microelectronics reliability think tank group (RAC Defense Technical Information Center) in their publication “Recommended Readings in Reliability Physics - Ten Significant Papers in the Area of Failure Analysis”. My 1984 presentation at the IEEE Reliability Physics Symposium placed #4 on their list.
It dealt with a transistor interconnect wiring failure mechanism that was misdiagnosed and largely ignored. It wasn’t until it took down some man critical system and started to cause us some grief that we turned our attention to it. Remember that this was pre-internet days, so problems felt around the globe took time to filter in. In my analysis, I drew upon knowledge from a college Materials Science class, and pulled up a page from a 1958 reference book on Binary Phase Diagrams. I showed 1200 people gathered in Orlando that day that a commonly performed semiconductor wafer level metal sintering process done at the wrong conditions was the kiss of death!
A 25 year old handbook basically said “Don’t Do That”. With continued device use, the wiring system broke apart. A built in time bomb, that eventually killed 1 in a thousand parts. It took a few years for my work to be fully appreciated, and with time everyone abandoned the practice. It took 15 years for my team to get our 5 minutes of fame. We changed an industry.
The wheels can move very slowly ..
Your comment reminded me of a funny story that I heard out at the ISTFA conference this past November. IIRC, it was a computer motherboard maker somewhere in Asia that suddenly experienced a high field failure rate. It seemed that after a certain number of power-on-hours, some kind of chemical reaction was happening within the board and killing it. Analysis showed foreign material (contamination) believed to be wood (?) and a red brick-like substance. What the heck??
A manufacturing date study did show a recorded peak in particulate contamination months earlier on that day. Apparently the city was demolishing several old buildings on the adjacent block! But according to facilities engineering the peak was ‘contained’ and didn’t get thru the HEPA filtration system. Thus they had never shared this data with manufacturing or product engineering. I guess that turned out to be a bad judgment call!!
They kept telling us the water filtration system in our new building was state of the art, but when DC had a bad water scare, the stuff coming out of the fountains was discolored! Ewww!
Can't trust what the building architects tell you, I guess.
Since I purchased the car in June 2011, I have only filled it with Premium Unleaded. I tried the mid-grade once and noticed the H6 didn't like it.
http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/28/nada-dealers-most-happy-with-hyundai-subaru-a- nd-lexus/#continued
Bob
Kudos to her!
Edit: holy cow it outsold the Forester! That ratio used to be about 3 to 1 in the Forester's favor!
I was left with only 4 players, including my son. As you can imagine, I was pretty devastated, and took it very personally, since I was coach, and my son was on the team.
I suddenly became recruiter. I thought long and hard about how to build loyalty, and decided to recruit NICE kids, and looked outside the box.
We added kids from India, Lebanon, Jordan, and even 2 kids from the MPDU housing. (Moderately Priced Dwelling Units). These kids were outsiders here in wealthy Potomac, and definitely not the "click" type. But - I saw potential where noone else did.
Then we set to work. The first season we played in different divisions, so we did not play against the other team. We had a rough start, but bounced back and ended the season on a strong note last year, 2011.
We sent the kids together to skills camp in the off season, and we've gone as a team to watch the local high school play, to build team work and camaraderie.
Well, we got the 2012 schedule, and guess what? The other team was on it this time. They had not been successful in the tougher division and decided to move back down. The stage was set - D-Day Februaru 4, 2012.
The kids have been talking about it since the schedule came out in early December. They go to the same school, so there was trash talk from the other side about how they were the "cool kids" and how they would crush us. Those same kids invited all their 4th grade teachers to see the game, and 3 of them showed up!
Show time.
My son had the game of his lifetime and scored the first and last points of the game. The original 4 kids (who they did not want on their team!) combined for 10 points, enough to make the difference.
We won 24-21!
It was a wonderful story of redemption via hard work and diversity. It's what's on the inside that counts. Not the size of your head, but rather the size of your heart!
I am one very, very proud coach and dad. :shades:
Bob
Gosh, that is a great story! Goes to show what you can make happen with the right attitude!
Congratulations proud papa & coach!
I'd like to report elsewhere. Is that alright?
When does the movie come out?!
I have nothing against any of those kids - let's be clear about that.
In fact, after the game, I put both teams together and we took a joint photo with all 20 kids. I told them we needed to unit to beat the only undefeated team in our division - we BOTH must beat them for either of us to have a chance to win the division.
Funny side note: I made a bet with my son, that if he scored 4 points or more, he'd get new high tops.
First let me say he needed new shoes anyway, his old ones were actually tearing.
Any how, he played the best game of his life!
The shoes he picked weren't cheap, so it cost me, but he earned it!
I just need to add something to the list of things failing on my 2008 Outback 3.0 LL Bean. Just hit 42,000 miles.
I was driving to a Patriots party (I know, tough one!!!) and was on the highway for the ride. My commute is mostly back roads and only about 3 minutes on the highway.
Periodically on the highway, my steering wheel would vibrate/shake. Mostly around 65 mph. Then, it would calm down and be fine. It happened about 4 times in my 30 minute ride on the highway. The tires only have 7000 miles, been rotated and balanced about 1000 miles ago.
Is this wheel bearings?
I have resigned myself to just driving the car as long as I can and not go back to any dealerships unless I need an oil change. I appreciate keeping my blood pressure down
I did renew my AAA membership as I have a very low level of confidence in the car. Pity, I really love*d* it.
So they move to another team, one which maybe is playing in a more competitive system. Sometimes it doesn't go so well, just like your example.
Even more frequently, though, is that the parents planning the jump to a new team/league don't bother to tell anyone on the original team early enough to permit the team to find more players. I don't know why they do this. Maybe they want a bridge left behind, just in case their plans to join a new team don't pan out. Or maybe they don't want the original team to try to convince them not to leave.
Whatever it is, it's horribly unprofessional and insulting. Just act like a responsible adult. If you think your kid should play on a better team, against other better teams, just say it and move on.
I haven't encountered this in person, yet, as my son is just about to turn 5. But many of my co-workers and friends have been through it and I've heard so many stories like AJ's.
The whole thing makes me hope my son focuses on individual sports.