[Noisebridge-discuss] FW: Toyota

[Don French]

This sounds like a much more likely explanation.  So, do the Toyotas -- like
the Audis -- have smaller brake pedals?  And how did they prove that this
was what was happening with the Audis?

-- Don


On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 9:26 PM, Jeff Younker <jeff at drinktomi.com> wrote:

> So, I'm very skeptical that there is actually a sudden acceleration problem
> with Toyotas.  I say this based on history.
>
> The last time it was the Audi sudden acceleration problem.   Audis were
> leaping through garages., and they were accelerating into intersections.
>
> The DOT put a lot of money and time into investigating the problem.  What
> they found was basically this:
>
> The economy sucked, so people traded in their big American cars for the
> smaller more gas efficient cars.   In particular they were trading in for
> Audis.
>
> American cars have much bigger brake pedals.  In these cars many people,
> under normal driving conditions, rest their foot on the left side of the
> pedal.  However under certain conditions, say an emergency stop, they slam
> their foot down an inch or two to the right of that.  In an American car, an
> inch or two from the rest position is still the brake pedal.   However in an
> Audi (or most other foreign cars) this is the gas pedal.
>
> What the driver experiences is that instead of slamming to a stop,  the car
> leaps forward.  At this point the driver's well honed reactions start
> running on autopilot.  There is no conscious intervention.  Their body is
> telling them that they are pressing the brake, but the car is going faster,
> so they keep slamming their foot on the "brake" and the car keeps leaping
> forward, or they keep pressing harder on the brake and the car keeps going
> faster.
>
> At least that was the problem with Audis.
>
> So here we are again in a time in which people are trading their big
> american gas guzzlers for small fuel efficient cars.  And again the most
> popular of these cars are having mysterious sudden acceleration problems.
>
> What I'd love to see is the brake-down on the incidents including the
> length of time the driver had been driving the car, and the previously owned
> model of car.  That might really tell us something.
>
> -jeff
>
>
>
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