$1M Prize For Finding Cause of Unintended Acceleration

One way to stop it cold: Clutch Pedal.

Unfortunately, almost no one in the US dives a manual transmission and how would you hold that cell phone and Big Gulp and shift anyways...

As for shifting with a big gulp, that's easy, shift on the column! Learned how to drive in a 77 Chevy with a three speed on the column ( miss that old truck).

But the idea of putting the vehicle in neutral, pulling off the road and turning a key is for whatever reason way too complicated for way too many people.

You could still have an emergency clutch pedal, or button, or handle. It's actually a very good idea AH. Sort of an "manual override" as our cars become more computerized.

A big red RESET Button. :-)

Or, as they have in the fighter jet cockpits, that D handle between the legs, but I keep having bad thoughts about punching out of a car in a tunnel.

Nice to hear from you again, Roger. I hope you are getting through the winter okay. It just doesn't seem to stop for you guys.

Hi AH,

Actually up in Albany the winter has been mild. All the stuff we usually get went south. It's been really weird with rain here while it snowed in DC. Bizarre.

http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2010/02/11/news/doc4b737940124c0517873702.txt

Roger

The spike in reports of unintended accelleration begain at almost exactly the same time as the honeybees began to mysteriously vanish, UK PM Tony Blair left office and the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians started airing in the US.

Clearly all these things cannot be unrelated.

"including requiring brakes to be strong enough to stop the car even when the accelerator is floored."

Modern brakes are more than strong enough to stop an engine. Even a powerful 320 ft-lb output engine, distributed among four wheels for 80 ft-lbs each can easily be stopped by ordinary brakes.

The real problem is panic. Even well trained military pilots make mistakes and the sudden rush of unexpected acceleration (and adrenalin) take 99.99% of us off guard.

What seems like common sense right now is thrown out the window when it happens unexpectedly.

While I like to think that I would be immune to the event, I have not specifically trained nor tested myself for such a mishap. I can't say that I would do the right thing quick enough, because sometimes the elapsed time from sudden acceleration to impact can be less than one second.

On the other end of the spectrum I listened to the testimony of one Toyota owner describe her sudden acceleration with the car in reverse, stating that she hit 100 MPH. Obviously, that is just a tiny bit of exaggeration since reverse gear is usually a lower ratio than first and 25 MPH is probably the maximum you could go. And... never mind that a Toyota probably couldn't get to 100 MPH in less than 20 seconds going forward. Still, it speaks volumes about human perception under duress.

I believe she stated that the vehicle was accelerating in forward gear and she put it in reverse while she was going forward and it continued to accelerate to about 100 MPH. Fly by wire shifting perhaps?

Maybe I missed that. Like I said, the trip to 100 MPH probably takes at least 15 seconds, all of which was in panic mode. Hard to do the right thing when fear and panic are in control.

I don't know what their transmissions are like. It would make sense to disable any deliberate attempt to select reverse when the car is moving forward. Neutral may be a different story, but my guess is that she was busy watching the road and not the selector if she was shooting for neutral.

Last line of defense would be turning the key off, but it probably locks the steering wheel and power brakes go away. You have to turn it off, then reengage the key to the run (not start position) to free the wheel.

Any useful response needs to be planed and thought out, which is not easy under those conditions for most of us.

You're right as far as panic and fear taking over and I have had a similar situation with the throttle sticking on an old car I had. I used to be pretty good at reacting quickly but I'm not so sure I would fare as well nowadays. As far as the womans story is described,, I don't get it, unless it was a standard transmission. With an automatic transmission (or at least any that I have dealt with), the brake has to be applied to shift from anything into reverse, but from reverse or drive and I believe 1, 2, or 3rd gear, you can push it right into neutral. If you've ever lost your brakes going down a hill and didn't have a MT to shift down then you will know what a horrific sound and jerk you'll get when you put that thing in reverse, it won't accelerate. But that is just my personal experience.

She may have been on the brake pedal.

I know when I was training to fly that instructors would do things to me by surprise to test my reactions. Each time that I went through one of those events I was always as cool as a cucumber. What worried me was my response to those cooked up and often unannounced emergencies. My first reaction was surprise (not panic), then curiosity sets in and I want to analyze the situation, make a determination of action, then apply corrective actions.

On the surface that sounds like the text book response you want, but it is that curiosity stage that always worried me because I am concerned if I am really reacting fast enough. Fear works both ways. On the downside it can cause paralysis. On the upside it is nature's way of kicking you off your butt to save your butt. I guess that over the aggregate of all life that it must work for the upside better than 50% of the time. :-)

A pressure detector (mechanical or other) installed on the Pedal pad to detect a foot pressure on the accelerator pedal. the fuel supply will be restricted to idling no matter where the pedal position goes to if there is no initial foot pressure on the pedal pad.This way, when instinctively you release the accelerator pedal, the fuel will be reduced to idling as intended...!

Well, additional layers of redundancy may be well what they do. VW, for instance, forces the EMU (engine management unit) to idle whenever the brake pedal is engaged (regardless of accelerator position) and they also have dual accelerator pots.

Toyota uses dual Hall pots to achieve sensor redundancy. A failure in one pot should force the system into limp mode. However, Toyota did not choose to add the electronic brake override.

Toyota issued a recall to replace the Denso foot pedal assembly, citing that as the probable cause. The belief was that the pedals mechanically stuck. However, there is peripheral evidence that the cause may be in the EMU, not the mechanical bearings or the sensor array of the foot pedal.

Compounding the problem is politics. The federal safety board investigating the problems has agreed to toss out investigation of some of the Toyota complaints after reaching agreements between the US government and Toyota. I don't know the nature of the dismissed complaints, but it does raise questions.

Finally, the whole issue of e-gas is not a new phenomenon with sudden vehicle acceleration. Audi 5000s had the issue and were a pure mechanical system. That issue was never fully discovered and some felt it was the pedal placement.

My car uses e-gas, but the brake does not override the throttle input. This is because the car is designed to allow heel-toe operation. My safety net is the clutch pedal, which is the master override between the engine and wheels. So, I do not worry about malfunctions with the throttle assembly other than the inconvenience it might bring calling a tow truck.

There just isn't a simple solution that catches all requirements.

The big question many people ask is "why e-gas?" The answer is simply that government has indirectly legislated it into existence. E-gas allows manufactures to dynamically remap the fuel supply under varying load and running conditions to optimize fuel economy mandated by Congress.

Now the Chevy Cobalt is under scrutiny and guess what the issue revolves around? GM uses electronic power steering in all models that have engines with 2.4 liters and less. There have been accidents (and fatalities, I believe) associated with this recall. Ford expect 80% of their vehicles will have electrical power steering like this by 2012. These systems save fuel over the older hydraulically assisted systems.

The trend to add more drive-by-wire components will only increase as more government pressure is brought to bare on manufactures to increase fleet mileage ratings. Last year's government mandates for improved fleet mileage has been the largest jump in fleet standards to date and is very likely to push more drive-by-wire components into new cars to help offset fuel consumption. It is possible we will see more instances where safety is pushed further into the back seat.

This is because the issue is about improvement and learning, and it tends to be a chicken and egg thing, because an automobile in action is a Complex System.

read here and see if I have identified the cause and solution.

Chris

Just read your essay Chris. Well said.

-John

thank you. do you think the fact that "an automobile in action, with a cotrol system is a 'complex system', and guaranteed to fail" is a valid reason to get the million dollar prize?

Chris

Probably not. But with Toyota facing 3 billion dollars in lawsuits, a million dollar prize is a drop in the bucket for finding the CAUSE of this particular failure and makes it a valid reason. Economics and public image win in some cases even though system failure may be a guaranteed entity.

I say hire Mac to write the software.

Many members on ecomodder dot com have installed injector kill switches. They use them for engine-off-coasting. It is very effective and the car starts right back up when needed.

It is apparent the the gas pedal is not the source of the problem. So it would seem that the throttle-by-wire system is suspect. I have reviewed Toyota's system and I have come to the conclusion that the system's hardware configuration provides sufficient information to the engine's computer that will allow detection of a failed component; there is sufficient redundancy designed into their system.

So it is my conclusion that the software is the most likely culprit for this problem. Without a copy of the code in hand, I cannot rule-out the possibility that either the code contains a problem, the code is becoming corrupted, or the vehicle's computer is unknowingly being injected with malicious code from a routine connection of a reader to the OBDII port during service and/or annual inspection.

My suggestion here is to crap the throttle-by-wire and install a throttle cable system. Problem solved.

Prius Runaway

All is well, but it is shocking to me that the brakes on so many models of cars are totally inadequate to stop a car under these conditions.

At the end of the link above they talk about a California Highway Patrol officer that died after his loaner Lexus did the same thing, reaching 100 MPH before crashing.

CHP are trained for high speed and performance driving and he was still unable to control and stop the Lexus.

You have quite a few assumptions in that statement.

1) It doesn't say that the officer was driving.

2) He is a Sergeant. He could have a desk job.

3) If he was driving and had the training, he would have known to put the d--- car in neutral.

The more and more I hear about this and the Cobalt steering problem, the more I think we need to adjust driver's education. We already have the MADD cars to simulate drunk driving. Why not a car to simulate other dangerous situations on the road?

I really don't know if the Lexus can be put into neutral when driving under normal circumstances and I have no clue if the transmission would shift into neutral even if you put the selector into that position. So, you are right, there are a lot of assumptions. That's the best we can do.

The problem, or one of them, is that the highway to electronic vehicle control systems is a two-way street. It has benefits and it has alligators that can and will bite you in the butt. Most of us are used to the context of operation of cars built before the electronic revolution. Cars used mechanical linkages and mechanical cogs to control the vehicle. Now electronics control the mechanisms more and more and they operate invisibly to us. A car in the 1970's with a stuck accelerator is pretty simple to defeat and that is the thinking we are applying to cars built in the 21st century that do not operate on the same set of primitive mechanical principles. So we do make assumptions about the car's operation.

Secondly, regardless of what position the officer held, they still undergo training to keep their cool under "fire". My original point, many posts ago, was that even people that do train for the unexpected get foiled and it is easy to see why so many people that are not trained do not react the way you might expect.

Our mindset is an analytical one while we ponder the Toyota issue and we write, "why didn't they do this, or that?" The reality is that most of us probably would fare no better under those conditions because we are caught off-guard and our bodies are pumped full of adrenaline, which hinders cognitive thinking.

If you don't think that adrenaline hinders your ability to react, take a look at that video where a police officer and a bad guy stood toe to toe 15 feet from each other and both emptied their weapons without either getting hit. Neither person moved and I would not be surprised that the officer scored very well with paper targets on a range.

I know of another situation where under battle a soldier watched his buddy pointing his weapon and repeatedly pulling the trigger on his M-16 long after he shot his last round.

It's easy to be an armchair quarterback. And I agree with you that more driver training would be a good thing, but nobody is really willing to pay for it.