Toyota Accelerator Data Skewed Toward Elderly 776
An anonymous reader passes along this discussion on the data for the Toyota accelerator problem, from a few weeks back. (Here's a Google spreadsheet of the data.) "Several things are striking. First, the age distribution really is extremely skewed. The overwhelming majority are over 55. Here's what else you notice: a slight majority of the incidents involved someone either parking, pulling out of a parking space, in stop and go traffic, at a light or stop sign... in other words, probably starting up from a complete stop."
Left foot don't know what the right foot is doing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here's a question (Score:5, Interesting)
The black box system does tell you that, in some cases at least. And it says that the driver is slamming their foot on the gas. I tend to believe the black box - but it's based on the same sensors and software that's supposedly at fault...
Other possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's a question (Score:3, Interesting)
And who is it that's claiming the sensors and software are at fault? The people who were involved in the incidents, that's who. Of course they're claiming that; it's either make that claim or admit they screwed the pooch.
Re:And 1/2... (Score:3, Interesting)
Non-issue (Score:4, Interesting)
What it means is that there's likely zero problem with Toyota's cars and there never was.
What's happening is that people are missing the brake pedal and hitting the gas pedal without realizing it. Their car then speeds up, shocking them, and since they think they're foot is on the brake they slam it all the way down, stomp on it, etc., and it just keeps going.
The elderly do this all the time.
Toyota's are just really popular cars, and some lawyer out there smelled blood.
And right now is a really good time to buy a Toyota. You'll get the deal of a lifetime :)
Re:Correlation != causation (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem (as I see it) is a stackup of features:
pushbutton start/stop, and it doesn't stop when I momentarily push it.:
accelerator pedal by wire.:
transmission shift by wire.:
There is nothing in the owners manual that would tell me that you have to hold in the start/stop button in to stop it, I looked. That is beyond bullshit. I want a car that turns off when I tell it to, I will deal with the lack of power steering (you don't need it at 120mph) and a couple of power brake pedal pushes (the engine isn't making vacuume at full throttle anyway).
This is either an embedded software bug (it has issues with the cruise control sometimes when pulling a mountain) or RF susceptibility. At no time does ANYONE test for RF susceptibility with a nearby trucker running a linear amplifier on his CB radio. It is well above CE test limits.
Re:Here's a question (Score:5, Interesting)
If the vehicle has that much computer controlled functionality, why doesn't the black box tell which pedals were pressed at the time of impact and for the moments before impact? The black box system is arguably an invasion of privacy, but in this case it would go a long way toward fixing the problem(s) and perhaps saving lives.
I bought a brand new car in 2006. It was great for the first few months.
Then about 4 months in, it acted strangely. If I put the throttle past 1/2-way, the car would start bucking wildly. It was as if I was alternating between *flooring it* and *idling* every second. It was major because merging into fast traffic and crossing busy intersections (from a stop sign) was a real pain. I had to take it to the dealer 3 times for them to find the problem; they thought "user-error", fuel line, transmission, etc.
A sensor in the throttle assembly was faulty. It was reporting to the computer that I was flooring/idling/flooring/idling when in fact I obviously wasn't. It was showing the throttle position and everything.
So...
Had I gotten into an accident and someone looked at the black box, it would show the same thing. "Umm, he took his foot off the gas and then floored it, repeating. Probably drunk or distracted."
Re:not enough data (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not far more concerning to me. Whats concerning is how stupid people can be when put in the situation. You literally just press the brakes or turn the car off and it stops!
Re:not enough data (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not far more concerning to me. Whats concerning is how stupid people can be when put in the situation. You literally just press the brakes or turn the car off and it stops!
I did a minor experiment. I was coasting around 15 MpH, then applied heavy acceleration and brakes at the same time. I was slowing down, but not nearly enough to do much in an urgency. Sure, at completely rest my brakes were enough to over-power the engine but engine + kinetic energy is another story.
My concern about this kind of issue isn't the car accelerating up to 100+ MpH on the highway. Like you say, there are ways to slow down and stop.
It's when it accelerates *at the wrong moment*. You're a couple of car lengths from the car in front of you, you're nearing an intersection, you want to brake for some odd reason, etc. The big thing is if it happens near-or-at the time you need to stop. Pressing a brake a few seconds too late is usually a bad thing as it stands, accelerating instead... bad.
Throw in the shock of the event and the time it takes to throw it in neutral, and it's a dangerous thing if you need to stop.
As I mentioned in another post, I had issues with the sensors on my throttle of my GM car. It was sending faulty data to the onboard computer and thus the acceleration was behaving incredibly strange: thinking 1/2 pressure alternating between 0-pressure and full throttle.
While were looking at that spreadsheet... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Starting from full stop ..... (Score:4, Interesting)
3) Once cruise is cancelled, it can only be started again by going over 30MPH; and even then, you can only set it to the speed you are currently going at; not at a higher or lower speed. (So you have to reach the desired speed manually, then hit the button).
Come back when you have facts, not fabrications.
Odd, my car (not a Nissan), cruise control has a "Resume" feature. If CC gets canceled for some reason (#1 and #2 above), I press the Resume button and the CC accelerates back up to the speed it was set at. Turning the car off or turning the CC OFF, would reset the CC, but other then that it remembers where it was set.
Re:Here's a question (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you know that their system tells you that?
NO ONE knows what the damn things record.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233585 [newsweek.com]
I decided on a Civic instead. (Score:5, Interesting)
I started car shopping shortly after the bad press about Toyota broke. I always wanted a Corolla because of its great reputation.
I tried researching the issue, but nobody had hard numbers to firmly establish that the hype was hype. All I got were anecdotal accounts along the lines of "we've had Toyotas for years we love them". The only numbers I did get were that Toyotas got in more accidents per a given number of cars than Hondas, though it wasn't established if it was the car or the driver.
It occurred to me that the main reason I started thinking about the Corolla was reliability....in other words, not having to think about my car and here I was scouring the internet doing research.
Finally, the 2010 Car Buying Guide of The Consumer Reports came out. Everything that attracted me to the Corolla, reliability and safety seemed to rated slightly higher in the 2010 Civic.
If my current car was in better shape I probably would have waited 6 months for the smoke to clear before giving up on getting a Corolla.
My intuition is that a significant amount of bad hype is involved( though not the only issue going on ), but when it comes time to put down tens of thousands of dollars of your own money and take risks that could hurt you personally, your attitude changes.
I don't like spending more money for a Honda, but I can and given what is at risk it is not worth it to take a chance on a Corolla in the next few weeks.
I think getting their electronics analyzed by NASA is the smartest thing Toyota can do. They need a detached third party body with a stellar reputation to reassure people to clear their name.
Re:Non-issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Only if you can explain why the bumbling elderly somehow manage not to have wrong pedal crashes in other cars with the same frequency. If the explanation was "old drivers", then Lincoln and Cadillac would top the charts.
Can you also explain how a wrong pedal incident would lead to reliable reports of smoke pouring out of the wheels of a runaway car?
one in a thousand odds not good enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
The odds of this kind of skew are ridiculously low.
We have ages of 27 people. 13 of them are over 65. If you look here [allcountries.org], you can compute that of all Americans over 15 years old, 16.5% are over 65. (14.4/(14.4+72.9)=16.5)
I'll be generous and assume that 20% of Toyota owners are over 65.
So in a sample of size 27, what are the odds of getting 13 or more people over 65, when the population you are looking at has only 20% of its people over 65?
The odds of getting that skewed of a sample are only about 1 in a thousand. (1-binomdist(12,27,.2,1)) So despite claims to the contrary, that is indeed statistically significant.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about where this sample even came from, and am not claiming anything about its validity. I am merely disputing the posts dismissing this sample out of hand without doing some simple math.)
Whew; glad I'm only 54 (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean WTF is wrong with you so-called techies when you think that cars with "drive by wire" throttles, brakes, and steering (yes, steering) are a good idea. You know how reliable computers are (not "can be") and I'm sure you would be quite nervous to trust your life to a computer controlled car. But in the same breath you jump to the defense of Toyota who build cars just like I've described - and apparently didn't even see the need to include some fail-safe routines into their systems.
I see this kind of stuff every day on Slashdot; people arguing both sides of an issue "just because". They never consider that one or both of those "sides" are nothing more than political or marketing spin. It makes me sad to see that this is the kind of discourse my fellow man is capable of.
Anyway, go on with your beating on people who claim to have been taken on a full throttle ride by their Toyota. You probably won't experience this kind of thrill yourself so you can feel safe and justified with your attacks. And if the worst happens and your Toyota freaks out and runs you full-throttle into a bridge abutment - well, we won't hear about what happened to you so it's all OK here in Slashdot land.
And breast implants caused chronic fatigue (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone remember that gem of litigation? The one where people won lawsuits claiming breast implants caused chronic fatigue syndrome despite the fact the rate of chronic fatigue among breast implant patients was the same as the general population.
The law isn't about the truth. It's about narrative.
Look at the Tylenol scare. There's only one way to respond as a company in that situation. Toyota's great sin is that they held back and waited for the truth.
Re:Did you type this on a manual typewriter? (Score:2, Interesting)
if you can drive your auto with as much control as your manual, then i don't think you actually HAVE much control over your car.
What is it, exactly, I shouldn't be able to do ?
i can't say, never having seen you drive.
and i don't have any trouble driving an auto, actually its less taxing on the mind. but sometimes i like being in control of my car, especially on trips >100km.
Long trips are one of the best times to have an auto (along with cruise control). Probably beaten out only by city driving and commuting.
i think you've never driven for fun. automatic gears take the fun out of driving. inside the city it becomes a burden (not an advantage) to continually keep shifting. automatic gear shifting is really helpful there.
when, on the other hand, you don't need to shift so frequently, it becomes nice to have something to think about. here, automatics just take away the enjoyment of a long drive.
cruise control is usually liked by people who aren't bothered about driving and just want it to be as painless as possible. i find it quite boring.
Re:Good god, please stop (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it's horrible. 55% of Prius unintended acceleration fatalities are with elderly drivers, and 15% of the fatalities at large are elderly drivers. Obviously there isn't any age link, right?
Re:not enough data (Score:3, Interesting)
Fair point, I didn't see there was more than one page. However the incident initiated a seperate recall, it did not kick the first recall into overdrive. The decision to make the second recall was also made in less than a month after the first confirmed mat-less crash, "though the cause is still under investigation"(pg 6.)
"I think I was reasonable in saying that mat-less incident is what finally provoked a deeper action on Toyota's part: they could no longer deny a problem less trivial than pedals stuck under floormats."
But is it reasonable to expect additional recall action from Toyota before the evidence from the December crash? There are two seperate problems here, they had a demonstratable problem with mats in September and acted properly. Nobody had hard evidence of mat-less crashes until December when again they acted properly. Yes the accident was tragic but short of polishing a crystal ball I still don't see what Toyota should (or could) have done differently?
Re:Here's a question (Score:1, Interesting)
Had I gotten into an accident and someone looked at the black box, it would show the same thing. "Umm, he took his foot off the gas and then floored it, repeating. Probably drunk or distracted."
But there's nothing wrong with the brake sensor. So when you tell the cops "it started accelerating out of control, I tried to turn off the car & it wouldn't turn off (because it's not in park, duh), I tried shifting into neutral, and I had my foot on the brakes the whole time!" they can verify that you never turned the key, never shifted to neutral, and never pressed the brakes. Even though the data regarding the accelerator pedal is flawed the rest is not, so when Toyota goes to investigate they see that you lied about everything else, so why should they spend millions of dollars on an investigation or recall when it's probably driver error all the way.
I'm not defending Toyota, there IS something goofy with those vehicles. But it's not nearly as widespread of a problem as the news is making out, and this data shows what is really happening in many of the reports we see in the media. You have a bunch of old people who've never driven a hybrid and quite frankly don't understand that they DO operate a little differently than a pure combustion vehicle. They also tend to have slow and/or incorrect impulses- NONE of these people reported ever putting the car into neutral during their initial reports, but afterwards suddenly they all "tried to shift & it wouldn't. I have a hard time believing that in all these cases we not only have a throttle problem, but at the same exact time the brakes fail and the shifting mechanism jams at the same time the "ignition" switch quits working. I can understand how a company would have trouble chasing down an odd issue with the throttle, but even an idiot should be able to spot a problem so pervasive that it causes essentially ALL of the control systems to fail at the same time.
Here's a good example- my mother in law got a hybrid recently (different brand) and she's nearly caused a wreck on several occasions. Why? Because the hybrid doesn't have a starter and as long as the battery has good charge the motor isn't running- although she knows in her mind that the car is "on" and "in gear" it still catches her by surprise when it just goes forward. She's spent so many years driving combustion vehicles that anytime the engine isn't running she subconsciously thinks it's off... there have been several occasions where she's actually started to get OUT of the car while it was still on & in gear. And no, she's not senile or anything like that.
But she describes what happens as the car "just taking off on its own" because she wasn't expecting it to accelerate, even when she pressed the pedal, because all of her ingrained 'habits' and reflexes tell her it shouldn't do anything with the engine not running.
No, what we really have here is a few cases of a faulty throttle mechanism (electronic or mechanical or both), combined with old people who panic & don't react correctly. Then they get embarressed and lie about what they did or didn't do which just makes it harder to find what the problem is. On top of that, we have a pile of people who don't HAVE a problem, but are either using it as an excuse to get out of a speeding ticket or are just media whores, or hoping to dig a little gold out of a class action lawsuit.
Re:Did you type this on a manual typewriter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, someone making fun of GP.
Ever driven an 18 wheeler? Ever driven an 18 wheeler with an AUTOMATIC???? I did. Once. Never again.
As has been pointed out, the transmission cannot anticipate that I need a bit more torgue to climb a hill that it hasn't sensed yet. Nor can it see that I need to merge into traffic. It senses nothing, anticipates nothing - it only responds to certain stimuli, and everything is WRONG by the time those stimuli reach the brain controlling the transmission.
Worse, that damned transmission took a nice stab at killing me. Going downhill, a driver puts the truck into a lower gear and/or engages the Jake brake to govern his speed going down the hill. Try that with an idiot computer which decides that you are wasting fuel at high RPM's and upshifts the transmission, just before you get to the steepest grade on the hill. I had a hairy few minutes, believe me. 80,000 pounds of inertia falling into the gravity well is hard to overcome when the machine is fighting with you!
Re:I trust Woz (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I bought the "safest car in the world" (that's the brand promise) second hand from a dealer. It had one previous owner, and was two years old.
Three weeks after purchase, it suddenly accelerated uncontrollable on the freeway. Pressing the brakes slowed it down, but when I lifted off the brakes again it kept accelerating. Quite unnerving.
I managed to find the cause (not that many things in a car should cause it to accelerate) quite quickly, the 3+/3- km/h cruise control adjustment micro switch had broken (physically) and now sat and "vibrated" towards the 3+ setting several times a second. Turning the cruise control completely off (separate switch) worked fine.
I had the broken part replaced by the dealer, and never said much about it. I wonder what had happened if I had described the case to the press. After all, you could claim the design is defective since a broken switch shouldn't result in such a scenario. ... I still drive that same car btw, 10 years later. Nothing's ever broken down since ;)
but elderly *DO* it with other car! (Score:3, Interesting)
Driving in the US and Europe is very different. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've driven recent model cars in both the US and Germany. When comparing things like fuel economy and performance, here's a short list of things people tend to forget:
Driving in the US means much more driving very long distances compared to Europe. So many of my European colleagues just don't grok this until I describe a few things. For example, an 8 hour drive from Phoenix to LA at 70+ miles per hour, then show them on a map how little of the US that actually covers. I do that, then ask them how far away they'd be if they drove for 8 hours from their house at that speed (as if it were possible).
Distances impact the relative "feel" of fuel costs. I live in a rural part of the country (as do 42% of McMericans). It's several miles drive for me to get to groceries. It can be a 45 minute commute at highway speeds just to get to work (not for me, but it's common enough). You just use a lot more fuel. This is also why public transportation is so much more difficult to make practical here. The distribution of population is radically different. Much of the US was settled after the advent of personal transportation that you didn't have to feed and water.
To my German friends -- don't feel bad about not quite fully understanding that sheer size and scope of the U.S. You aren't the first from Germany (well, technically Austria I suppose) to make that mistake. (poke).
P.S. - On the whole Automatic vs. Manual transmission thing -- I've certainly driven both. People claiming better turns on sweeping mountain roads and are driving front wheel drive cars are pretty much full of crap. Sure, a manual will give you a real edge with a rear wheel drive car. Otherwise, get over yourself and quit pretending your an F1 driver in your silly little consumer box.
When I drive in Europe, I make an effort to rent a small automatic. It costs more. Why? Because I don't know the roads well and my attention is full enough paying attention to the different road etiquette and the GPS combined with signs in different shapes than I'm used to and frequently in languages I don't speak.