These unintended acceleration incidents seem to happen mostly to elderly drivers.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/how-real...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/how-real...
Ultimately, Toyota was heavily penalized for fielding safety-critical software that it could not show was acceptably safe, which is a reasonable and desirable outcome, IMHO.
1) None of these cars are 700hp Supras that accelerate at drastic speeds. These were normal consumer cars that frankly aren't that fast even with the throttle fully depressed.
2) The brakes in all of these vehicles are many times more powerful than the engine. Pressing the brakes would have stopped the vehicles, even if the engine were attempting to accelerate full throttle.
In most cases I would never side with the corporation over average people. But this is one of those rare cases where lawyers were able to hire dishonest "experts" and snow over the judge and jury and get an unjust verdict.
I had a water bottle fall onto my right leg while turning, this caused a sudden but short lived acceleration (e.g. 10 MpH of unexpected acceleration for less than 1 second), this was enough to cause me to mount the curb, and do some decent property/car damage (thank god nobody was on the curb). The brakes worked perfectly, and stopped the car, but it does show how much damage even a tiny burst of unexpected acceleration can do (the entire incident was under 5-10 seconds).
It honestly boggles my mind that someone can dismiss any length of unexpected acceleration because "cars [aren't] 700 hp Supras." Consumer cars are plenty powerful enough to cause injury and death due to any length (even 1 second) of unexpected acceleration at the wrong moment. Sure, if you're going straight on the freeway then you aren't going to even notice, but in a car park, while turning, or stopped at a school crossing, the brake's ability to overcome the engine are largely irrelevant since you won't be expecting it.
Modern cars, even the modest ones, are fast enough that they can get out of control very quickly. While the brakes certainly can slow a vehicle with its throttle stuck open, the real question is what impact does that stuck throttle have on the average driver? When the brake doesn't work as expected, does the average driver continue to brake? Do they pump the brake pedal? Something else altogether? How long does it take them to regain composure and act sensibly (in this case, putting the car in neutral while continuing to brake aggressively)? If that slowed reaction is more than some fraction of a second, accidents will happen.
Toyota's unintended acceleration is notorious because of incidents where the car accelerated up to extremely high speeds, was driven down the highway in this state for an extended time, then finally crashed. At least one involved a panicked 911 call from the driver. This is a scenario drivers should be able to bring to a safe conclusion, because they have time to work things out.
Some drivers will panic in such a scenario and be unable to work on the problem. Those people should not be driving. That they are speaks to the woefully inadequate state of driver training in this country.
None of this absolves Toyota of blame, though. If an equipment malfunction due to a design defect results in death even if the human should have recovered, that's still the fault of the manufacturer, as well as the driver.
> Do they pump the brake pedal?
I was thinking of my old race car days, where a low pedal (boiled fluid or worse) could be temporarily reversed by a few pedal pumps to bring up the line pressure.
The actual data paints a different picture: http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking-result...
That said people don't do well with surprises so while the car mechanically would have no trouble at all stopping very nearly as fast due to a wide open throttle, the driver is probably freaking out instead of just slamming on the brakes.
Also people suck at actually slamming on the brakes, regardless of the situation. It's not something people want to ever do. They'll hit the brakes, they just won't go anywhere close to really pushing that pedal to the floor.
To what? That doesn't contradict what I said at all.
If we convert MPH to FPS we can look at the data as follows:
70 MPH: 102.667 fps 100 MPH: 146.667 fps
CAMRY, V6, 70-0: delta 16 feet, .15sec
CAMRY, V6, 100-0: delta 88 feet, .60sec
INFINITY 70-0: delta 9 feet, .08sec
INFINITY 100-0: delta 6 feet, .04sec
This means that in all but the Camry 100-0 case your reaction time is a larger factor in braking distance than the presence of wide open throttle.
[1]: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics
It's still the driver's fault for not reacting properly. You could have unexpected acceleration or deceleration (which is just as dangerous in some circumstances) due to a lot of different problems; throttle stuck open, O2 Sensor goes wonky and tells the ECU to adjust the fuel mixture in a way that makes your car run rich and stall out, tire blows out causing your car to swerve severely to the right. In all of these cases it is up to the driver to react properly.
NOW, if they had proven that there was a design/manufacturing defect in these cars that Toyota knew about and did nothing about (like in the GM faulty ignition switch case), that's a different story. That would mean the manufacturer put customers at risk deliberately and not only should they pay financial penalties for that, but there should be jail time involved.
However, in the Toyota unintended acceleration case, not only was it very few drivers, they were never even able to establish a cause for the unintended acceleration. The software "experts" that testified for the plaintiffs only said that basically the software is badly written. It was never demonstrated that a specific piece of code caused unintended acceleration.
Instead, what is the obvious answer is that panicking drivers hit the throttle when they meant to hit the brakes. Especially since at least one of the drivers testified that they hit the brakes and it was unable to stop the car, which is total baloney.
EDIT: Also let me just state as a disclaimer I do not work for Toyota, never have, don't know anybody who does, I don't own any Toyota cars and never have. I just can't deal with people spreading bullshit.
But in the scenario I gave the driver DID react properly. The break was applied and the car brought to a halt. It didn't stop damage being done or a dangerous situation from occurring.
Same thing with sudden acceleration. A driver can react appropriately and the condition can still be incredibly dangerous or even deadly.
> Instead, what is the obvious answer is that panicking drivers hit the throttle when they meant to hit the brakes.
Saying something is "obvious" when it is disputed just makes you sound arrogant and dismissive. Many experts don't agree with your "obvious" conclusions.
> Especially since at least one of the drivers testified that they hit the brakes and it was unable to stop the car, which is total baloney.
You're again contradicting the experts. They said that it is possible for the car to ignore brake input, but were unable to determine how corruption could have occurred to cause it.
I'm not saying I know for a fact that unintended acceleration occurred and that the brake was ignored, I do not, nobody does. But I think the way you're dismissing it and stomping all over a dozen or more experts is absurd. You cannot know it didn't occur any more or less than they know it did. You certainly don't have the expertise for your "obvious" conclusions to be meaningful.
> EDIT: Also let me just state as a disclaimer I do not work for Toyota, never have, don't know anybody who does, I don't own any Toyota cars and never have. I just can't deal with people spreading bullshit.
Right... And you essentially saying that the conclusions of experts in the field is wrong without any proof, cite, or good explanation definitely isn't "bullshit."
The fact you need a disclaimer saying "I am not a shill" (paraphrasing) means you yourself must know how absurd you're sounding here.
No one who is actually an expert in cars would say this because the cars in question did not have purely drive by wire brakes. There's literally no way the car could "ignore" brake input unless the hydraulic system failed, which the driver should have noticed the moment they got in the car.
The brakes in 2004 and newer models are controlled by the computer. It controls the hydraulic pressure to the brakes to maximize the amount of work the regenerative braking system can do. It uses a pump and accumulator to store hydraulic pressure, and solenoids to send it to the brakes as well as provide pedal feedback. The only time you directly control the brakes is if the main system loses all accumulated pressure. Until then, you're just sending pedal input to the computer and it does what it wants.
Some cars have a sensor to detect if you are overlapping the throttle and brakes and will cut the throttle if the brake pedal is detected as being pressed. This can frustrate people who attempt to match revs on downshifts in manual transmission cars.
No doubt there are accelerator-brake confusions in many of these cases, especially with older drivers. I'm really hesitant to say they all are in that category. Investigators need more "black box" info to see, for example, whether the accelerator and/or brake were being pressed in the seconds before an accident.
Edit: I mean, -if it was this obvious we should have known it by now?
My recollection is: It was widely reported at the time.