Wozniak cites 'scary' 2010 Prius acceleration problem

Just a few? That's just THIS thread - other ones are filled with the same dismissive attitude. The number of personal attacks against the man, whose engineering skills are known to be non-trivial, are unfortunate. You would think that instead of such blatant dismissal, us Prius owners would be interested in ensuring that there really isn't something wrong with our cars and would be willing to consider that there might possibly be software, mechanical, or human interface issues that might contribute to this issue.

That said, I hope that the official fix resolves this issue once and for all and the Prius remains unaffected.

 

Yep.

 

I hate to say it, but this sounds a lot like what my older cars would do if I repeated these same steps. It does not sound to me like it's even an issue with the design of the system. I'm not saying that it isn't, but anyone can interview and talk about their problems. He should put a video camera in his car (or have someone hold it while he drives) and actually show us what he is doing, what settings he has, etc. so that there is actually footage to help review the situation.

I will say, that typically if I need to accelerate with the CC on in any of my cars, I would step on the accelerator and cancel the CC manually and re-set it. It's a smoother, more controlled way to increase your speed. I never really enjoy the red-lining that cars do when the speed drops below the set speed to bring it back up to speed. I may even attempt to anticipate this and adjust the speed of the vehicle manually.

In regards to the CNN interview, he expected someone to jump because HE mentioned something? Does he seriously think that Toyota has that many staff working in that department that everyone gets their own personal assistant? Isn't APPLE known for having iPods that the battery would catch fire or explode? I don't recall them jumping to help anyone that reported this; in fact, I believe they made people sign agreements not to talk about it. Why should Toyota treat him better than Apple has treated their customers? I will admit, that my knowledge of the Apple situation is limited to what I've heard about in the news and what my memory is able to recall from that so I may not have full information!

 

Rats! There goes all my fun. Apparently I'd need the automatic cruise control Prius <grumble grumble>.

Bob Wilson

 

For crying out loud, have you read this thread at all?
Have you read what Efusco has said at all?
Most importantly, have you understood a word of what has been said?

For the last time (on my side), THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE PRIUS CRUISE CONTROL SYSTEM!!!!!!!!!! The guy in question, who supposedly has "superior" engineering skills is not using the CC as he should! The car is behaving AS EXPECTED.

We all care for the Prius, and sure as hell we care if someone finds out a REAL problem in the software or somewhere else. We would be the FIRSTS TO COMPLAINT about a problem that would pose a safety risk to all of us. However THIS IS NOT THE CASE!

Don't expect us to indulge someone who goes to the press and does all this fuss about a NON-EXISTING PROBLEM, when all he had to do was to read the user's manual, or at least ask for advice in forums like this one.

I'm sure all of us would be happy to explain to this gentlemen that he is the one causing the situation. When he chose not to read the UMN and jump into the news he lost all chances to get my sympathy.

 

so i am software engineer with 12 years of on-hands experience (probably a lot more than Steve in past 12 years)... can I call Steve Jobs now and tell him how to fix iPhone problems? ;-).

If he went to the Toyota dealer, he would get service advisor to look it up and either explain it to him or create an FTR for Toyota. You can not call 800 number and expect to talk to Prius master tech.

He claims not to have time to go to Toyota dealer but he is on every news channel ;-).

 

my error

 

On my VERY PERSONAL opinion, this gentlemen should apologize big time to TOYOTA for all the mess he created with his claims.

He should go public, call for a press conference, and put the record straight. I guess we'll never see that happening, from what we saw on the CNN interview.

 

to be fair, the implementation of the adaptive cruise control might not have included adequate safeguards; the driver should at least be given a notification that any attempts to up the speed while following another vehicle will be overridden for safety.

assuming that the speed adjusted after the car in front departed, I think the issue is then that Toyota might simply have added the adaptive capability to the standard cruise control system without any adjustments made to how it responds to having the stalk tapped up, in which case the Woz would still be correct about the software/algorithm issue

 

Allow me to most respectfully disagree with that.

The preset speed is showed on the console, you just have to read your instruments. This was a major improvement from the 2G, where we did not have the information on what speed was set.

Why should the car warn the driver that it is doing what is supposed to do? The preset speed is showed at the dash, surely one is still required to have some level of intelligence to be behind the wheel no?

The more geeky the car gets, the more features it has, the more demanding it is on the driver's skills. This is clearly a case where the car is more clever than the driver, sorry to say.

 

This whole situation is scary and hope our Prius' are not affected! I'm feeling like my beloved Prius is nothing but scrap metal now with Toyota's bad reputation!

 

I understand what you say, we have the same situation here in Portugal, Europe. But the point is not that one I think.

The point is that he refused to follow the proper channels. He did not go to his dealer to explain the problem, he sent his wife. By some comments I read on the news he was expecting nothing short of someone with higher powers (TMS President???) to call him back!

He can not expect that just because he is Apple co-founder or whatever he is that people should all bow to serve "his majesty". Like someone here said already, the guy had no time to go to his dealer, the guy had no time to call the proper channels, but the very same guy has all the time in the world to give interviews to explain a false problem on the car.

That's the only thing that drives me mad about this. A guy with such a public visibility should be more careful with these bold statements because no matter how idiotic the statements are, there will be a lot of people listening and believing them.

What also drives me mad is that we see on some Prius forums people who refuse to understand what is going on and just get carried away by all the bells and whistles and news titles sensationalism. Where's the good judgment? Where is the self criticism and self thinking? Do we believe everything we read in the news? Can't we be better than this and think by our own heads? Bah, I'm entering ranting mode, apologies to everyone.

I'm just glad that in the end both PriusChat.com and Prius-PT.com saw the truth behind all the paranoia. Good work everyone.

 

I do tend to forget sometimes how thin skinned some folks are when I yuk it up. (like when Wozniak jokes, "You at CNN aren't as nice as folks at dancing with the Stars" and Wolf goes, "ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha" ... wow ... was that a complementary laugh, or what" ) ok, so I ask those folks forgiveness. Now on to the good stuff.

Evan has it right ... some folks accelerate / decelerate via the cruise control. Tap it up a bunch, and the car will SLOWLY continue upward, even though you're now taping down down down down down. I figured that out in 2004. But when STEVE figures it out, CNN wants to jump on it FOR RATINGS. End of story.

On a side note, when I play "tap tap tap tap" with cruise control acceleration on our much higher powered Lexus hybrid SUV ... well IT takes off quick. Kind of fun. Many cars do that. But acceleration turns on the power of the car. Anywho, there sure are a bunch of tight shorts reading these threads. Like Bob W said earlier ... if folks simply factor in how many millions of Toyotas there are, versus how many problems there are, versus how many other cars have similar flaws, you keep the whole (bad) issue in prospective. Yes, flaw are bad, but my gawd, you demand 100% perfection, and you'll drive every manufacturer out of business. sheez they ARE working on it. So ... when did this happen ... our insistance on the impossible?

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IIRC from earlier in the thread, the North America version does not show the CC set speed.

ETA - This is incorrect. Sorry for the confusion.