Unintended Acceleration -- While Parking

It's 'brake' not 'break'

The brake is the system that stops a moving vehicle.

 

All I can say is that not everyone is lying and not everyone is making mistakes while driving. What I reported at the 1500 mile mark in owning my new 2010 Prius 5 was quite unsettling.

While in Econ mode, semi warmed car, driven 45 minutes prior, I was baking out of my garage towards parked cars. Foot riding break as it slowly backed out down tiny incline. ICE kicked in right as front tires passed thresh hold of garage door. I seemed to accelerate backwards towards parked cars. Foot had NEVER been on accelerator and brakes completely cutout. I instantaneously released/pumped brakes one time and brakes immediately re-engaged. It is as if computer controlled brakes needed to be reset after ICE started. Again, very unsettling and did not sit pretty with me for a while after just missing the car parked behind me outside of my garage. There is not a chance the accelerator was touched, as my foot rocked back on it's heel and just reapplied the brake. Not a chance in the world. In addition, I am a commercial airline pilot, very cautious with operating equipment, and certain of my operation of mechanical devices. I did post it immediately here, but the response someone posted was in terms and systems that this car has that I was unfamiliar with. My point is simply this. It should not have happened. It was as if I had to reset the brake pedal after the ICE started while already backing up (1-2mph) riding the brake. Like it momentarily lost it's programming.

Just shouldn't be, and I do not think all of these above may be driver error. Mine was not, would stake my families life on it, and feel there certainly is something going on. I have also noticed sometimes, not often, that after pressing the start button in initially starts in hybrid power. After a few moments it starts ICE. When that happens the car "seems to want to lung forward but you can tell a locking pin or something is keeping it in a stationary position. My thought is this, what if you were in a stationary position, started car, placed in D, and just had foot lightly on brake. Just enough to keep car from rolling. The ICE NOW KICKS IN, and the car lunges forward. Sounds kind of what may be happening to these people. Except they are pulling into a space, coasting in parking lot on hybrid battery. Battery gets low or ICE cools enough to want to start to warm up to temp. Brakes now experience need to reset as ICE suddenly starts and also they experience that little lunge/surge I have felt. But rather than pump or reset brakes they just continue to push harder while brakes don't reset. I'm telling you, that's exactly what it felt like with me backing out while coasting ONLY on the brake pedal.

 

When I'm in traffic and the battery is low, the ICE turns on.....as soon as it does this, it moves forward slightly sometimes.

 

Anything new in the Aluminum-Foil Hat thread????

Oh... no, I guess not.....

 

You've described the grabbing brake while reversing syndrome, a known issue for which Toyota has yet to find a solution and not to be confused with SUA. It can be quite unsettling as the car lurches backwards every time you lift your foot while still touching the brake until you reset the brake. For it to be SUA, the car has to actually accelerate to high speed.

There's a temporary solution to this issue and it involves momentarily releasing your foot completely off (not merely touching) the brake in order to reset it. Works 100% of the time, at least until Toyota finds a solution.

 

I agree Toyota isn't perfect and made a number of errors, but what do you suggest they do if there actually isn't an issue? Apple was also the subject of an intense media hysteria regarding the iPhone, yet they were harshly criticized for doing exactly what you propose Toyota should do, namely publishing a video showing there isn't a problem. Apple did exactly that demonstrating the death grip exists in the various smartphones by other manufacturers. Didn't do them much good. Apple behaved the exact opposite of Toyota, basically blowing off the distractors ("Here are your free cases, fools") rather than being meek and apologetical ("We grew too fast in the last few years"), yet Antennagate persisted for a while.

I just think it's funny that armchair PR critics blasted Toyota and Apple equally, as they acted in the opposite end of the spectrum. Can't win either way, huh?

 

I agree that Toyota could have handled the bad press better. Toyota doesn't, or didn't, have much experience with bad press. They have been the poster child for high quality, so I think this whole situation caught them by surprise.

I suspect next time they will be a little more experienced.

Tom

 

I know you suggested that, but Apple already tried that and did them no good (the videos were eventually taken down). It wouldn't really matter because people like you wouldn't be convinced anyway, waiting for the big NASA report.

No, it's because AT&T has reception problems. Big difference. The death grip existed in the original iPhone and 3G/3GS. Depending on where you live, it can be impossible to get the bars to drop if the reception is very strong. There were a number of original iPhone and 3G/3GS adopters who had to return the iPhone because they couldn't deal with AT&T, whereas the rest of us do just fine with the iPhone 4 because we get good reception (and millions of them have been sold).

 

apple addressed the situation poorly, but in the end agreed for customers to either return the phone or they would give them a free case of there choice.

big difference between a phone issue and a safety issue.

 

Another difference was that the Apple problem was clearly demonstrable and understood.

Despite what the Apple appologists say, the iPhone in question had mediocre RF performance even if you held it the way Monsignor Jobs said to hold it. Out in the boonies my beat up old Motorola flip phone outperforms the iPhones with the antenna problem while both are using the ATT network.

 

What if the video evidence is not correct? What if video data is stored for the wrong pedal application, so it looks like the brake was pressed but it was really the gas? How is this indisputable?

Perhaps this is a silly argument. After all, video recording is a pretty well established technology. Even so, it brings into focus a fundamental issue when deciding whether something works or not. How far do you go trying to prove that it works? You can prove that something doesn't work by demonstrating one failure. You can never prove that it always works.

This gets back to the basic question of the accuracy of data. You are willing to trust video evidence because you are comfortable with the notion of video recording. It doesn't mean that it is more reliable than other forms of recorded data, but it feels good given your personal experience. Other forms of evidence may be just as good or better, but they may be harder for the layman to understand.

I used to run into this phenomenon frequently in the world of industrial automation. We would instrument an existing process and the data would be different than expected. The unexpected results would uniformly lead to accusations of bad data. Almost always it would turn out that our data was good, but the process was not as well understood as expected. It's easy to blame the data when it doesn't agree with your preconceived expectations.

Black box data is considered good enough for use in commercial airplanes. They don't use a video camera to watch control inputs by the pilots. If they don't do it on a million dollar aircraft, it seems a bit excessive for a $30,000 car.

Tom

 

I did couple of years of weapons system and automotive test work, mostly installing and running instrumentation. Sometimes there would be some self styled expert there to disagree with the test data because they saw what happened and were convinced the data was wrong. One hot day at a Fort Irwin firing range I had enough and when the turret design manager gave me a ration of shit I handed him a note pad and a pen. He asked what that was about, so I told him that since he could tell better by eye what was happening than I could with instrumentation there was no sense paying me to be there and I walked away to a shaded area and had a cold drink while the program manager told him to not bother the test engineers in the future.

 

Unfortunately, that's a drawback of internal antenna vs. external antenna (even the little or flat ones that are on the vast majority of older flip phones).

 

have you read about this lady who wrote steve jobs a letter saying she was fired because her iphone alarm didn't work jan. 1 and she was fired for being late for work?

 

My flip phone doesn't have an external antenna. The iPhone is unprotected on the outside periphery of the phone which was the bonehead mistake that caused the problems.

 

Note to self... Pump brakes as I back up just as I would in an emergency situation further increasing the likelihood that one step on the incorrect pedal. Yes, I know we're only talking about rocking foot off and on brake pedal when grippy brake syndrome hits in reverse, but "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!"

 

Secondly, the brakes were not there, it's not as if they were grippy. Read my post, then post a reply answering to the fact that the brakes "Cut Out" for a second and then had to be fully reset. Your post is not clear as to "what exactly this Grippy Brake Syndrome is and is doing. There is no grippy here, and would be nice if there was. Do you understand what I'm saying. It's like the electronic signal to the electronic brakes was interrupted when ICE started. Had to take foot off brake pedal that was doing nothing, then reapply to re-initialize or send new signal to brake computer.