- or why living in a country full of people who haven't got the slightest clue about the way a transmission works might get you run over by a speeding japanese car.

So apparently Toyota are recalling quite a few cars because there's a freak chance the floormats might get tangled up in the pedals and jam the throttle open.
The story that apparently got the shitstrom strong enough to trigger the recall is this. Feel free to call me heartless but how exactly do you have the time to accelerate from ~75 (the speedlimit as far as I know) to 120 (presumably while standing on the at the time of the phonecall cooked brakes) and make a 30 second phone call without thinking that maybe putting the car out of gear might be a good idea.

Surely there are lots of cars this can happen to?

He was an off duty state trooper and he still never even thought to turn off the car, pull the handbrake, put it in neutral...anything that could have saved him and his family. Now toyota has to recall. Eventually cars will be so safe they won't even have doors to get in.

Incidentally this is why I don't use a floor mat on the driver's side of my car. I took it out after it got stuck under the brake, I didn't call Ford and tell them to put a recall on a 30 year old car.

This is natural selection doing what it does best

Sadly this man took his family too

all i can say it. BRAKE! Engine off. Put it in neutral let the engine kill it self and if in a manual down shift to first.

My first reaction would be to hit the clutch.
Who cares if the engine blows, much rather that then driving off an intersection and killing my family.
Although im sure at some point i wouldv'e realised that turning the car off would stop it accelerating.

yea im not getting my camry serviced for this

yeah gotta say wtf man. Pretty crap driving. Altho this does bring up some interesting topics - Keyless ignition....how do u stop that in this kinda situation. Automatic gearboxes that are fully electronic, what if the software prevents you from downshifting to protect the engine? All this new technology is ok i spose but when i'm operating machinery, I WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF WHAT IT DOES. Not a handful of computers that are supposedly smarter than me. you can keep all that fancy shit it's just engineers trying to be "smart" and "make things better" I'll take a $10 throttle cable over a few hundred bucks worth of electronics anyday.

Quote from 5haz :

Surely there are lots of cars this can happen to?

i guess so
in the punto the mat got stuck under the clutch regularly
a quick tug on it while driving solved the problem easily

Exactly. Within a second of realising the car is accelerating without you telling it to, and pretty much without having to think about it - Clutch. Gather thoughts a bit, spend a few seconds calming down and realise what's actually happening - neutral, ignition off, brake to a stop.

Quote from senn :

yeah gotta say wtf man. Pretty crap driving. Altho this does bring up some interesting topics - Keyless ignition....how do u stop that in this kinda situation. Automatic gearboxes that are fully electronic, what if the software prevents you from downshifting to protect the engine? All this new technology is ok i spose but when i'm operating machinery, I WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF WHAT IT DOES. Not a handful of computers that are supposedly smarter than me. you can keep all that fancy shit it's just engineers trying to be "smart" and "make things better" I'll take a $10 throttle cable over a few hundred bucks worth of electronics anyday.

This..

Quote from senn :

yeah gotta say wtf man. Pretty crap driving. Altho this does bring up some interesting topics - Keyless ignition....how do u stop that in this kinda situation. Automatic gearboxes that are fully electronic, what if the software prevents you from downshifting to protect the engine? All this new technology is ok i spose but when i'm operating machinery, I WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF WHAT IT DOES. Not a handful of computers that are supposedly smarter than me. you can keep all that fancy shit it's just engineers trying to be "smart" and "make things better" I'll take a $10 throttle cable over a few hundred bucks worth of electronics anyday.

Even if you have no control of the throttle, you still have the handbrake. If the worst comes to the worst you can always scrape the car along the central reservation to slow it down or something... You could even scandanavian flick it and spin to slow it down...

It's usa, therefore probably automatic? I think you don't get clutches in automatic cars...? So this woulda kinda fail.

You could try breaks but that wouldn't do much good, turning ignition key off? That'd work I'm assuming. If not you could always try to gently ram agaisnt the barrier on highway in order to slow down by friction..?

Sadly looks like he paniced, and when you panic any logical think goes flying out of the window.

In saying that he was an off duty officer, I'm resonablly sure he would have had some kind of advanced driving and he should still have been able to deal with it.

Why don't Toyota just tell people to take out their driver-side floormats? Way cheaper than a recall

The saddest part about this recall is that less people will die on the roads and so fewer organ donors are going to save lives. This selfish act will kill hundreds of people on transplant waiting lists.

Of course there are countless things you can do to deccelerate a car when the throttle is jammed open, even in an automatic.

My first car was a rust bucket Fiat 126 and the throttle jammed on me twice, the first time I killed the ignition first of all and the damn thing still kept firing as I approached a roundabout - i've no idea how or why - so I threw it in neutral.

Even auto's have neutral, it's the one right next to drive... A 2cm movement of the gear stick and he'd have saved his family.

Still, as a police officer there's a fairly good chance he was an organ donor, so it's no real loss.

Brits and their awesome sense of humour..:rolleyes:

Quote from Boris Lozac :

Brits and their awesome sense of humour..:rolleyes:

I doubt she was joking and I partially agree with her, if I die through an act of (my own) stupidity, so be it. Sure, taking the whole (not yet existing as such) family with me would be cruel in a way, but utterly insignificant.

€: My ~25yr old Fantic Trial 50 has a very moody clutch, sometimes it just won't disengage, now that's mean! Very little you can do, hold the killswitch, hit the (drum) brakes, shift down if the gearbox lets you.

Quote from morpha :

I doubt she was joking and I partially agree with her, if I die through an act of (my own) stupidity, so be it. Sure, taking the whole (not yet existing as such) family with me would be cruel in a way, but utterly insignificant.

€: My ~25yr old Fantic Trial 50 has a very moody clutch, sometimes it just won't disengage, now that's mean! Very little you can do, hold the killswitch, hit the (drum) brakes, shift down if the gearbox lets you.

Stupidity, cmon, the guy panicked, it's an awfull thing and nobody here knows how would they react in the same situation, maybe if he was alone he would react better, but he knew he had his family with him, which just worstened the situation.. It's easy to be a smarta** behind your monitor and say 'n00b, i would this i would do that'...

I certainly would of thought a highway officer (not sure if they get advanced driving - I know not all UK police who have cars do) wouldn't of made a phone call when driving at 120... Yes calling 911 may help but it certainly wont solve the immediate problem and certainly will be a very big distraction (and at 120 i'd imagine you'd need a fair amount of that...)

I was going to say that even automatic transmissions still have Neutral. And I know my first car (auto, unfortunately and I won't go back to one), you could even slam it from drive into park; passing through both neutral and reverse to do so. And when this happens the wheels lock up and STOP. I haven't been in this type of situation, though I've had my clutch pedal stick before and pop back up with small delay. But like stated, you can't do much in a panic state of mind; that said, how do you have time to make a 911 call and not think more clearly about the situation at hand?

It's hard to think that a cop, with any sort of vehicle training, would panic under such situations. And a half a mile is at least 15 seconds at 120mph, I don't know how long it takes for the car to stop but that call was certainly long enough to have thought of other ideas; especially when the operator mentioned the ignition. (Keyless or not I do believe there is a big "stop" button, though I don't know if it would help with much as the car has enough momentum to keep the engine firing.) I don't know, sad to see people lose lives, but it needs to happen; the population of 8billion (or whatever it is) is not effected if 25 people die. Sure the emotions of those friends and families are effected, but people die every day. It is a fact of life that will not go away; life == death.

EDIT: And where as it is "sad" that people lose their lives like this it is far more sad that the media points fingers, lawsuits fly and statements like Toyota knew this was a problem for two years and could have saved these people. Stating like it is Toyota's fault. That is sad.

Quote from Boris Lozac :

Stupidity, cmon, the guy panicked, it's an awfull thing and nobody here knows how would they react in the same situation, maybe if he was alone he would react better, but he knew he had his family with him, which just worstened the situation.. It's easy to be a smarta** behind your monitor and say 'n00b, i would this i would do that'...

I know exactly how I would react because I regularly drive driving school vehicles with a second pair of pedals and it happens alot that when you've got a passenger onboard who doesn't know about the pedals, they occasionally step on them. Granted, that's a fairly unusual situation for most people, but I'm not some smartass behind my monitor

Quote from morpha :

but I'm not some smartass behind my monitor

I didn't mean you, i was talking in general.. But i agree, it's beyond stupid to make a phone call in that situation..

Quote from Shotglass :

So apparently Toyota are recalling quite a few cars because there's a freak chance the floormats might get tangled up in the pedals and jam the throttle open.

The big recall that is happening currently is totally unrelated to the floormat issues that some Toyota models are having. The major recall is for accelerator pedals that get excessive wear over time and start taking longer to return to their natural position, and eventually just get stuck. The floormat problem is another issue they are having (although a hell of alot easier/cheaper to fix). My brother drives an '07 Tacoma, and had the floormat problem.

Quote from SidiousX :

The big recall that is happening currently is totally unrelated to the floormat issues that some Toyota models are having. The major recall is for accelerator pedals that get excessive wear over time and start taking longer to return to their natural position, and eventually just get stuck. The floormat problem is another issue they are having (although a hell of alot easier/cheaper to fix). My brother drives an '07 Tacoma, and had the floormat problem.

I was just going to point that out, the current sales freeze is related to the throttle actually getting jammed or sticking, not the floormat, issue. Regardless, I think a recall of that scale was a bit ridiculous, but from a PR standpoint, it probably looks better to appear to be playing it safe than to not do anything.