Toyota Cites Driver Errors in Acceleration Cases

[Tesha]

Source: Business Week

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp.’s investigation of accidents involving
unintended acceleration where motorists said they pressed on the brake pedal
shows that “virtually all” involved drivers who pushed the accelerator instead, a
company spokesman said.

:

The Toyota City, Japan-based company has reviewed about 2,000 reports of
unintended acceleration since March, including analyses of information from
event-data recorders when the incidents involved crashes, said Mike Michels,
a Toyota spokesman at the U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California.

“There are a variety of causes -- pedal entrapment, sticky pedal, other foreign
objects in the car” and “pedal misapplication,” Michels said yesterday in a telephone
interview. Asked how many crashes were linked to pushing the accelerator when
motorists thought they were pushing the brake pedal, he said, “virtually all.”

The company has yet to find evidence of electronic malfunctions, he said.

<more>

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-14/toyota-cites-driver-errors-in-acceleration-cases.html

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In another incident, surveillance video showed one of these
crashes. Even though the driver insisted that she was jamming
on the brakes during the entire incident, her brake lights did
not come on until *AFTER* she had crashed.

[Tesha]

1. NBC Nightly News just reported this story; NPR carried it earlier. (NT)

[mopinko]

2. the npr story on this was citing nitsa

so this is not just toyota saying this.

[Omaha Steve]

3. Motley Fool: Toyota Blames the Victims

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/07/14/toyota-blames-the-victims.aspx

By John Rosevear July 14, 2010

Oh no, Toyota (NYSE: TM). Now you've gone and blown it again.

You were doing so well for a while, too. After the unintended-acceleration debacle peaked earlier this year with that epic Congressional inquisition and that whopping $16.4 million fine from the U.S. government, you -- finally! -- made a big point of going all humble. You put your CEO, Akio Toyoda, out in public to shed a few tears, eat some crow, and put a human face on your soulless transportation-appliance-manufacturing empire.

And that -- plus a huge incentives blitz -- worked, kind of. You're still trailing General Motors and Ford (NYSE: F) in U.S. sales, but you're afloat. Car shoppers aren't avoiding you like the plague like they were back in February, when they were wondering whether Honda (NYSE: HMC) would race past you.

But then you came out and blamed the victims of most of those unintended acceleration incidents.

Way to take responsibility, guys! Not.

Blaming the victims? Really?

Here's the background: Tuesday's Wall Street Journal brought a report of "early results" from the Department of Transportation's examination of data recorders from Toyotas involved in accidents blamed on unintended acceleration. According to the Journal:

The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes. But the findings -- part of a broad, ongoing federal investigation into Toyota's recalls -- don't exonerate the car maker from two known issues blamed for sudden acceleration in its vehicles: "sticky" accelerator pedals that don't return to idle and floor mats that can trap accelerators to the floor.


FULL story at link.

[Thor_MN]

4. So Toyota's closed source data dump shows that it did not detect the brake pedal being applied...

Didn't we already know that? It would take a really stupid ass program to open the throttle when the brake pedal was pushed, so we already knew that the program didn't detect the brake pedal. It's not surprizing that the data matches the real workd outcome. The question is, was the program getting faulty inputs?

[TroubleMan]

5. If that were true, we'd see the same frequency of these type of accidents in other makes and models.

From that data, you would more readily conclude that the software recognized hitting the brake incorrectly, and processed it as hitting the accelerator. That sounds a lot like what happened when you hear the accident reports.