Lexus about to have the piss sued out of them over some floor mats. Seriously.

[Top Geek]

Throttle cables snap.

Then what happens? The engine idles, you put on the four-way-flashers, slow down, pull over, turn off the engine and call AA.

They also get stuck.

Then what happens? You put on the four-way-flashers, depress the clutch, slow down, pull over, turn off the engine and call AA.

Steering racks have seals fail, tie rods snap, ball joins give out, etc...

Yes, but there are always indications before they fail... sounds, vibrations, etc. Drive-by-wire systems can fail spontaneously if a programmer accidentally omitted a semi-colon.

Mechanical != reliable. Just ask anyone who owns vintage British cars

The difference is that if you maintain it properly, there's no reason any of these things should fail, barring a significant manufacturing defect (then again, maybe vintage British cars are significant manufacturing defects :lol: )

The rental was an automatic with + and - shifter, not sure how a real manual would feel.

Absolutely nothing like those pseudo manuals. For one, with a real manual, the cogs swap when you shift. They don't prepare a 10-course meal, run a marathon and perform a day-long surgery before finally swapping the cogs.

 

[sonza68]

I haven't had a accelerator stick on me, so I can't speculate on the correct way to unstick it, if there even is a correct way to unstick it.

Depends on the reason it stuck. On mine, a metal tube that runs under the throttle body had bent slightly and was rubbing against the external rotating part of the throttle body assembly. I had to take a screwdriver and pry it slightly to open up a positive clearance.

I was a passenger in another car which had a stuck throttle and he just had to open the hood and push on the thorttle body and it snapped shut. At WOT, something would occasionally hang up and hold it open. Just a little bit of force would break it loose.

 

[Hatmouse]

Yes, but there are always indications before they fail... sounds, vibrations, etc. Drive-by-wire systems can fail spontaneously if a programmer accidentally omitted a semi-colon.

On the whole, I agree with you about cars remaining as mechanical as problem.

However, as a computer programmer I have two things to say in defense of *-by-wire:

1. Software such as this is typically raked over by a fine toothed comb till it is very nearly bulletproof. Careless errors don't make it through; once in a while, maybe a subtle error will come through because some assumptions by the designer about the car's operating environment was wrong.

2. The compiler would have caught a semicolon missing years before any cars actually ran the code.

Besides that, manual gearbox and rack and pinion and throttle cables all the way.

 

[DarkReaper]

I don't like how cars with throttle-by-wire sometimes have different throttle response ranges.

On my 8 which has throttle-by-wire you notice the delay when stamping on the throttle and it takes the electric motors about .1-.2 of a second to finally open the throttle all the way.
Also when you repeatedly pump the pedal the software gets confused. But that might just be because it is an early throttle-by-wire system.

Coupled with the shift down delay by the automatic, hitting kickdown might take 1 second for the car to finally accelerate.

Also you can thoroughly confuse the automatic by erratic throttle control and it starts to shift up/down gears endlessly.

 

[Spectre]

On the whole, I agree with you about cars remaining as mechanical as problem.

However, as a computer programmer I have two things to say in defense of *-by-wire:

1. Software such as this is typically raked over by a fine toothed comb till it is very nearly bulletproof. Careless errors don't make it through; once in a while, maybe a subtle error will come through because some assumptions by the designer about the car's operating environment was wrong.

2. The compiler would have caught a semicolon missing years before any cars actually ran the code.

Besides that, manual gearbox and rack and pinion and throttle cables all the way.

Your fellow programmers at Airbus don't seem to have all the bugs out of their fly-by-wire programming yet.... as anyone on Air Transat Flight 961 could tell you. The rudder came off because of uncommanded flight inputs.

 

[Hatmouse]

Your fellow programmers at Airbus don't seem to have all the bugs out of their fly-by-wire programming yet.... as anyone on Air Transat Flight 961 could tell you. The rudder came off because of uncommanded flight inputs.

Mistakes do occur, but at very low rates. (ie. compare it to the # of airbus flights in total with said computers, most are incident free).

Though of course, I appreciate that in this field mistakes are often deadly.

 

[GRtak]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090930/bs_nm/us_toyota_recall_7

Toyota plans huge U.S. recall for dangerous floormats

DETROIT/WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Toyota Motor Corp said it will recall some 3.8 million vehicles in the United States because of the risk that a loose floormat could force down the accelerator, a problem suspected of causing crashes that have killed five people.

The recall includes the hot-selling Prius hybrid and would be the largest ever for Toyota, which has built a reputation for safety and quality that helped it surpass General Motors as the world's top automaker last year.

The recall also comes at a critical time for Toyota as it scrambles to squeeze spending to bounce back from record losses forecast this year amid a broad-based slump in car sales.

"This is an urgent matter," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The U.S. government said it has received reports of 100 related incidents that include 17 crashes and five fatalities involving Toyota vehicles.

Toyota said it was too early to provide a cost estimate for the move. Deutsche Securities auto analyst Kurt Sanger estimated the cost at a modest 5-10 billion yen ($50-$100 million), saying the bigger worry was its image.

"Monetarily I wouldn't expect it to be a major issue for Toyota," he said, noting that labor costs, which typically make up the bulk of recalls, would likely be minimal.

"The bigger concern is reputational."

In Tokyo on Wednesday, Toyota shares were down 1.1 percent, underperforming a 0.2 percent fall in the main Nikkei average and a rise in rival Japanese car stocks.

"CAR REACHED 120 MPH"

Toyota spokesman Yuta Kaga in Tokyo said on Wednesday that the floormats subject to the recall are used only in vehicles sold in the United States.

The company is also checking whether the problem originates in the floormats or the process of placing them in the vehicles, he said, without naming the floormat supplier.

Toyota and U.S. safety regulators warned owners to remove all driver-side floormats from eight Toyota and Lexus models manufactured in the last six years as an immediate safety precaution.

Last month, an off-duty California state trooper and three members of his family were killed in the San Diego area in a crash of a 2009 Lexus ES350.

 

[ChrisSRT4]

This is why I will only drive a manual. But as stated above they are getting more and more rare is this damn country.

 

[BerserkerCatSplat]

Your fellow programmers at Airbus don't seem to have all the bugs out of their fly-by-wire programming yet.... as anyone on Air Transat Flight 961 could tell you. The rudder came off because of uncommanded flight inputs.

Source? I've got the TSB report for the investigation that says otherwise:

2.2 Flight Control System
2.2.1 General

The investigation of the aircraft flight control system and related subsystem components revealed that there were no control system anomalies or conditions that could have led to the breakup of the rudder.

 

[Spectre]

Source? I've got the TSB report for the investigation that says otherwise:

I thought I'd linked it upthread, but basically, the A300/310 has a history of uncommanded rudder movements.

The Air Transat investigation couldn't have found any info about it because the flight data recorder was overwritten (since the plane didn't crash and was in the air long enough to return to base).

Here's a good summary of the issues.

There have been other non-fatal incidents. One came in 2002 when a FedEx A300 freight pilot complained about strange 'uncommanded inputs' - rudder movements which the plane was making without his moving his control pedals. In FedEx's own test on the rudder on the ground, engineers claimed its 'acuators' - the hydraulic system which causes the rudder to move - tore a large hole around its hinges, in exactly the spot where the rudders of both flight 961 and flight 587 parted company from the rest of the aircraft.

 

[BerserkerCatSplat]

So a single freight pilot's claim of uncommanded inputs is enough for you to state as fact that a separate incident was caused by computer error? Nice. The engineers found that there was play in the hydraulic mounts, indicating that rudder was moving because of that play, not any kind of fly-by-wire error as you claim.

 

[Spectre]

Actually, that's not all. I talked to some American Airlines pilots (AA is based out of DFW) who flew A300/310s after the Air Transat incident and 7 out of the 9 I spoke with reported at least some rudder bizarreness with the flight control system on the A300/A310. Of those 7, 6 had transferred to Boeings or requested a transfer.

8 out of 9 told me that if I had any choice, don't fly on an A300 or A310. The remaining pilot wouldn't say anything one way or the other, which told me volumes.

 

[BerserkerCatSplat]

So, "rudder bizarreness" you automatically attribute to a flaw in the control software, despite having precisely zero evidence to back that up? I totally agree that there's a problem with the rudder design, but absolutely nothing you have posted indicates it is a fly-by-wire problem.

 

[thedguy]

This is why I will only drive a manual. But as stated above they are getting more and more rare is this damn country.

Thanks to a generation of ricers driving enthusiasts, manuals are making a come back. In some cases (mazda) the stick is an option you pay extra for

 

[BerserkerCatSplat]

Interestingly, a classmate of mine had the carpet-pedal-jam happen in his Tacoma yesterday. Apparently it's less of an isolated incident than I thought.

 

[Matt2000]

I heard that this used to happen to the original Ford Explorers in this country. Never understood how that ver American SUV sold here. I suppose it looked alright.

 

[Blind_Io]

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/10/08/toyotas-solution-for-troublesome-floormats-tie-them-down/

Good news for those of you who happen to own a Toyota or Lexus vehicle sans floormats, as the Japanese automaker has reportedly come up with a solution to the 3.8 million-vehicle recall announced last week. We haven't reviewed the documentation ourselves, but it sounds as if the answer is to zip tie the driver's side floormat to the seat rails.

Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons tells Automotive News that dealers all around the country should have gotten the instructions on the so-called "semipermanent floormat installation process," which means they can continue to sell new and used vehicles with floormats in place.

Plus, dealerships are being instructed to attach a note to the nylon wire-tie instructing dealers and customers to ensure the mats are properly affixed. The warning also notes that owners should never stack multiple mats on top of one another(!). Apparently, bit of discount MacGyvery satisfies the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If you own one of the recalled models, perhaps it's time to visit your dealership to get the fix taken care of.

Nice to see Toyota stepping up with a permanent fix for this. Zip ties? Seriously? I get that it works, but that's something I would do on the side of the road to get me home. There once was a time that I would have expected better of Toyota, but these days it's par for the course.

 

[Spectre]

Well, if they're going to add floormat hooks, it's going to take them some time to design and field one if the cars weren't designed to have one in the first place.

The zipties may be ugly, but they work. Better an imperfect solution now than a perfect one in six months (and lots of additional lawsuits).

Of course, given Toyota's pattern of behavior, this will be the permanent fix. We'll see.

 

[Vette Boss]

What Lexus should do is go back and redesign the floormats and offer (for free) the improved ones to all affected customers. The floormats in my VW have spikes and some sort of rough texture on the back to make sure they don't slip. They also have two mechanical locks, to be certain they're not moving.