Empire of the Iguanadons

Sitting in the living room eating my dinner when the news comes back from commercial. Another story of a Prius owner whose accelerator got stuck and took him on a wild ride. James Sikes was out on Inerstate 8 in San Diego County, minding his own business when he moved to pass a slower vehicle. That's when it all started. The accelerator in the Prius he was driving became stuck and he soon realized he was in real trouble.

James dialed 911 and informed CHP dispatch that he was unable to regain control of the vehicle and needed help. The operators tried to talk him through how to disengage the stuck accelerator but he ended up having to put the phone aside because he could no longer maintain control with one hand. The car was refusing to comply with the brake and James was flying down the freeway at around 90mph when CHP finally showed up.

The CHP officer who gave his statement to channel 9 reporters said himself that he could smell the smoking remains of the car's braking system, and could visibly see that Mr. Sikes was doing all he could to try and bring the car to a halt. CHP managed to get Sikes to engage the emergency brake and then shut the engine off once the car got down below 55 mph. Once the engine was off, the car coasted to a stop on the side of the freeway without further incident.

When reporters spoke to Sikes, he indicated to them that he'd already had the car in to the dealer for the recall notice and they supposedly fixed the issue. Needless to say, he'll be back to give them a piece of his mind in the morning. Who could blame him! Toyota has said they are dispatching a specialist to inspect the car. Hopefully they do a better job this time than they did before.

This isn't the only major incident like this recently either. I can't find any links to it online, but a couple of weeks ago the KFI talk show host on the air at the time was talking to a woman who had a similar incident to Mr. Sikes.

She was driving on one of our freeways and her accelerator became stuck. After an equally useless effort to mash the brakes to make it stop, she used her emergency brake and nothing happened. She got even more desperate and pushed the transmission into neutral, thinking that would stop the car eventually even if it blew the engine. Unfortunately this did not happen. Much to her surprise, the car continued to accelerate. By this time she was in excess of 100mph and decided to try one more thing that should have ended it. She threw the gearshift into reverse.

Conventional wisdom says at this point the transmission should have been shattered from the sudden reversal and the car would eventually come to a halt. This was not the case. Instead, the car rapidly slowed and then accelerated - in reverse. So now picture driving backward down a busy California freeway at insane speeds of almost 100mph in a Prius. The woman figured she was about to die and had called her husband on the car's built in phone to say her good byes. Somewhere along the way, she slammed the car into the center divider of the freeway and the force of the impact was enough to disengage the transmission and bring the car to a stop.

Her husband arrived shortly after, and a tow truck pulled up a bit later to remove the wreckage. In the process of loading the car onto the flatbed, the tow operator asked the husband to put the car into neutral so he could pull it up. Not thinking about it, he did, and the car's engine tried to start back up and caused it to jump! The woman now has signed affidavits from both her husband and the tow truck driver that the incident happened exactly as she described.

Toyota has commented in both cases that the scenario is impossible. They insist the car's circuitry will not allow these situations to happen. The only problem is, Mr. Sikes has a CHP report to back up his claims, along with news footage of part of it. The other woman may not have that, but she certainly has the tow truck operator's statement and a wrecked car to show for it. Digging a bit further, Google reveals that there have been 56 reported deaths all attributed to accelerator problems in the Prius and other models over the last FIVE years.

So I have to ask. Is this the downfall of Toyota? After the recall over the braking systems and stuck accelerators they are still having issues, and there's plenty of buzz about other problems as well. Toyota used to make great cars and you'd have been hard pressed to find better other than Honda. This issue will haunt this company for years, if not decades to come.
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RIP United States of America

July 1776 - November 2012.

If we want to figure out whether he was lying, to me, the question is not whether the exact circumstances of what went haywire can be recreated, but whether it is possible to fry your brakes in that way through something you deliberately do to the car while it's functioning normally. Maybe by pressing the gas and brakes at the same time?

Also, by the time I took drivers' ed in 2004, they were telling us to floor the brakes in most cases, though they told us about pumping in case any of us were driving older cars.

Several mechanics have already stated that the system is supposed to cancel the accelerator when the brake is pushed. The problem here is that the folks who have had the problem (and lived to tell about it) have all said they tried that and it didn't work. So something in the drive-by-wire system is malfunctioning.

Normal cars will slow, under resistance mind you, if you slam both the gas and brake at the same time. That's assuming your brakes are in good shape of course. Situations requiring you to deploy the hand brake may not work out. For example, in my RSX, I've driven away from my parking place before with the hand brake still set. That alone won't do the job if your accelerator gets stuck.

I'd have to agree with Samson, even though I do see what you're saying, Regina, the problem isn't about what would normally happen. Under normal circumstances if you floor the brake in a Prius even while maintaining the full pressure on the accelerator the car will slow down because the system is designed to enforce the brake controls over the accelerator controls. In the cases where the problem has occurred, something went wrong in that system and acceleration took the priority for the system, apparently.

Good to know they're still teaching what to do with older cars just in case. My wife and my son both told me they didn't even bother teaching stick shift in their driver's ed classes.

Actually, if you catch the timing right on the brake while you're still flooring the accelerator and turn the wheel hard at the same time you get one of those nifty 180 spin outs the stunt men are always having to do for the movies, but you really do need a lot of practice to get it right and some seriously clear space in all directions to avoid a pretty bad wreck, but of course that's also not going to work right if ABS kicks in nor if you floor the brake completely and just stand on it. Sadly, I don't think I know anyone who hasn't at some point realized they forget to disengage the parking brake before pulling out, it's really meant to just give you an extra boost of braking for a second in an emergency or to help prevent the car from rolling when it's parked on an incline, and they don't always work for even those. (I definitely wouldn't go relying on the "emergency brake" in a real emergency except as a hopeful extra to the regular brakes.)

Toyota put on another one of its demonstrations today, but even they're having to admit Sikes' brakes on his Prius were completely gone. I wonder if they'd care to explain how this could be if he's lying?

The rest of the article more or less says Toyota can't duplicate the results. Well, duh, they haven't been able to in any of the failed vehicles. All this talk about how brake wear isn't consistent with mashing the pedal seems to have been blown out of the water though. No pads left.

I'd read that in the last article I'd linked for you as well. It seems that Toyota is dismissing his claim altogether though now because hey claim to have extensively tested his car and found no evidence supporting his story but rather that the on-board computer recorded that "he rapidly pressed the gas and brakes back and forth 250 times" and they "found severe wear and damage on the front brakes from overheatng, but the rear brakes and parking brake were in good condition" and everything else in the car is working properly including the backup systems that kill acceleration if the brakes are applied. Interestingly, they're not saying he staged it or that it was a hoax, they're just saying they feel his story is inconsistant with the technical findings.

Im not sure about some of the claims being made by people as to what exactly was happening, i drive a Ford Falcon XR6 Ute, with a 6 speed manual transmission, if i floor it and get upto 150 km/hr, 50% over the highway speed limit and hold that speed, then slam on the breaks and the accelerator at the same time, i slow down to about 90 km/hr in a very short time frame, not wanting to destroy my brakes, rotors and clutch, i have not done this for very long, but i am sure coupled with the handbrake and down shifting i could bring it to a controllable speed, and then pulse the breaks to keep them cool enough to not get to failure point.

Critically, you need to remain calm and make decisive decisions about what to do and in what order, something Mr Sikes failed to do from what i have heard of the 911 audio. I can understand that Toyota cannot replicate what happened, they are not panicked drives who are making irrational decisions about what to do and when. All Mr Sikes had to do was knock the car into neutral and he could have coasted to a halt, this was something the 911 operator had asked him to do on a number of occasions, which each time he failed to do.

If anything, these events are a very good illustration why everyone needs to undertake defensive driving training on a regular basis, so that in an emergency, you at least have then, deep in your subconcious, the tools and skills needed to deal with the situation.

I think it's not so much a matter of taking a defensive driving course repeatedly (here in the states such a course doesn't actually teach the same things that they sounds like they're teaching over there anyway), as it's a matter of different people react differently to the same given situation and most people have no experience at driving either at high speeds or without complete control of their vehicles. But yes, if we had more thorough driver training in this country and mandatory refresher courses, especially with hands-on experience given in the course with regard to certain potentially dangerous situations, things like this wouldn't be nearly as big a problem to begin with. On the other hand, whether he did it or not shift to neutral, as we were discussing earlier regarding the second story Samson had given, if the real culprit in all this was an electronic glitch in the software that handles the accelerator, brakes, ignition, and transmission, wouldn't have mattered. You may have noticed in the last article I linked that some of the expert opponents of Toyota's dismissal also suggested that such an electronic glitch or gremlin would've vanished again by the time they got to testing.

You guys talked about this subject for three days. How old are you guys and don't you have jobs.

I fail to see what difference it makes how old anyone is or what their employment status is.

It never works. I purposely ignored this comment by anonymous thinking this time it was clearly inane enough that we'd all do likewise and get to see if anoymous would just go away, but someone had to take the bait.

I believe, Samson, that Anonymous is trying to imply tht we must all be kids with nothing better to do than argue this sort of stuff. Clearly Anonymous hasn't visited much of the rest of the site or (s)he'd already know that we're not kids and we do indeed have other things to do but that we choose to come here specifically to argue this sort of stuff because we're mature enough to care about what's going on in our country and the world in general.

Bait or not, I could have asked why anon responded to a topic that had been dormant for two weeks and questioned their employment status and age for going out of their way to dig through links to find it.... oh drat, I just did.

Why, yes, you did.