Megan McArdle wrote an interesting article about the age statistics of the drivers involved in Toyota acceleration accidents. It seems older people (above 60 years old) are much more likely to be involved in an acceleration accident.
She then hypothesizes that this “age discrimination” means that these accidents are driver caused and not “Toyota caused.” Or at least that this is the reason that Toyota did not discover their problems sooner.
Interesting article. See:
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-deep-dive-into-toyota-sudden-acceleration-accident-stats-2010-3
The assessment is probably valid, but is not exactly robust. There’s no baseline with which to compare the apparent disproportionate number of deaths of older drivers. I did a quick trawl to find that 3x as many 40-year olds die in RTAs in the USA as 80-year-olds, so there is some significance, but if, for example, Toyotas are rarely driven by 20-year-olds, then it’s not surprising that few of them die in Toyotas.
More significantly, if a car fault creates a situation from which 90+% of drivers can recover (while the other 10% may be correlated with the elderly), that still seems like a car problem to me, rather than being a problem with ‘people who are not fit to drive Toyotas’. I’m not convinced that being ‘elderly’ is the root cause here!
Has something like this happened before? Is it just Toyotas that have uncommanded acceleration accidents, or are there examples in the record for this sort of thing happening in other vehicles?
I have done a fair bit of research into ‘pedal confusion’ accidents where the driver thought they had their foot on the brake, when in fact they had it on the accelerator. These incidents seem like a perfect candidate for this type of human error.
A case a couple of years ago when a bus driver ran down and killed five people was put down to dangerous driving and the bus driver was jailed for five years, yet no attempt was made by the investigating authorities to find the root causes of the accident as it was clearly the driver’s fault. The fact that he was shouting “the brakes have failed” (a clear sign of pedal confusion) carried no weight with the presiding Judge.
From an ergonomic point of view, only an idiot would place two safety critical controls that have the opposite function, but the same sense, down a dark tunnel and ask the operator to control them with their feet! If this sort of control layout was proposed for any modern installation, it would be considered to be the work of a madman!
It’s a great shame that Toyota and its representatives did not consider pedal confusion as being a possible root cause, as they could have saved themselves a lot of grief.
Is there a backstory on why/how car controls are the way that they are? I remember gear shifting on the steering column in Eastern Euope in the 80s and understand that western automakers abandoned that a while back.
It might be that steering was considered paramount and designers gave that task to the two hands, which leaves…
How are controls set up in vehicles adapted for folks who do not have feet?
I’ve previously posted a similar note under a different blog, but it bears repeating.
Yes, the problem is real!!!
Not necessarily the Toyota specific root cause:
While driving another manufacture’s car, I had sudden maximum acceleration (the tachometer immediately pegged past the redline). I was fortunate because the first time this occurred I was still in ‘park’, so I had some warning. After turning the car off and on again, the symptom stopped. Knowing that if this happened again, I would immediately put the car in neutral, I attempted to drive the car. Sure enough within a couple of blocks sudden maximum acceleration happened again. I put the car in neutral and coasted into a parking lot with engine revving all the while. It was quite scary.
In assessing the car, my husband found that the plastic battery post cap (used for side post batteries), was lodged at the butterfly to the carburetor, holding the butterfly open, allowing gasoline to continued to poor in, even thought the accelerator was not pushed.
Apparently the plastic battery cap had been sucked into the line when the air filter was recently replaced. Once the plastic cap was removed, no more issue. We now have 216K miles on the vehicle and it runs great.
The vehicle is a 1991, and I’m not sure if new cars have the same set-up. But all car manufactures should beware of this potential root cause for sudden maximum acceleration.
More “crash” info:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/03/19/prius.investigation/index.html
Driver error is a potential “causal factor”.
No easy answer for the Toyota problem
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031501693.html
By Jeremy Anwyl Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The writer is chief executive of Edmunds.com, which recently announced a competition with a cash prize for anyone who can demonstrate in a verifiable manner the reason for unintended acceleration.
[Included chart in W. Post hardcopy issue: (Toyota and the accelerating mystery; page A19)]
Discrepancy in complaints
Consumer reports of cases of unintended acceleration by manufacturer
(Model years 2005 – Sept. 30, 2009)
Sales (in millions)…Complaints per 100,000 vehicles sold
GM ……. 16.5 ……….. 0.81
Toyota .. 11.0 ……….. 4.81
Ford ….. 10.8 ……….. 3.12
Chrysler .. 9.1 ……….. 1.72
Honda …. 7.1 ……….. 1.26
Nissan …. 4.6 ……….. 1.07
SOURCE: Edmunds.com analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration complaints
Haven’t found that software glitch, Toyota? Keep trying
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-cummings12-2010mar12,0,2595172.story
(excerpt): Because of Pathfinder’s high reliability requirements and the probability of unpredictable hardware errors due to the increased radiation effects in space, we adopted a highly “defensive” programming style. This included performing extensive error checks in the software to detect the possible side effects of radiation-induced hardware glitches and certain software bugs.
David M. Cummings, executive vice president of the Santa Barbara-based Kelly Technology Group, spent nine years as a consultant for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft.