

Toyota braking problems discriminate against the elderly? - yummyfajitas
http://overlawyered.com/2010/03/toyota-acceleration-why-im-skeptical/

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tjic
The vast majority of times that the customer "does everything right", but my
website "refuses to let them check out", and/or gives them error messages that
do not appear ANYWHERE IN THE SOURCE CODE ... they are elderly.

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sfk
I'm young and guess what: I've seen web shops where the checkout process is
broken. When that happens, I go to the competition rather than taking time to
report the error.

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olefoo
Precisely. And furthermore, if someone's checkout process is confusing to a
significant fraction of it's intended users, it's a bug, just as surely as if
you forgot to close a set of braces.

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joeyo
To interpret this we'd need to know what the distribution of Prius drivers is.
Perhaps it overwhelmingly attracts older drivers?

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asdf333
valid point, but doubtful that the age distribution is so skewed.

perhaps an argument can be made for younger drivers better able to react and
re-take control of the car through cool headed calculation and the sheer
mental agility that youngsters are so known for.

jkjk but an argument that needs to be ruled out is that young drivers are less
prone to be killed by this malfunction for whatever reason.

Good data sleuthing on the part of the blog author.

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snewe
From my experience, Prius drivers in SoCal are usually over-50. We used to
have a game called "Prius" that simply involved yelling "Prius" everytime one
was observed (there are a TON down here). Most of the time, we saw an older
driver.

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Jim72
The only thing that is proven with these numbers, is that the elderly are
getting into more accidents because of the acceleration problem.

It is quite plausible that the younger and more spry drivers react better to
the acceleration and are able to successfully deploy the proper counter
measures.

Another and possibly more important question is why didn't Toyota install
break override systems which would signal the computer to kill the throttle?
This is a common safety system found in all GM cars with electronic throttles.

"If the brake and the accelerator are in an argument, the brake wins," a
spokesman at Chrysler said in describing the systems, which it began
installing in 2003.

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timwiseman
_The only thing that is proven with these numbers, is that the elderly are
getting into more accidents because of the acceleration problem._

No, what is shown is that elderly are in more accidents attributed to the
acceleration problem. How much of it is really the acceleration problem and
how much not is precisely the question this article is asking.

To really answer it, we need a little more information, such as the proportion
of drivers of the affected Toyotas that are older.

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andrewcooke
Could be selection effect - maybe newspapers report ages when victims are old
because they want to imply they may be at fault, or because they think they
will get more sympathy.

Is it normal to mention someone's age if they are not old? Do newspaper
articles commonly say "Mr Smith, age 37"? Perhaps not. But they are likely to
say "Mr Smith, age 82, and grandfather to 7" because it "adds colour".

[Edit: although I suspect the same also happens around age 18-21, implying
irresponsible driving.]

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mncaudill
In my experience, local news sources always list the ages, and often even list
the home addresses of the people involved in a car accident.

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andrewcooke
hmmm. in that case i should add i am not american and these reports are, so my
expectations may be incorrect.

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flogic
Ah the fun of post engineering! Fact 1 your users are unreliable. Fact 2
whatever you made has bugs. Which one is this?

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balding_n_tired
Young men survive physical trauma better than any other demographic. The same
crash that will kill a man of 40, let alone a man of 70, might leave a man of
19 or 20 badly injured. So I don't think fatality rates tell us much here. If
we had a measure of damage to the car, correlated to age, that would help.

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bad_user
Any references?

Rings true enough, but why is that? Is it because young bodies can absorb more
on impact? Or because young people have better survival instincts?

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jwecker
Larger exposition. This has been on the most emailed in nytimes for at least a
day now so a lot of you may have already seen it.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11schmidt.html>

There are certainly reasons to be skeptical. In addition to age, consider for
example the fact that it tends to be highly correlated with automatics vs
manuals.

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asdf333
My mom was almost in a bad car accident due to something like this. she was
walking in a strip mall when a car plowed into a dry cleaners about 10 feet
ahead of her. Her friend almost fainted.

it was a teen and she said she accidentally pressed down on the accelerator
instead of the brake. the place was destroyed but fortunately no one was hurt.

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ericwaller
Sudden acceleration is more likely to result in a (deadly?) crash for drivers
with longer reaction times. Elderly drivers have longer reaction times.

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giardini
Sudden acceleration is more likely to result in a (deadly?) crash for drivers
with little experience. Young, especially teen-age, drivers have little
experience.

Young drivers kill and injure far more people than elderly drivers.

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shpxnvz
_Sudden acceleration is more likely to result in a (deadly?) crash for drivers
with little experience_

Very few people, regardless of how long they've been driving, ever get
experience with uncontrolled sudden acceleration.

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bad_user
If I got plenty of experience noticing I have no breaks in situations where I
really needed them ... does that count? (drove a piece of shit of a car for
quite some time)

I also ended up in situations where my instinct or experience told me to
accelerate instead of pushing the breaks. This happens often.

Got plenty of experience driving on glazed frost. I even crashed once because
of the car skidding ... went off-road, with the car rolling over a couple of
times, and me and the other passenger survived with minor injuries.

From that experience I learned that whatever you do (besides wearing a seat-
belt) you have to avoid trees.

IMHO, more experienced drivers are better, and I've seen some pretty good
instincts coming from 40-50 year-old or so acquaintances.

I really don't know what I would do with a sudden acceleration problem. I
would probably try to remain calm and wait for it to recover (pushing the
acceleration / brake to trigger events, try to stop the engine), and try not
crashing.

On a side note ... that's why I don't like cars with automatic transmissions.
If my current car experienced a sudden acceleration problem, I could just take
it out of gear or do an old-fashioned motor-brake.

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VBprogrammer
You can blame the electronics all you like but the truth is cars can have
faults, both mechanical and software I once drove a Vauxhall Cavalier were a
small wire had got in the way of the throttle input lever causing it to have a
very high idle. If this wire had got in the way any further it would have
caused the throttle to stay near wide open. If it had I'd have either put the
clutch in (plenty of brake assist and power steering but the engine running
unloaded at the rev limiter) or turned the ignition off (no power steering or
assisted breaks) depending on whether I had a good straight bit of road to
stop on or not.

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rdmcfee
This is a statistical correlation. You might as well say that eating ice cream
causes drowning. Why? People eat more ice cream on hot days. People swim more
on hot days. Increase in swimming means increase in drowning, therefore when
people eat ice cream they are more likely to drown.

When old people drive cars they are more likely to crash therefore when old
people drive a Prius they are more likely to crash.

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byrneseyeview
If 24 people drowned in my town, and the majority of them were holding an ice
cream cone when they did, the ice cream truck driver would probably be a
suspect

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csmeder
Didn't Woz say he can repeat the bug at will? Therefor we know it is a
software problem?

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GrandMasterBirt
Woz found a software bug in the cruise control mechanism. However once you hit
the break the cruise control immediately disengages and thus the bug is
"fixed". They can fix this bug but it is not a live-or-die issue because there
is definitely a way to stop the car.

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blhack
Won't a stuck accelerator pedal also be remedied by simply pressing the brakes
or shifting into neutral?

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27182818284
I the case of the runaway Toyota cars in the news currently, the reports from
people are that they do NOT stop with the break engaged. In fact, the recent
incident under investigation in California involved the car at a speed of 90
mph until the emergency break was applied decreasing it to 50 mph. For the
neutral part, I haven't seen a clear answer. I've heard rumors that the
Toyotas either couldn't shift into neutral or the person was too panicked to
do so.

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MrFoof
The California case is currently being subjected to intense scrutiny.

Here's the full, 24-minute 911 call audio. Does that sound like genuine panic
to you? How would someone who doesn't know how to stop a car have any idea if
their "brakes are almost burned"? [http://jalopnik.com/5489553/runaway-
prius-911-tape-im-over-9...](http://jalopnik.com/5489553/runaway-
prius-911-tape-im-over-90)

The driver filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and still has $700,000 in debt.
[http://jalopnik.com/5491101/did-bankrupt-runaway-prius-
drive...](http://jalopnik.com/5491101/did-bankrupt-runaway-prius-driver-fake-
unintended-acceleration)

There's significant reason to suspect this guy may have attempted a pretty
blatant cash grab.

Regardless, I think the Corolla is the only Toyota sedan that still has rear-
drums. I believe all others (maybe barring the bottom-rung Camry) are 4-wheel
discs. The brake systems on Lexuses are also significantly beefier (though
nowhere near sports car territory). C&D did tests with Mustang GT500s -- which
while having beefier brake packages, aren't anything compared to normal
supercars and high-end sports cars -- had no problem stopping a 500HP engine
from 120mph _while maintaining wide-open-throttle_. Sure, it took some
distance, but it definitely stopped. My point is, if you step on the brake
pedal and don't release, ANY car that is properly maintained will stop.

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27182818284
Oh I know, when I said "the reports from people" in my parent comment I really
meant that. Even before today's news I thought the CA case was fishy, so your
comment is preaching to the converted a bit :-) I strictly meant that the
drivers report to have tried to apply the brakes as hard as they can in most
(all?) of the cases.

On a side note, I recently had a stuck accelerator less than a week ago. (No
it isn't a Toyota) Since I drive a manual transmission, I just quickly
clutched and shifted to neutral. The engine redlined a bit before I killed it,
which isn't good, but no serious harm to anyone or machine as far as I can
tell. I coasted to a stop and then pulled the gas pedal from the floor with my
hand. The weird thing is, after your comment just now I was trying to remember
whether I tried to apply the brakes and I don't remember. It is cliche, but it
"happened so fast," haha.

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lambda
I'm wondering; with how vital software systems are in modern cars, for
everything from fuel efficiency to emissions to drive by wire systems like
this, whether anyone has started doing work on free software for car computer
systems.

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nfnaaron
A problem that exists, and is easily handled by the young, even to the point
of not noticing it's a problem, could be insurmountable by the elderly.

