Electric controled shifter. If the car is at full throttle, the ecm won't let it come out of gear, until it the engine rpm comes down. The newer models have a push button ignition switches, to kill the engine, you have to press & hold the button down for 3-seconds. 3-seconds @ 100MPH, you just covered 44 car lengths. I guess thats ok if no one is front of you.
It seems so easy to blame the drivers.
And that's exactly what the US President of Toyota did yesterday, with the statement that when they design their cars they can't take into account how they'll be used. (How they'll be used? Think maybe they'll be
driven?)Driver's error, according to him.
At the same time saying they don't know if the pedal replacement will fix it. Just like removing the mat didn't fix it.
It's all fine and dandy if you've owned Toyotas in the past. Good for you that you've gotten good mileage out of them. I've got a Ford minivan sitting here in the driveway with over a quarter million miles, too. My sister has a Chrysler minivan about to hit the two hundred thousand mark. That's not the idea.
Toyota has a history of covering up design and engineering flaws. They've lost a class action lawsuit in the past when internal memos were exposed that the brass was covering it up and blaming the customers. Their own history has set them up for this investigation.
It's easy for us, safely behind a computer keyboards, to second guess the people who have been put in the runaway cars. It's playing armchair quarterback. The truth is, Toyota has no idea what's going on with these cars. Blame the floormat! Uh oh, it's still going on. It's the pedal! Well, maybe. PCM? Don't know. Is it mechanical or electrical? From yesterday's testimony, they don't know. They've changed their story so much that now there's the element of doubt as to rather or not they even know what they're doing. All the time that, again, internal memos are showing that they looked at the floormats, originally, as a way to save money, not fix the problem.
I see people bemoaning Benz and how the
corporation didn't give a s*** about how Chrysler treated it's customers. That the
corporation stank for customer service and customer well-being, building "inferior" cars. How then, does Benz, and now Fiat, get looked at with such scrutiny, but
corporate Toyota is let off the hook with a history of corporate malfeasance and cover ups? Because it gets good gas mileage? Because it's gone so many miles? I'm sorry, but the criticism Chrysler has gotten lately needs to be applied to a corporation who said it was the floormat so they could save money, not lives. Yeah, there's that great customer service.
