When every car on the road was working this way, it did cause enough pollution to kill people. LA’s smog killed people; that’s why California now has the strictest emission requirements in the country.
"one died due to Toyota, either. The problem was user error. People were putting non-factory floor mats on top of the factory ones and they were not secured. The mats got stuck on the accelerator. "
We bought a Prius for my S and they shipped the mats separately. The warnings about using non-factory mats were all over. And the instructions about installing the Toyota mats were extremely specific. I never really “installed” a mat before! There are locking switches on the mats so they don’t fall out of place.
I had an Audi 4000 in 1986. The unintended acceleration issue on the 5000 came through and the value of my car plummeted even though it was a different model. I felt very burned - I loved my Audi.
PizzaGirl, I had an Audi in 85-86 and sold it to a family member very cheap, they kept it for 20+ years, it was a great car.
I’ve liked VW for many years but repeated irresponsible conduct by corporate management is wearing on me. The Audi sudden acceleration problem was a nightmare that company executives simply dismissed out of hand as long as they could. VW bigwigs also refused to acknowledge the engine coil problem in the 1990s until car owners nearly revolted. And now this latest stuff. Those Teutonic engineers make good cars but their hardheadedness and lofty prices for maintenance are going to hurt them sooner rather than later. I’ve got a relative who is a VW owner who wants someone at VW to go to jail over this.
No company is perfect. Even the hippy-approved Prius has NiMH batteries which contain toxic materials hazardous to humans and the natural environment. To this day, Toyota has no real plans to properly dispose of these batteries, and many of the toxic materials end up going straight into landfills.
Volkswagen’s Martin Winterkorn resigns as CEO
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/volkswagens-martin-winterkorn-resigns-as-ceo/
@fractalmstr “hippy-approved” - are you talking wide seats?
Yes, people died from Volkswagen’s cheating. No, there are no specific cases you can definitively tie to Volkswagen and that was surely part of their greedy, sleazy, plan.
But if 5800 people die prematurely each year in the UK from diesel exhaust from passenger cars, it will be simple math to uncover how many of those deaths were the fault of the extra Volkswagen emissions over the last six years. They simply have to know the models and when they were sold and how many of them were sold.
Almost half of all passenger cars in Europe are diesel so it will a much bigger deal there.
I heard in one case (but I never confirmed it) that the redline in neutral was like 3-4000 RPM, and the redline in gear was more like 6-7000 RPM, and it would not allow a person to shift into neutral if the engine speed was greater than neutral’s redline.
I.E. once you were in motion and churning at 5500RPM, you weren’t going to shift into N.
This may be apocryphal, but I can imagine someone designing it that way.
Re #85
The claim about hybrid car batteries in landfills is bogus if you think about it. Almost all discarded cars go to recycling businesses (salvage yards). They will resell usable hybrid batteries to those needing replacements. Unusable hybrid batteries contain materials far more valuable than scrap steel, so they will be sold for recycling of the materials. No recycling business would throw money away by putting them in a landfill.
I love how alternative energies bring out the environmentalist in fossil-fuel lovers. “Windmills are bad for birds!” “Batteries in landfills!” Like these things are equivalents to all the many, many problems with conventional fuels.
Classic false equivalency fallacy.
"Even the hippy-approved Prius has NiMH batteries which contain toxic materials hazardous to humans and the natural environment. "
Prius is “hippie”? That’s an odd interpretation - stereotype.
I see a lot of those hippie cars parked in the Pentagon parking lot.
“What I have never understood with the unintended acceleration cases was how come the drivers never thought to put the car in neutral and apply the brakes? I drive a stick, and the first thing I would do is press down the clutch and put it in neutral.”
Having been in a car that did this, the only thing that stopped it was slamming into park. I wss in a parking lot and shifted into reverse to back out. The car literarally leapt backwards and hit the car in the row behind me and pushed it into another car. Thank god no one was walking behind the car. I absolutely was not hitting the gas pedal and did not mistake the pedals for one another.
It’s conservative to want to conserve natural resources.
Huh? Isn’t it the other way around that recent automatic transmissions require stepping on the brake to shift from neutral to drive, rather than drive to neutral?
This does not make any sense. The redline for the engine should be the same whether or not the engine is connected to the wheels. Putting the transmission in neutral is like depressing the clutch pedal in a manual transmission car, which can be done at any RPM.
In all cars, even with the accelerator floored, you can stop the car by applying the brake. The “problems” Toyota fixed weren’t problems at all. Toyota made changes so they could claim to have done something, but they did not discover anything that was causing the “unintended acceleration” because there was nothing causing most of it besides driver error, (followed by fraud) and it is bad business to call your customers stupid and dishonest. There were a few floor mat issues, including the highly publicized incident with the dealer loaner, but very few. There was no conspiracy at Toyota to come up with a dangerous design and hide it.
At VW, the software was written specifically to defeat the emissions test protocols, so it was a deliberate criminal act. Nobody died, any more than anybody died from Bernie Madoff’s crimes, but not many are complaining about him going to prison.
As a former Prius driver and current Camry Hybrid driver, I am likely the opposite of hippie. I have long commute and it was more cost-effective to pay the up-front costs and save on the gas. The hybrid also has a longer range (in the Camry case) than the gas version. This allows fewer stops at the gas station on trips.
As for alternate fuels…the people complaining about windmills and dams and nuclear energy are other ‘environmentalists’. Most of us ‘fossil-fuel’ lovers are inclusive. As long as the cost is not prohibitive, bring it on. Also, don’t force everyone else to believe it your way. If you want to focus on a particular fuel source, have at it.
As for people dying, that is all conjecture and supposition. We should want clean air because it smells better, looks better and feels better. The rest is hyperbole to create a crisis when one does not exist. Data is only as good as those who produce it and when they have an agenda, it is useless.