Full Version: Toyota

Friday February 5, 2010
Forget the Recalls: Now's the Best Time to Buy a Toyota
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toyota-logo.jpgToyota is a Japanese car and it's a German word that comes to mind, schadenfreude: taking glee in the misfortunes of others. In this case, take glee if you want, but also take advantage of their misfortunes if you're in the market for a car. Toyota's reputation is horrible this month. Whatever ails the cars is relatively minor (I believe) but prices will depressed and dealers will be cutting prices to build showroom traffic. If you're thinking of buying, now's the time. Some tips after the jump, plus how to deal with a sticking throttle.

Toyota temporarily stopped selling eight models, maybe nine if there's also an issue with the Toyota Prius, the problem Steve Wozniak helped bring to light. Toyota hurt itself by initially saying floor mats were the problem and nothing else, now it's saying it's floor mats and a sticky throttle linkage (and nothing else), and we'll see if the throttle electronics are also a factor.

Let's say the gas pedal recall repair costs $100 to $250 (Toyota pays). But the effect is to depress the value of every Toyota by $1,000 from your dealer's everyday low, low pricing. (Used cars, too.) It might be $500, it might be $2,500. That will last a couple months. So the Toyota Camry you could get for $25,000 last month you now can buy for $24,000. Who'd pay the difference? Toyota, not your dealer, will provide sales incentives if it finds sales are soft. Incentives might be a couple thousand dollars. They might take the form of 0% financing if you do it through the automaker's finance arm. It might be an enhanced loyalty trade-in if you own a Toyota now. Once you discount the core price of the car, it's hard to bring it back up.

Eventually Toyota's reputation and sales will recover and those incentives will go away. Take advantage while you can. If you're a long time Toyota buyer from the baby boom era, you'll feel especially good sticking it to the dealer who 20 years ago, when gas prices were high and Toyotas were scarce, added a $1,000 markup over list price for a paint and fabric protection program that cost $50. What goes around, comes around. I'm not saying Toyota Motor Sales ever condoned this, but buyers see the company and the dealers as a "you people" kind of monolith.

There's more good news: If and when Toyota drops prices, dealers selling competing cars will scream that their sales hurting and ask for factory incentives, so you might expect to see the Presidents' Birthday Sale of All Time this year. It's always amazing that auto dealers invoke the name of an honest president to sell cars.


What If Your Toyota Can't Be Stopped? Hit the Brakes. Put It in Neutral
If you have a problem with unintended acceleration, the solution is simple. Toyota says, and they're almost certainly right, that you'd have warning signs beforehand, that the throttle is a bit harder to depress, or doesn't immediately return to idle when you take your foot off the throttle. If you do find your Toyota or other car not slowing down:

Step on the brakes and stay on the brakes until the car stops. If you have both feet on the brake pedal, it's virtually impossible that you've mistakenly pressed the throttle thinking it was the brake. That was the likely cause of the Audi 5000 unintended acceleration issues of the 1980s: people, not cars.

If that doesn't do it, put the car in neutral; the engine may keep turning at high rpm's but it will be disconnected from the drive wheels. On most cars, you push the gearshift lever forward from drive into neutral (console shifter) or up (steering column shifter). If you have a sport shift transmission, first move the shifter to the right, then forward.

If that doesn't work, turn off the ignition and push the brake pedal with both feet. With pushbutton-start cars you'll need to hold the button for 2-3 seconds. When the ignition is off, you lose power assist for your steering and eventually the braking assist, which is why you shouldn't pump the brakes, something you shouldn't be doing anyhow in normal driving now that most cars have anti-lock brakes.

Don't remove the key from the ignition or the steering wheel may lock.

Pull over, stop, and call either your Toyota dealer or a class-action lawyer, depending on how you're feeling.

* Toyota's video on stopping a runaway car.

The video you posted earlier clearly shows that floormats were to blame for many of the incidents.

...

Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles worldwide for problems with either floor mats , which can trap a gas pedal, or a mechanical glitch in the accelerator, which can cause the pedal to become stuck.

But safety advocates and lawyers for a Michigan woman killed in a high-speed wreck in April 2008 argue that evidence suggests electronic throttle controls are at fault, not floor mats or "sticky pedals.

...

This may well be speculative crap, but at least based on the anecdotal incidents I keep hearing about, this sounds like an ECM problem.

First Toyota blamed floor mats. That immediately causes consumers to think that the problem was the fault of idiot drivers, not Toyota itself. The typical person's reaction would rightfully be something along the lines of "duh, if you stack floormats under the accelerator, it's going to stick...this is not Toyota's fault".

Now Toyota blames the pedal. And the pedal manufacturer. Again a simple system that people understand...that can be labeled as obviously defective and replaced with something theoretically not defective, bringing about peace of mind.

Finally Toyota is going to "go the extra mile" and update the ECMs to cause pressing the brake to cut the throttle. I imagine this is an algorithmic (code) change to the ECM, not just new calibrations. Apparently Toyota uses a proprietary ECM that is not very "hackable". That is, it's very closed in comparison to items like those in GMs and VW/Audis where there are cottage industries of tinkerers who have decompiled the code, modified calibrations for performance and economy, and even modified the algorithms themselves. (You don't see things like VAGCOM or EFILive for Toyotas.)

Point being, if they update the ECM and it is all proprietary stuff and there's no easy way to diff it (or an adequate number of eyes to catch the difference) they can fix the problem and scapegoat the pedal manufacturer. And potentially leave a lot of dangerous vehicles on the road to save face.

The biggest hole I can find in this idea is where I'm getting my data. Random reports from people, a lot of whom seem to claim their vehicles accelerated from a stop. And of course it's all stuff reported by the popular news media. And of course a lot of folks who rear-ended someone in their Toyota are going to suggest anything other than their own actions being the cause.

But being a software developer, the more I hear about this, the more it stinks of software. An ECM has too many variables to simulate all possible conditions, so you must rely on the algorithms to work correctly. My gut says there's a tiny hole in there somewhere, where most users will never encounter it.