people are fucking stupid.
Yes…yes they are.
The Prius may be the only car with a plausable excuse for not stopping because of regenerative braking.
But I don’t know enough, so I’m giving a benefit of doubt.
what?
Lock 1
lock 2
thirded
Guess what… it’s back open.
Why?
James Sikes, Owner of Runaway Prius, Is Heavily in Debt, May Have Faked the Whole Thing
James Sikes made news the other day when a California Highway Patrol officer had to help him stop his runaway Toyota Prius, which Sikes claimed had unexpectedly accelerated to 94 mph. But the glare of a national spotlight has cast light on some cobwebs in Sikes’s recent past, secrets that cast doubt on his credibility.
According to an investigation by motorhead blog Jalopnik, Sikes and his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2008 with $700,000 in debt. Including over $20,000 owed on the leased Prius he claims has a mind of its own.
That’s a deep hole to shovel out of. So it’s not a surprise that some are saying Sikes may have faked the incident.
(His [911 call](http://jalopnik.com/5489687/the-full-24+minutes+long-runaway-prius-911-tape) is of particular interest to Jalopnik commenters, who are poring over all 24 minutes of audio like Kennedy conspiracists might comb Zapruder's film, straining to hear false notes of manufactured panic.)
Sikes responded to Jalopnik with a heavily exclamated screed about the “SLANDEROUS” media. Which is ironic considering he’s loaned his story to every major outlet that will have him, even while they’ve largely ignored the relevant fact that Sikes has filed a number of shady insurance claims in the past. And the equally irrelevant, thought tittilating, angle that Sikes owns and operates an adult swingers web site (SFW).
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/03/james_sikes_owner_or_runaway_p.php
or
and many more links if you’d like
This just gets better and better.
Edit : More BS around the internet
[quoteOh My God! We too had a similar experience with our new 2008 Lexus hybrid vehicle. On a day in August of 2009, as we were parking in a space suddenly the car excelerated on its own to a speed of about 40 mph and crashed into a fence and nearly wound up in a lake. My husband had to throw the car into park in order to stop it. It was like a demon was in possession of the vehicle. No one believes us that this is indeed what happened. We are afraid to drive this vehicle again since it was repaired and the dealer found NOTHING wrong with it. Laverne Fryxell Sequim, WA[/quote]
This is clearly BS because throwing any modern car in park will not do a damn thing.
Also there is no other stories on Mark Saylor - the CHP officers death, only one photo of the accident where the car looks fake as hell, also if you were going 120mph out of control your voice wouldn’t be as calm as his on 911 call.
Just saying…
rofl
No one will deny this is totally blown out of proportion and people are trying to get something for nothing out of it but a major conspiracy?
You claim the government is able to create all of this out of nothing and there really is no defect but than you also claim they overlook a something so stupidly simple as making the setup death of the CHP officer seem like he was panicking as he was about to die. Or that they couldn’t make a legit looking crash scene.
So are they all powerfull to creat a massive conspiracy or are they a bunch of idiots that can’t get a simple call to be believable?
Your call :tongue
You’re a mechanic, when was the last time you’ve seen a car that’s able to override it’s brakes or a car with a faulty PPS/TPS that even starts and runs properly, much less goes WOT?
This is on cnn right now too. Toyota AND government engineers agree, nothing wrong with the car. It does not have the existing problems and they could not find any other problems.
I’m really getting pissed off about this “gas override summit” Where the government will discuss mandating that ALL cars have an override of some sort for the gas pedal.
I have one in my car already…
Its called a clutch pedal.
The thing I hate about conspiracy theories is that for some reason they are started by people who completely look over the facts as not being there.
Facts:
-40+ deaths have been contributed to this problem.
-Toyota AND independent probes have found mechanical issues with these cars pertaining to random acceleration.
-One man who was put in prison for vehicular manslaughter a year ago is being released due to the fact they found out that the car he was driving ran someone over because of the recall issue.
I am not willing to believe 40+ people gave up their lives, Toyota openly admitted to having mechanical problems with random acceleration, and a man sat in federal prison for over a year, all to bring Toyota to its knees.
And as someone else stated, if this WAS a govn’t “conspiracy” they would go all out with it. Not use grade c actors and photoshoped pictures of a car.
There is no conspiracy.
“facts” fixed.
Facts?
As soon as my friend with a Toyota heard about this, he said he will be going 100mph everywhere and if he gets pulled over he will blame “sticky pedal”.
If your family friend died in a random accident recently and you heard about this, you’d think $$$$$ too. These are not just “claimed deaths” you can bet your ass each one of those is a lawsuit.
Eerie similar to the morons burning their hand by a hot McDonalds cup. Everybody out there knows better, but the one person acts stupid and sues to win.
So far every INDEPENDENT test not sponsored by lawyers that are suing Toyota cannot find an issue.
The thread of “some” issue is within every manufactured vehicle…Yota is being picked on hard…the\is thread was pulled and its being pulled by people, the media, and the government. No matter how well toyota trys to cut the thread…its off and running.
Those claimed deaths happened before everything was in the spotlight.
Look at the amount of complaints last year Toyota had filed against it for these issues and than look at the number of complaints since everything has come out, there has been something like 10x more complaints in the first two months of this year than in all of last year.
Yeah because all of a sudden the fact that you ran your wife over with your camry after you caught her cheating is now a fault of Toyota.
The fact that there is more complaints now is only reinforcing my argument.
Look at the quote above where a lady said that her run away Toyota was stopped by throwing it in park. She’s either stupid or a PR person spreading bad rumors on sites which is a known tactic.
It’s All Your Fault: The DOT Renders Its Verdict on Toyota’s Unintended-Acceleration Scare - Feature
Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation re*leased the results of its study into the blizzard of reports that various Toyota and Lexus models were accelerating out of control. The DOT concluded that, other than a number of incidents caused by accelerators hanging up on incorrectly fitted floor mats, the accidents were caused by drivers depressing their accelerators when they intended to apply their brakes. “Pedal misapplication” was the DOT’s delicate terminology for this phenomenon.
 Reports of sudden acceleration had been trickling in on Toyotas at a modest pace, as they do on most brands, until a spectacular accident on August 28, 2009, near San Diego. A veteran California Highway Patrol officer was driving three family members in a Lexus ES350. At some point, the throttle of the car stuck open, the driver lost control, and the car accelerated to high speed before hitting another vehicle, rolling over several times, and bursting into flames. All four occupants died.
A subsequent investigation discovered that the car had been fitted with all-weather floor mats designed for a Lexus RX, which were too long for the ES350, thus trapping the accelerator pedal after a full-throttle application and causing the crash.
Ironically, Toyota had already recalled the all-weather floor mats used in ’07 and ’08 Camrys and ES350s. However, after this crash and several other reports of sticking throttles, Toyota decided to recall a total of 3.8 million cars and trucks in October 2009 to replace their gas pedals with a shorter design that would be less susceptible to interference from floor mats.
The notorious ES350 crash, followed by the major recall, focused media attention on Toyota, and the volume of sudden-acceleration complaints grew quickly. Of the more than 7000 unintended-acceleration complaints about Toyotas that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration received from 2000 through March 2010, more than 70 percent of them came after October ’09 [see graph].
[](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/11q2/it_s_all_your_fault_the_dot_renders_its_verdict_on_toyota_s_unintended-acceleration_scare-feature/gallery) One component worthy of investigation was the electronic throttle control Toyota introduced on the [Camry](http://buyersguide.caranddriver.com/toyota/camry) in 2002, now virtually universal in the industry. This device replaces the mechanical link between the accelerator pedal and the engine’s throttle valve with a sensor at the pedal and an electric motor on the throttle. Was this new device going haywire?
The DOT hoped to answer this and other questions about these suspect Toyotas. In most cases, the driver reported that the sudden acceleration began immediately after the driver applied the brakes. DOT engineers determined that there was no mechanism by which applying the brakes could initiate acceleration. Additionally, they conducted tests to determine that, at low speed using normal pedal effort, the brakes could easily hold a car stationary or bring one to a stop even with the engine racing.
A field examination of 58 vehicles said to be involved in unintended-acceleration crashes revealed no evidence of brake failure or throttle malfunction. Moreover, these Toyotas were equipped with simple event data recorders (EDRs, or “black boxes”), as about 85 percent of new cars are. Of the 39 vehicles that fit the unintended-acceleration pattern and had usable EDR data, none showed sustained, pre-crash braking taking place and 35 revealed high or increasing accelerator position.
The reported high-speed incidents were far more rare. After examining the various cases, most of them turned out to be related to alcohol use or drivers’ medical problems: The EDRs showed no pre-impact braking or substantial acceleration, suggesting drivers who were unaware of impending crashes.
In only a handful of high-speed crashes was there evidence that the accelerators hung up on the floor mats. The DOT tested the ability of the brakes to bring such a car to a halt. A continuous, strong braking effort was found to be most effective. Pumping the brakes only served to bleed off the vacuum from the brake booster, increasing pedal effort. And partially applying (dragging) the brakes would eventually cause fade and make it more difficult to stop the car.
[](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/11q2/it_s_all_your_fault_the_dot_renders_its_verdict_on_toyota_s_unintended-acceleration_scare-feature/gallery) Shifting the transmission into neutral, park, or reverse was also found to be [an effective way to terminate acceleration](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept). On Toyotas, any of these three actions puts a moving car into neutral.
The DOT found nothing about the placement of Toyota accelerator and brake pedals that would have promoted misapplication.
Finally, to evaluate the possibility that some sort of electronic gremlin caused these problems, the DOT engaged the rocket scientists at NASA to probe the Camry’s engine-management computer, comb through its thousands of lines of code, and bombard the system with high levels of electromagnetic interference.
NASA scientists evaluated six Camrys (ranging from ’02 to ’07 models) the DOT had purchased from customers who reported sudden-acceleration problems. The scientists found that the electronic throttle-control (ETC) system had several fail-safe features designed to cut engine power if any failure was detected. The agency also found no circumstances under which the ETC could somehow disable the braking system.
To test for electromagnetic interference, NASA subjected the six test cars to very high-powered radiation at a variety of frequencies. The agency also directly imposed these electrical signals into the cars’ wiring harnesses. In the process, the NASA scientists stalled engines, induced limp-home mode, and even entirely fried one engine-management computer. But they were unable to cause a single instance of sudden acceleration.
Based on the DOT report, it seems clear that the Toyota sudden-acceleration scare has little more substance than the one that came before it [see below]. Ultimately, driver error was the culprit.
 [](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/11q2/it_s_all_your_fault_the_dot_renders_its_verdict_on_toyota_s_unintended-acceleration_scare-feature/gallery) In many ways, Toyota’s unintended-acceleration situation last year mimicked Audi’s experience 25 years ago. There was the same media firestorm, the same parade of sympathetic victims, and similar tales of wildly accelerating, unstoppable cars.
In 1986, however, cars didn’t have transmission interlocks, so you could shift from park into drive or reverse without your foot on the brake. The Audi 5000 also had a problem that occasionally caused an elevated idle speed. Both circumstances encouraged pedal misapplication.
But, as C/D demonstrated in a story published in June 1987, an Audi 5000 could be brought to a halt from 70 mph at wide-open throttle in a reasonably short distance (we demonstrated that a Toyota Camry could do the same in March 2010). Then, as now, no car could overpower its brakes.
Audi didn’t help itself by blaming the crashes on the cars’ owners, who didn’t appreciate the suggestion that they were incompetent drivers. Toyota avoided that approach last year.
Like Toyota, Audi was also largely exonerated by a DOT report, published in March 1989. But by that time, however, the damage was done. Audi’s U.S. sales plummeted from 74,061 in 1985 to 12,283 in 1991.
:pop