About
When I was 46 I started writing essays on life, or the state of the human condition as I once called it. Because I was halfway between old enough to vote (21) and planned retirement (72) it was known as the "Halfway Point" series of essays.

Later when I mentioned the essays in one context or another on USENET, I got requests for copies and eventually for future essays. Thus the mailing list was born, and it moved to the Internet when that became widely available. At that time I moved to writing on a schedule, the 1st, 11th, and 21st of the month.

Now the trend is to "blogs," and read on demand. I am therefore making this available as a blog, and we shall see if people read it here, or by mail, or not at all.

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Toyota throttle problems (12:19)

When I first heard about unintended acceleration in Toyota cars, particularly the Prius, I thought of my fried and his wife, both in their 80s, who have an early Prius. Not the people most likely to do the right thing by instinct. But some other parts of the issue came up, some not thoroughly covered by the mainstream media, so I'll mention them here.

Driver error induced by human interface

When I first heard of unintended acceleration years ago, it was not in a Toyota at all. It was a rash of accidents caused by drivers who claimed they had been hard on the brake. And that was when cars had real brake and throttle controls, unhindered by "fly by wire" style software deciding that the driver didn't really mean what the control input said. After investigation, it appears that many of the drivers had recently gotten cars which were not offered with a manual transmission, and which had the brake and throttle pedals more or less centered under the steering wheel, rather than in the traditional locations, throttle on the right, brake in the middle, clutch pedal (or space for it) on the left. It seems likely that the drivers, in an emergency, hit the pedal in the slightly right of middle location, and that this turned out to be the throttle.

Like many analyzes, this was "likely" rather than definitive, it may or may not apply to some of the Toyota incidents. But see the next item.

Driver population

In trying to blame all the incidents on driver error, Toyota and the press have noted that the majority of drivers having accidents were young men and older drivers. This could be caused by any of several things, Toyota would like you to believe that older drivers make mistakes and young men drive too fast. While both of these are true to some extent, I find it odd that the population distribution isn't mirrored in other vehicles, at least as far as I could tell. And regarding the pedal location issue I previously mentioned, those drivers cited are also the drivers who are more likely than average to have experience in driving vehicles with manual transmissions. This suggests an independent analysis of pedal position as a contributing factor.

Cruise control

If there is a software problem related to the throttle behavior, it could be related to use of cruise control. The phrase "I sped up to pass a car and it wouldn't slow down" has appeared in several reports recently. Since these occurred on highway settings, use of cruise control is likely. Note that the founder and designer of the Apple computer, Steve Wozniac, states that he can generate this failure at will in his own Prius, and Toyota has not gotten back to him to investigate, even months after he contacted them.

Are anti-lock brakes involved?

In spite of Toyota repeating over and over that the brakes will stop the car even with the engine at full throttle, the California Police report shows that the police could smell the brakes and see the brake lights, and yet the car didn't slow. This raises an interesting possibility. The anti-lock braking system in a car is designed to make the car stop in a straight line, not to make it stop faster! It does this by pumping the brakes so the wheels keep turning. But in these cases having the wheels stop is exactly what the driver wants, and if the anti-lock system were somehow reducing the effectiveness of the brakes, thinking there was some kind of skid happening, then the driver would be unable to stop. And that scenario matches the observed facts. I have yet to see a driver statement about anti-lock which would address this possibility.

Finally, the cover-up

Reports from Consumer Reports, Reuters, and DailyTech indicate that Toyota has only a single laptop capable of reading the black box recorder in all of the USA, and that there is dispute about whether the black box even reports if the brake is on (much less if the anti-lock is limiting it). There seems to be no reliable information about the crashes, what little there is comes from company spokesmen after they have done the data extraction.

Now I admit I'm a suspicious person, but it seems to me that if the black box data showed that the accelerator was pressed and the brake was not, and that if the accelerator pedal was not pressed that the actual throttle was also at idle, or anything else to indicate that this really was driver error, then I would have a jet full of those laptops flown in and hand one to every law enforcement officer I could find, and give a truckload to the NTSB so they could tell everyone that it was really driver error. But if the data showed a problem, and I had no fix, I would make sure that any black box showing a problem was "damaged in the crash." And if I had a well known expert on computer hardware and software claiming that he could prove my software was bad, I'd totally ignore him as long as I could.

I suspect that this is going to wind up being a reenactment of the the Nixon tapes, the damage from the cover up was far worse than the actual act. If it were shown that Toyota covered up a problem and let people continue to die, it may be a corporate cerimonial suicide.