Sticky situation
by George Jonas
National Post
February 3, 2010
The lady coming down Toronto's Don Valley Parkway knew she was in trouble. She knew exactly what was wrong, too, from having read the papers and seen the television news. Her gas pedal was stuck. She had already resigned herself to crashing, when she remembered that she was driving a Nissan, not a Toyota.
Wait a minute. Nissans weren't being recalled.
She started looking for an alternate reason, and indeed, it was the wedge-shaped piece of wood on the toes of her new boots that kept pushing the pedal. Lifting her foot slowed the car immediately. Saved by the bell.
"Well, the car was a gift from my husband," she told me later. "Don't I get Brownie-points for remembering what make it was? Some of my girlfriends wouldn't have remembered -- they would have thought it was a Toyota and crashed."
Lesson? Alexander Pope delivered it long ago: "A little learning is a dangerous thing."
Any information we give dizzy blondes or their male equivalents is more likely to hurt than help them. Offer such folks a choice, and there's a good chance that they will instinctively make the wrong one. Tell them that you're recalling certain makes and/or models of cars because of a problem, and if they experience what they think is that problem, they will deduce from it that they're driving that make or model of car.
I wonder if the next lawsuit against Toyota will come from a driver of a recalled model who lost control of his car when his puppy sat on the accelerator, but he didn't bother checking what was wrong because the recall misled him into believing that it was a factory defect. If Toyota hadn't recalled the car, he'll argue in court, the first thing he would have done was to look for a puppy sitting on the accelerator, but under the circumstances, when his car speeded up, he started text-messaging his lawyer.
I'm not making light of the problem. I realize it has killed people. I also know it's playing havoc with a great brand, one for which I have a soft spot. The most reliable car I ever owned happened to be a Toyota.
Having had a throttle stick on a motorcycle at the Shannonville race track, I know it's no picnic. Couldn't blame the manufacturer (Norton) either. It was my team's modifications that hung up the slider in the carburetor (if you remember what those things were).
Walking away from such a glitch requires quick remedial action, no simultaneous system breakdown and a bit of luck. What remedial action? Push the kill-button or equivalent (in other words, kill the engine) and apply brake(s) as needed.
What if you found you lost your brakes and couldn't switch off the engine? Simultaneous multiple failures are very rare, but if one occurred to you, you'd probably crash. Which was what a number of people did anyway, even though their brakes were fine and they could have switched off their engines.
The New York Times describes the driver of a Lexus ES 350 (made by Toyota) as calling 911 on his cellphone to tell the operator that his accelerator was stuck, he had no brakes and his vehicle was fast approaching a highway intersection. Apparently, the Lexus did enter the intersection and collided with a sports-utility vehicle. Four people perished. Accident analysis is often lucky people pontificating about what unlucky people should have done, which is in bad taste, but it seems to me that anyone with enough time to dial 911 and converse with the operator has time to turn off his engine and roll into something softer and cheaper than an SUV at an intersection.
As for Toyota, if it survives this fiasco, it might consider switching to making airplanes. I'm not being sarcastic.
I wouldn't say that "driving" an airplane is easier than driving a car -- it isn't -- but it's a trifle more relaxed. Time is rarely as critical in the sky as it is on the ground. Pilots usually have more alternatives to system failures than drivers, and more leisure to deal with technical glitches. Unlike Lexus drivers approaching intersections, pilots can orbit at altitude to sort out a problem. (If they remembered to take enough fuel on board, that is.) If I were fated to encounter something sticky, under most circumstances I'd prefer it to be a sticky throttle approaching a runway rather than a sticky gas pedal approaching an intersection.
The need for split-second decisions in traffic makes equipment reliability even more a safety factor in automotive than in aeronautical manufacture and design. The bottom line is that drivers often have less time than pilots to make life-and-death choices they're usually not as well trained to make.
Carmakers who relax quality control might consider sprouting wings. Throttles shouldn't stick in planes any more than in cars, but manufacturers designing power controls for pilots rather than drivers have more leeway. They can at least expect their customers to know whether they're flying a Toyota or a Nissan.