A runaway 2008 Prius with stuck gas pedal reported

Yes, it is.

But putting it into neutral with my foot on the floor at 78mph worked just fine for me, not an hour ago. The drive disengages and the engine goes to idle.

In that case, there is no way to predict the level of problems that could occur in a software/electrical failure. Electronics get affected by electrical fields, magnetic fluxes, sun spots, etc... Not to mention the near impossibility of tracking down defects internal to a chip or circuit (shift registers, up/down counters, timers, etc... that work 99.99999% of the time correctly, but have no recovery mode if they do get out of step). There are things that can take months to capture even with logic analyzers and a myriad of attempts to test the conditions of the problem. Sometime even attaching electrical test equipment can change the circuit enough that it operates correctly.

He's an idiot:

"When the accelerator stuck, he said he weighed all his options. He feared turning the car off in the middle of traffic, expecting the steering wheel to lock. If he shifted into neutral, he worried that it would slip into reverse. The floor mat, he said, wasn't interfering with the gas pedal.

He was worried more about breaking the transmission than he was about saving his life? I hope the news reports on this guy do a bit of digging into his background (for example his current financial status) to see if there might be a reason for such a non-credible story.

I also saw this guy on the news and he was saying that he didn't try shifting into neutral because he was "afraid I'd flip the car". I don't think that would happen even if he had deliberately shifted into to reverse! I doubt that any modern car, with an automatic transmission, would allow you to shift into reverse at any speed. Your transmission will not break! In fact, my prior car had a manual shift and it was impossible to shift into reverse when at any speed, it simply would go into reverse.

Here's a link to an article containing 2 videos of people shifting their Prius's into neutral at speed and one where they shut down the engine going over 70+ mph without ANY problems.

I would not have allowed Toyota near the car. I would have insisted that the NTSB or an independent laboratory examine the car (at Toyota's expense). Would Toyota dare refuse? "TOYOTA WON'T ALLOW INDEPENDENT LAB TO INSPECT RUNAWAY PRIUS -- FILM AND CUSTOMER CONDEMNATIONS AT 11."

Davoud

Here too:

Here's some more interesting info on this incident. It appears that the driver, James Sikes, had recently filed for bankruptcy and has over $700,000 in debt. He's also 5 months worth of payments behind on the Prius in question. So there might have been a financial motivation to fake this incident. Of course denies he's in it for the money! I'm sure it's just coincidence that he keeps appearing all over CNN and that his Prius was likely to be repo'd soon.

Brake lines fail. Accelerators stick. Mechanical Things Happen. The worst component in a car is the nut behind the wheel. Making it electronic does add another level of complication to an already complicated machine. How many Prius have had some kind of runaway incident? I've had a car accidentally hit a curb when I couldn't find the brake with my foot (an admittedly dumb incident on my part), but I could have claimed unintended acceleration, too. (By the way, that required replacement of much of the front suspension.) I agree, it's hard to see why it happened, but inasmuch as the gear shift and power switch just signal for intended actions, a completely screwed up and evidently frozen computer might have refused to do their intended actions. However, it appears that in the widely reported incident, shifting to neutral did indeed work, once they got the guy to try it. He panicked, and did a LOT of things wrong.

Why am I not surprised at all by this development. In fact, I was pretty sure he would turn out to be someone with severe financial problems.

Mark_Ransley

You might put it in neutral if the software allowed you to do that. I'm not saying that it wouldn't, only that the cause of these incidents is not yet known.

Davoud

I have yet to read of a runaway scenario in which the driver simply put the car in neutral and pulled over to a stop. In the instant case, the 911 operator tells the driver to 'take it out of gear' and he ignores her advice in favor of hysterical rant. Toyota probably won't find anything wrong with the car, aside from ruined brakes, and the next nut case will claim they are covering something up.