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Two problems now plague Toyota Motor Corporation during massive recall:

One is a braking problem with the Prius, which has led to a global recall of the vehicles.  The Prius is a hybrid gasoline/electric car with an ingenious means of converting braking energy into electrical energy.  The car has two engines, one is a gasoline engine; the other is an electric engine in which a battery sends electricity to a motor which turns the wheels..  When the car is stopped, so is the gasoline engine.  As the car is accelerated from a stop, the electric motors are used.  As the car accelerates, the gasoline engine cranks up and takes over.  This system saves a great deal of fuel which would otherwise be wasted when the engine idles at traffic lights, etc.  For this reason, a hybrid gets better gas mileage in town than on the road.  When the brake is applied, part of the energy that would ordinarily be lost into the atmosphere as heat is converted to electrical energy which is used to recharge the car’s battery.  This is known as “regenerative” braking, and it helps keep the battery charged.  Regenerative braking uses resistance from the motor acting as a generator to slow the car.  This is fine to slow the car down, but it is not powerful enough to stop the car suddenly.  That is the function of the conventional brake.  The conventional brake is not active during regenerative braking.  The car is designed so that is will switch from regenerative braking to conventional braking for heavy braking needs.  In the Prius (except for current production) there is a computer glitch that delays the switch from regenerative braking to conventional braking.  This causes a very slight pause in which there is no brake at all.  The error is in the computer program.  The fix is to “reflash” the computer in the car so that the delay is programmed out.  That is what is being done in the global recall, a simple upgrade similar to getting an update on a computer program such as moving from Windows Vista to Windows 7.   This is different from the problem in the non-hybrid model.

The second problem is Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA).  SUA comes from a computer glitch as well.  Toyota has not admitted this problem.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has received more than 2,200 complaints of SUA in Toyota vehicles since 2003.  There have been over 800 collisions, and 19 deaths have been reported due to the problem.  The first complaints to NHTSA were in 2003 and concerned Corolla models.  Since then, the models involved have expanded to at least 8, and likely there are more models involved than have been reported.

Toyota has admitted to conditions that are actually “stuck” accelerators.  A floor mat may indeed trap an accelerator if the pedal is long enough to allow the lower end of the pedal to be trapped by a loose floor mat, but that condition would be very rare.  Because it could not blame all the problems on floor mats (some runaway vehicles had none installed at the time).  Toyota then decided that the accelerator pedals were hanging up on other parts of the trim.  This again addresses a stuck accelerator condition.  Neither of these scenarios can account for the fact that Toyotas have been reported to take off from standing starts when the driver was sitting in the car with a foot on the brake, or when a car accelerates from a steady state of driving without any further pedal acceleration.

True SUA would be caused by a fault in the Engine Control Module (ECM) and its relationship to the Electronic Throttle Control System (ETCM).  The ECM is the computer that acts as the “brains” of a modern vehicle.  Every function of the car is under the control of a computer, from the engine power to the brakes.  In the case of the Toyota, pressing the brake with a wide open throttle should signal a fault to the ECM which would order the throttle to go to idle.  That does not happen.  The ETCS can command wide open throttle with no fault code in the ECM to detect the condition.  Wide open throttle without a command from the driver is a fault which must be considered and dealt with.  Many car companies who recognize the problem install a “smart brake” feature which causes the brake pedal to override an open throttle signal and causes the throttle to go to idle.  This is what Toyota needs to do.

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