Thursday, April 15, 2010

If you happen to own or drive a Toyota.....

.....keep in mind that if the gas pedal does indeed become stuck, there is a pedal called "brake" that should stop the car in almost any situation, and a little thing called the "transmission" where power can be disengaged, making braking easier and more reliable.

The article makes very clear that there is a big danger to our "pushbutton" cars--too often, the diver forgets the workarounds that the basic structure of the machine allows, and when something goes wrong, the failure mode is "less than graceful." If you love your children, teach them how to drive a vehicle with a clutch.

1 comment:

GotToBTru said...

Brakes work well to slow a car, and they do very poorly at countering an accelerator. You just end up burning them up. I do wonder why it is people don't think to put the transmission in neutral. It would sound terrible, of course, and the eventual failure would probably be pretty dramatic. However, when the *other* option is to hit something immovable at very high speed ... it's like the decision to use an ejection seat. The only promise the maker of an ejection seat will give is that the resulting experience will be preferable to staying in the burning airplane.