If you know anyone who has just about any model Toyota made since 2000, please remind them of this: if the accelerator acts up, put the car in neutral. Every Toyota model, gasoline or hybrid, allows you to do this while the car is running, even if the engine speed accelerates out of control. Dozens and dozens of people have avoided a crash by doing it. This guy, understandable, was afraid to do it. The result was quite frightening.
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.
“It was accelerating out of control. Period,” Sikes said.
Sikes said he had never had a problem with Toyota vehicles. But when his friend showed up this morning to take him to the dealer in a Prius, he hesitated. “It just felt funny,” he said. “I love Toyotas. I will not drive a Prius again.”
His fear of “going into reverse” led to a mistake that was very near fatal. He went some 30 miles at 90 miles per hour, pursued by the State Police and weaving through traffic. Toyota’s has hundreds of thousands of cars on the road in the U.S. that are still prone to sudden unintended acceleration. This includes cars that have already been recalled and “fixed,” in my opinion. The car at issue in this story was not even part of a recall, yet just read what happened with it and there are many other stories like it that involve cars not part of the recall. Just as importantly, the “fix” being applied by Toyota (replacing accelerator pedals and floor mats on some cars) is completely irrelevant to and ineffective at fixing the main problem.
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