Toyota Recall Videos - Stopping Procedure | Hacker News Reader

Toyota Recall Videos - Stopping Procedure

toyota.com

11 pointscesare4 comments

It is amazing how obvious these instructions are. I own a prius and have been setting up a plan for if/when something like this happens to me. I have never worried about a stuck accelerator, because such an event is a possibility in any vehicle and has been reported in many more models than just Toyotas since before I began driving. If you don't know how to react in such a scenario, you shouldn't be driving a car.

The procedure boils down to,

  1) Put your foot on the brake, then 
  2) Disengage the engine.

The Toyota fiasco has been completely overblown in my opinion.

I wonder if the fiasco is more a reflection of America's trends in car transmissions. Here probably around 90% of cars are automatic and people don't learn the underlying mechanisms of a transmission, rather they just learn to drive.

Anecdotal data point: I took my manual Hyundai SantaFe in for service the other day. The service department had to go through four technicians before they could find someone that could drive a manual.

People aren't learning what a neutral gear is for, nor are they learning the underlying mechanisms of how a car works. Everything has been abstracted away, and now they are being rudely awoken from all their assumptions. Perhaps what seems obvious to those of us who drive manual (get the car in neutral, turn it off) in a situation with a stuck accelerator is not at all obvious to those who have never learned that much about their car.

You don't have to know about how the transmission works in order to know what to do. I remember going through driving school, and they repeatedly told us what to do if the accelerator stuck to the floor.

That is astounding that that many service techs wouldn't know how to drive a "standard" transmission. It's like when you go into Best Buy and the guy whose whole job is one tiny little corner of the store and yet he doesn't seem to have any clue about even the basics of what he sells. If you want to move up in the world, learn how to do your current job well.

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