Page 177 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

utterly implausible. For instance, despite being advised repeat-
edly by a 911 operator to shift the car into neutral, he had re-
fused to do so for the 20 minutes that the ordeal lasted. Asked
later why he had ignored the advice, he claimed that he had been
too scared to take his hands off the steering wheel, although he
had been holding a cell phone with one of those hands. He also
claimed that he had reached down to the accelerator to pull it free
in case it had been trapped, which would have required him to
let go of the steering wheel entirely and take his eyes off the road
(not to mention having unusually long arms). A local Fox station
in California recreated the event on a Prius, only to find that ab-
solutely everything they tried (stepping on the brakes, hitting the
emergency brake button, shifting into neutral, and turning the
car off) worked quickly to stop the vehicle.
Within days, the actual car was tested by Toyota and the
NHTSA, with the results showing that all these systems worked
perfectly. The Prius, perhaps unknown to Sikes, was one of the first
Toyota vehicles to install a form of “brake override,” which cuts
engine power if the brake is pressed more than lightly, regardless
of the position of the accelerator; a version of this brake override
would later become standard on all vehicles.* The investigators also
examined the data in the car’s electronic data recorder (EDR). It
showed that Sikes had pressed the brakes lightly more than 200
times during the time when the car was supposedly running out of
control, apparently to make the brake lights come on so that it ap-
peared that he was trying to stop the car. This caused the brakes to

* Technically the Prius system is not as sophisticated as the brake override sys-
tem that became standard in all Toyota vehicles as a result of the recall crisis.
It features a self-protection function that cuts engine power if moderate brake
pedal pressure is applied and the accelerator pedal is depressed more than ap-
proximately 50 percent, in effect providing a form of “brake override.”

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