Thursday, December 17, 2009

Out of control!

About two years ago as I was driving on the main highway near Acco (Acre) out for a trip with some friends, suddenly my Toyota Yaris car lurched forward and began accelerating by itself! I had never experienced anything like this before and I did not know what to do, so I automatically braked and then tried to release the accelerator pedal, that I realized must be stuck, with my foot. Meanwhile the car was accelerating and I was very afraid. I reached down and tried to pull the pedal up, but I could hardly reach it while driving, when suddenly the car reverted to its normal behavior. I told my passengers what had happened and we were all worried about getting home safely, but the experience did not recur.
At the first opportunity I took the car into the Toyota dealer. A word about this company, when I first bought a car from them I met the owner, an old man who had been one of the first to start a dealership in the industrial zone there, and he was very friendly since his wife was Scottish and he liked to speak English with me. By then his sons were running the dealership and so he had time to chat and he told his sons to look after me, and so whenever I go there they call me "the Professor." Anyway they give excellent service and I had no complaints. So when I took the car in I told one of the sons what had happened and he said that one of their mechanics would examine it and then he told me that he could find nothing wrong with the pedal.
A few months later, when I was driving to Jerusalem alone, once again the car suddenly lurched forward and began accelerating by itself. It was a weird feeling, of not being in control. Luckily there were no cars ahead of me and once again I braked and tried to fiddle with the pedal to release it, when suddenly it stopped accelerating. This time I pulled to the side of the road and examined the pedal closely. I could see nothing wrong with it, but I noticed that the pedal did not pivot from its base, but rather from about 1/4 the way up its length and as a result the bottom of the pedal went up as the top went down during acceleration, and as I was examining it I noticed that the top edge of the rubber mat was very close to the base of the pedal. With the engine running I did an experiment, I pushed the edge of the mat under the bottom of the pedal and lo and behold the engine started racing. I had found the cause of the problem, the thick edge of the mat was getting stuck under the bottom of the accelerator pedal. There were originally hooks on the floor to hold the mat in place but these had been plastic and had broken off. So after that when I drove I made sure that the mat was pulled back down to the bottom of the seat so that its top was well below the pedal.
It still happened twice more, but knowing what was the cause I simply jerked the mat back and it stopped, so I had definitely found the cause of the problem. In a way I forgot about the problem since I had solved it, but then a few months ago I read about a recall of about 1 million Toyota cars in the US for just such a problem, for replacement of the accelerator pedal. It was reported that a Toyota Camry had suddenly accelerated out of control, had turned over at high speed and the four people in it had been killed. This had triggered a huge recall. Since I knew the origin of the problem I went back to the Toyota dealer and told them. They said that they had heard of the problem and the recall and they would fix my car. So after a half hour or so I got the car back, and the mechanic had cut a large chunk out of the mat so that it could no longer get stuck under the accelerator pedal! A simple solution to a dangerous problem. So if anyone out there owns a Toyota car, an excellent machine, please make sure to trim your floor mat, you can do it yourself with a heavy-duty scissors.

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