The vast majority of times that the customer "does everything right", but my website "refuses to let them check out", and/or gives them error messages that do not appear ANYWHERE IN THE SOURCE CODE ... they are elderly.
So? Elderly people who are trying to buy stuff from you have a name; we call them customers.
If you cater to them, they will be more loyal and spend more than most other demographics.
And truly, if you make your product usable by the elderly you also remove a lot of barriers for other groups and reduce the friction on the merely busy.
I'm young and guess what: I've seen web shops where the checkout process is broken. When that happens, I go to the competition rather than taking time to report the error.
Precisely. And furthermore, if someone's checkout process is confusing to a significant fraction of it's intended users, it's a bug, just as surely as if you forgot to close a set of braces.
On another note, customer service is typically not happy when they claim that a certain error message is impossible and you reply with the section of source code that generated it.
Can you elaborate? Sounds like there's an interesting story behind that comment.
I had something similar happen once, several customer service reps insisted that a message I was getting was entirely impossible: it told me I needed to buy competitor's prepaid card instead of theirs. I'd just assumed they had a deal with that competitor for prepaid card distribution.
They fixed the message soon after I ended the call, but when I called back later they still didn't believe me. Finally I pointed out that when they fixed the message they forgot to change it from their competitor's prepaid card number format. Then they finally credited my account.
valid point, but doubtful that the age distribution is so skewed.
perhaps an argument can be made for younger drivers better able to react and re-take control of the car through cool headed calculation and the sheer mental agility that youngsters are so known for.
jkjk but an argument that needs to be ruled out is that young drivers are less prone to be killed by this malfunction for whatever reason.
Good data sleuthing on the part of the blog author.
From my experience, Prius drivers in SoCal are usually over-50. We used to have a game called "Prius" that simply involved yelling "Prius" everytime one was observed (there are a TON down here). Most of the time, we saw an older driver.
Could be selection effect - maybe newspapers report ages when victims are old because they want to imply they may be at fault, or because they think they will get more sympathy.
Is it normal to mention someone's age if they are not old? Do newspaper articles commonly say "Mr Smith, age 37"? Perhaps not. But they are likely to say "Mr Smith, age 82, and grandfather to 7" because it "adds colour".
[Edit: although I suspect the same also happens around age 18-21, implying irresponsible driving.]
The only thing that is proven with these numbers, is that the elderly are getting into more accidents because of the acceleration problem.
It is quite plausible that the younger and more spry drivers react better to the acceleration and are able to successfully deploy the proper counter measures.
Another and possibly more important question is why didn't Toyota install break override systems which would signal the computer to kill the throttle? This is a common safety system found in all GM cars with electronic throttles.
"If the brake and the accelerator are in an argument, the brake wins," a spokesman at Chrysler said in describing the systems, which it began installing in 2003.
The only thing that is proven with these numbers, is that the elderly are getting into more accidents because of the acceleration problem.
No, what is shown is that elderly are in more accidents attributed to the acceleration problem. How much of it is really the acceleration problem and how much not is precisely the question this article is asking.
To really answer it, we need a little more information, such as the proportion of drivers of the affected Toyotas that are older.
Young men survive physical trauma better than any other demographic. The same crash that will kill a man of 40, let alone a man of 70, might leave a man of 19 or 20 badly injured. So I don't think fatality rates tell us much here. If we had a measure of damage to the car, correlated to age, that would help.
There are certainly reasons to be skeptical. In addition to age, consider for example the fact that it tends to be highly correlated with automatics vs manuals.
My mom was almost in a bad car accident due to something like this. she was walking in a strip mall when a car plowed into a dry cleaners about 10 feet ahead of her. Her friend almost fainted.
it was a teen and she said she accidentally pressed down on the accelerator instead of the brake. the place was destroyed but fortunately no one was hurt.
Sudden acceleration is more likely to result in a (deadly?) crash for drivers with little experience. Young, especially teen-age, drivers have little experience.
Young drivers kill and injure far more people than elderly drivers.
I actually almost included inexperience in my comment, but I thought it muddled the point since this article is asking why the elderly are over-represented in the toyota acceleration related deaths.
It seems like you're correcting me, but how is your point anything but tangential? If you're wondering why inexperienced drivers aren't also over-represented, it's probably because not many 16-21 year olds drive priuses.
Ignoring that young people live through stuff better. And ignoring that the comment I was replying to merely said that young people account for more injuries, not more often, much less more per mile.
If I got plenty of experience noticing I have no breaks in situations where I really needed them ... does that count?
(drove a piece of shit of a car for quite some time)
I also ended up in situations where my instinct or experience told me to accelerate instead of pushing the breaks. This happens often.
Got plenty of experience driving on glazed frost. I even crashed once because of the car skidding ... went off-road, with the car rolling over a couple of times, and me and the other passenger survived with minor injuries.
From that experience I learned that whatever you do (besides wearing a seat-belt) you have to avoid trees.
IMHO, more experienced drivers are better, and I've seen some pretty good instincts coming from 40-50 year-old or so acquaintances.
I really don't know what I would do with a sudden acceleration problem. I would probably try to remain calm and wait for it to recover (pushing the acceleration / brake to trigger events, try to stop the engine), and try not crashing.
On a side note ... that's why I don't like cars with automatic transmissions. If my current car experienced a sudden acceleration problem, I could just take it out of gear or do an old-fashioned motor-brake.
I think it's more that experienced drivers are presumably more defensive and therefore more likely to avoid situations (tailgating, etc.) where a sudden acceleration would be tough to recover from.
You can blame the electronics all you like but the truth is cars can have faults, both mechanical and software I once drove a Vauxhall Cavalier were a small wire had got in the way of the throttle input lever causing it to have a very high idle. If this wire had got in the way any further it would have caused the throttle to stay near wide open. If it had I'd have either put the clutch in (plenty of brake assist and power steering but the engine running unloaded at the rev limiter) or turned the ignition off (no power steering or assisted breaks) depending on whether I had a good straight bit of road to stop on or not.
This is a statistical correlation. You might as well say that eating ice cream causes drowning. Why? People eat more ice cream on hot days. People swim more on hot days. Increase in swimming means increase in drowning, therefore when people eat ice cream they are more likely to drown.
When old people drive cars they are more likely to crash therefore when old people drive a Prius they are more likely to crash.
If 24 people drowned in my town, and the majority of them were holding an ice cream cone when they did, the ice cream truck driver would probably be a suspect
Woz found a software bug in the cruise control mechanism. However once you hit the break the cruise control immediately disengages and thus the bug is "fixed". They can fix this bug but it is not a live-or-die issue because there is definitely a way to stop the car.
I the case of the runaway Toyota cars in the news currently, the reports from people are that they do NOT stop with the break engaged. In fact, the recent incident under investigation in California involved the car at a speed of 90 mph until the emergency break was applied decreasing it to 50 mph.
For the neutral part, I haven't seen a clear answer. I've heard rumors that the Toyotas either couldn't shift into neutral or the person was too panicked to do so.
The California case is currently being subjected to intense scrutiny.
Here's the full, 24-minute 911 call audio. Does that sound like genuine panic to you? How would someone who doesn't know how to stop a car have any idea if their "brakes are almost burned"?
http://jalopnik.com/5489553/runaway-prius-911-tape-im-over-9...
There's significant reason to suspect this guy may have attempted a pretty blatant cash grab.
Regardless, I think the Corolla is the only Toyota sedan that still has rear-drums. I believe all others (maybe barring the bottom-rung Camry) are 4-wheel discs. The brake systems on Lexuses are also significantly beefier (though nowhere near sports car territory). C&D did tests with Mustang GT500s -- which while having beefier brake packages, aren't anything compared to normal supercars and high-end sports cars -- had no problem stopping a 500HP engine from 120mph while maintaining wide-open-throttle. Sure, it took some distance, but it definitely stopped. My point is, if you step on the brake pedal and don't release, ANY car that is properly maintained will stop.
Oh I know, when I said "the reports from people" in my parent comment I really meant that. Even before today's news I thought the CA case was fishy, so your comment is preaching to the converted a bit :-) I strictly meant that the drivers report to have tried to apply the brakes as hard as they can in most (all?) of the cases.
On a side note, I recently had a stuck accelerator less than a week ago. (No it isn't a Toyota)
Since I drive a manual transmission, I just quickly clutched and shifted to neutral. The engine redlined a bit before I killed it, which isn't good, but no serious harm to anyone or machine as far as I can tell. I coasted to a stop and then pulled the gas pedal from the floor with my hand. The weird thing is, after your comment just now I was trying to remember whether I tried to apply the brakes and I don't remember. It is cliche, but it "happened so fast," haha.
Not to sound like a jerk, but if you're too panicked to do this, maybe you shouldn't be piloting a several thousand pound piece of steel around...
Also, this supports my belief that every driver should have to know how to drive a vehicle with a manual-shift gearbox. Shifting into neutral would probably happen without much of a second thought for somebody who normally drives a stickshift.
In some cars there is electronics that will stop the gas when the brakes are applied, but many brans (including toyota) do not employ these electronics.
So, if the gas is stuck and the brakes are both applied they will act in opposition, and with most engines the engine will overpower the brakes. So, applying the breaks will slow it down (especially if you apply normal and emergency breaks together), but it probably will not stop.
I vaguely remember a newscast where someone did apply both brakes and it slowed them down from some extreme speed to somewhere around the 40s or 50s.
I don't believe for a moment that the engine will overpower the brake, for the simple reason that any normal car can stop faster than it can accelerate. That means the brakes are stronger. For sure a Camry or Prius can in no way accelerate faster than they stop.
Yes, there is an issue with overheating the brakes, but that will take a fairly long time, certainly longer than the time it should take you to figure out wtf is going on and shift to neutral or turn the ignition off.
IMHO, the outcome of these incidents being someone dying has driver error written all over it, even if the runaway acceleration actually is real.
I'm wondering; with how vital software systems are in modern cars, for everything from fuel efficiency to emissions to drive by wire systems like this, whether anyone has started doing work on free software for car computer systems.
