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Federal Government Cannot Explain Runaway Prius Incident
The federal government said Monday it cannot explain a reported incident of sudden, high-speed acceleration in a Toyota Prius on a California freeway last week, a malfunction the driver's lawyer is describing as "the ghost in the machine."
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement that it continues to investigate but "we may never know exactly what happened with this car."
Prius owner James Sikes called 911 last week to report losing control of his Prius as the hybrid reached speeds of 94 mph. A highway patrol officer helped bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
On Monday, Sikes' attorney, John Gomez, said it's "not surprising" that investigators have not been able to replicate the incident.
"This problem is sort of a ghost in the machine that is the Toyota system," Gomez said Sunday. "It doesn't leave a fault code, it doesn't leave a footprint and you can't make it happen upon demand."
"They have never been able to replicate an incident of sudden acceleration. Mr. Sikes never had a problem in the three years he owned this vehicle," he added.
The NHTSA said its engineers are reviewing data from Sikes' Prius but have so far not been able to find anything to explain the reported incident. Inspectors in California tried during a two-hour test drive to duplicate the acceleration, but were unable to do so.
Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the failure to duplicate the stuck accelerator, along with a vehicle design to prevent such occurrences, raises questions about the driver's story.
"We're not saying Mr. Sikes is wrong or that he lied, we're saying that questions have arisen in the investigation," Bardella said.
Toyota Motor Corp. planned to announce preliminary findings of its investigation at a news conference Monday in San Diego.
NHTSA is looking into claims from more than 60 Toyota owners that their vehicles continue to accelerate unexpectedly despite having their vehicles repaired.
Technicians with the NHTSA and Toyota could not duplicate what Sikes said he experienced March 8 on a mountainous but lightly traveled stretch of Interstate 8 east of San Diego, according to a congressional staffer's memo prepared for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
"Every time the technician placed the gas pedal to the floor and the brake pedal to the floor the engine shut off and the car immediately started to slow down," the memo read.
According to the memo, a Toyota official who was at the two-day inspection last week in suburban San Diego explained that an electric motor would "completely seize" if a system to shut off the gas when the brake is pressed fails, and there was no evidence to support that happened.
"In this case, knowing that we are able to push the car around the shop, it does not appear to be feasibly possible, both electronically and mechanically that his gas pedal was stuck to the floor and he was slamming on the brake at the same time," according to the memo.
Toyota has recalled millions of cars because of floor mats that can snag gas pedals or accelerators that can sometimes stick. Sikes' car was covered by the floor mat recall but not the one for sticky accelerators. He later told reporters that he tried to pull on the gas pedal during his harrowing ride, but it didn't "move at all."
The Prius is powered by two electric motor-generators and a small gasoline engine, all connected by transmission gears. A computer, which Toyota calls the "hybrid control computer" determines what combination of motors is needed and which would be most efficient.
Craig Hoff, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich., said that for the Prius to accelerate out of control, at least two systems would have to fail simultaneously. They are the sensor signal that tracks the brake and gas pedal positions when the driver presses on them and the hybrid control computers.
"The chance of them both going wrong, plus the fact that the signal is bad, it just seems very, very, very remote," Hoff said. "Could it happen? Statistically, yes. But it just doesn't seem very likely."
Several events usually combine to cause problems with cars, and it's difficult to reproduce them, Hoff said.
"It's going to make it really hard to find, because you've got to line up the multiple effects," he said.
The congressional memo said both the front and rear brakes were worn and damaged by heat, consistent with Sikes saying that he stood on the brake pedal with both feet and was unable to stop the car. But if the fail-safe system worked properly, the brakes wouldn't have been damaged because power would have been cut to the wheels.
Gomez said the best evidence that his client was frantically slamming the brakes is that a California Highway Patrol officer who was giving Sikes instructions over a loudspeaker smelled burning brakes and saw the lights on.
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Runaway Prius Driver: Brakes Were "Almost Burned"
Before he called 911, James Sikes says he reached down with his hand to loosen the "stuck" accelerator on his 2008 Toyota Prius, his other hand on the steering wheel. The pedal didn't move.
"My car can't slow down," he began when a California Highway Patrol dispatcher answered his call.
Sikes, 61, rolled to a stop 23 harrowing minutes later, he and his blue Prius emerging unscathed but Toyota Motor Corp. suffering another big dent. Toyota has watched its reputation for quality crumble with recalls tied to risks that cars can accelerate uncontrollably or can't brake properly.
Todd Neibert, the CHP officer who gave instructions to Sikes over a loudspeaker as they went east on mountainous Interstate 8 in San Diego County Monday afternoon, said he smelled burning brakes when he caught up with the Prius.
The officer said he told Sikes to push the brake pedal to the floor and apply the emergency brakes as the Prius neared 85 mph. The car slowed to about 55 mph, at which time Sikes says he turned off the ignition and the car came to a stop.
"The brakes were definitely down to hardly any material," Neibert told reporters Tuesday. "There was a bunch of brake material on the ground and inside the wheels."
The officer found the floor mat properly placed and the accelerator and brake pedals in correct resting position.
The freeway incident happened at the worst possible time for Toyota - just hours after it invited reporters to hear experts insist that electronic flaws could not cause cars to speed out of control under real driving conditions.
Another driver in suburban New York told police Tuesday that her 2005 Toyota Prius accelerated on its own, then lurched down a driveway, across a road and into a stone wall. The driver, a 56-year-old woman, escaped serious injury. Police said the floor mat did not appear to be a factor; Toyota said it's not yet known whether the company will investigate.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has sent two investigators to examine Sikes' car. Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said the automaker is sending three of its own technicians to investigate.
Another Toyota spokesman, John Hanson, said the company wanted to talk to the driver.
Sikes' car was covered by Toyota's floor mat recall, but the driver said the pedal jammed and was not trapped under the mat.
Sikes, a real estate agent, said he was passing another car when the accelerator stuck and eventually reached 94 mph.
During the two 911 calls, Sikes ignored many of the dispatcher's questions, saying later that he had to put his phone on the seat to keep his hands on the wheel.
Leighann Parks, a 24-year-old dispatcher, repeatedly told him to throw the car into neutral but got no answers.
"He was very emotional, you could tell on the line he was panicked," Parks told reporters outside the CHP's El Cajon office. "I could only imagine being in his shoes and being that stressed."
Neibert told Sikes after the CHP caught up with him to shift to neutral but the driver shook his head no. Sikes told reporters he didn't go into neutral because he worried the car would flip.
The driver rolled down the window and Neibert told him to apply both brakes. Sikes said he lifted his buttocks from the seat to press the floor brake, an account backed by the officer.
The cars maneuvered around two trucks going uphill to a "clear, wide-open road," Neibert said. The officer had only about 15 miles to stop the vehicle before a steep downgrade and was considering spike strips to puncture the tires as a last resort.
In the final minutes of the 911 call, Sikes tells the dispatcher, "My brakes are almost burned out."
After the car stops, Sikes sighs with relief.
Neibert, a 14-year CHP veteran, worked with Officer Mark Saylor, who was killed in August along with his wife, her brother and the couple's daughter after their Lexus' accelerator became trapped by a wrong-size floor mat on a freeway in nearby La Mesa. The loaner car hit a sport utility vehicle and burst into flames.
Toyota has since recalled some 8.5 million vehicles worldwide - more than 6 million in the United States - because of acceleration problems in multiple models and braking issues in the Prius. Regulators have linked 52 deaths to crashes allegedly caused by accelerator problems. Still, there have been more than 60 reports of sudden acceleration in cars that have been fixed under the recall.
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Sources: MSNBC, CBS News, Fox News, Google Maps
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