Eric Weiss was stopped at a busy Long Beach, Calif., intersection last month when he said his 2008 Toyota Tacoma pickup unexpectedly started accelerating, forcing him to stand on the brakes to keep the bucking truck from plowing into oncoming cars.
Toyota Motor Corp. says the gas pedal design in Weiss’ truck and more than 4 million other Toyota and Lexus vehicles makes them vulnerable to being trapped open by floor mats, and recently announced a costly recall to fix the problem. But Weiss is convinced his incident wasn’t caused by a floor mat.
He said he removed the mats in his truck months earlier on the advice of his Toyota dealer after his truck suddenly accelerated and rear-ended a BMW.
“The brakes squealed and the engine roared,” the 52-year-old cabinet maker said of the most recent episode. “I don’t want to drive the truck anymore, but I don’t want anyone else to either.”
Amid widening concern over unintended acceleration events, including an Aug. 28 crash near San Diego that killed a California Highway Patrol officer and his family, Toyota has repeatedly pointed to “floor mat entrapment” as the problem.
But accounts from motorists such as Weiss, interviews with auto safety experts and a Los Angeles Times review of thousands of federal traffic safety incident reports point to another potential cause: the electronic throttles that have replaced mechanical systems in recent years.
The Times found that complaints of sudden acceleration in many Toyota and Lexus vehicles shot up almost immediately after the automaker adopted the so-called drive-by-wire system over the past decade. That system uses sensors, microprocessors and electric motors to connect the driver’s foot to the engine, rather than a traditional link such as a steel cable.
For some Toyota models, reports of unintended acceleration increased more than fivefold after drive-by- wire systems were adopted, according to the review of thousands of consumer complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Toyota first installed electronic throttles in 2002 model year Lexus ES and Toyota Camry sedans. Total complaints of sudden acceleration for the Lexus and Camry in the 2002-04 model years averaged 132 a year. That is up from an average of 26 annually for the 1999-2001 models, the Times review found.
The average number of sudden acceleration complaints involving the Tacoma jumped more than 20 times, on average, in the three years after Toyota’s introduction of drive-by-wire in these trucks in 2005. Increases also were found on the hybrid Prius, among other models.
Today, every new Toyota vehicle sold in the U.S. uses drive-by-wire.
Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said the automaker could not explain the trend. But Toyota has held that electronic control systems, including drive-by-wire, are not to blame.
