Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Extreme prejudice

According to the Los Angeles Times there have been at least five fatal crashes involving "runaway Toyota and Lexus vehicles made by Toyota Motor Corp" resulting from "hundreds of incidents of sudden acceleration involving the company's vehicles". Toyota blames accelerator pedals jammed open by adrift floor mats. Some experts think the problem has more to do with possible faults in the cars' sophisticated technical systems. Read more here.


Jeremy Clarkson, sensing that the Toyota he's road testing has picked up on his negativity and might try to kill him HAL 9000 style, takes preemptive action. That's one Prius that's never going to hurt anyone.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Chistery said...

I’ve just recently been a passenger in a Prius taxi. The dash has one of these displays

http://john1701a.com/prius/photos/PriusDashboard_MultiDisplay-Surround.jpg

I spent the whole trip watching the thing show me if the power was coming out of the engine or batteries or both, or if the regenerative brakes were putting power back into the batteries. I didn’t realize there were so many permutations. It was a wonderful 15 minutes. I was in awe of the amount of effort and cost to create the telemetry system that served no other purpose than to entertain… well maybe to also give you a few smugness credits. If I owned a Prius, I think I would look at it for maybe two whole days rather looking at the boring road in front of me. After that, I would start driving safely again and never again look at the display. Then I would be bitter about the thousands of dollars I’d just paid for that display when I could have had a DVD player for only a few hundred.

I wonder how may Prius’s crash in the first week of purchase?

PS Congratulations on the move, Becks.

10:50 AM  

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