Toyota sedang mengalami ujian berat - PART 01

[maskopat]

Makanya belilah dari ATPM. Lambo aja bisa dibeli dari ATPM.

Ini tret udah jadi klan Toyota vs Mitsu - Nissan ya? Walau Subaru udah nenen ke 3 oval, aku gak ikut2an lho ya. Cuma sudden acceleration aja, gampang cara benerinnya.

BTW, kalau bisa janganlah pancing2 pejabat publik bikin komen yg simpang siur. Carilah info yang betul. Ini Detik emang kadang gimana gitu lho. ABS bro, ABS. Emang bisa saja ABS meninggalkan jejak rem, cuma kalau ada yg bisa ngukur, saya baru tahu krn yg saya tahu jejaknya di stage awal dan intermittent.

waduh, koq mitsu ikut2an?

om sudar, bukannya prinsip ABS itu ngerem, kalo ban locking remnya dikendorin sambil direm lagi.. locking dikedorin lagi? jadi jejak ban rem di jalan kadang2 terlihat tapi tidak panjang... cmiiw..

[asudarsono]

You are correct.

[toyotaman]

http://www.leftlanenews.com/toyota-work ... -memo.html

Update: Congress requests Toyota workers’ 2006 safety memo

03/09/2010, 1:30 PMBy Mark Kleis

Congress has not requested that Toyota produce the memo that was sent to it by a band of six concerned Toyota workers attempted to warn the automaker of impending quality and safety concerns back in 2006. The report says that Toyota never acknowledged the memo in 2006, but Congressman Edolphus Towns of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is requesting Toyota produce it by March 10.


According to an investigative report by the LA Times carried out in Toyota’s hometown of Toyota, Japan, six workers came together in 2006 in an attempt to warn the now ailing automaker of impending safety and quality concerns.


The six men – all union workers in Japan – had come together and agreed that the automaker [Toyota] had turned to extensive use of unpaid overtime and cuts in workforce while simultaneously increasing output in order to keep up with increased demand in the U.S. market. One statistic the workers listed in their memo was Toyota’s 5 million recalled vehicles between 2000 and 2005 – totaling 36% of everything sold during that same period – a rate higher than other automakers.


The men explained to the LA Times that the two-page memo warned Toyota that a failure to act could eventually “become a great problem that involves the company’s survival. We are concerned about the processes which are essential for producing safe cars, but that ultimately may be ignored, with production continued in the name of competition.”


Despite their best efforts, the men say Toyota never even acknowledged receipt of the memo, “They completely ignored us. That’s the Toyota way,” said Tadao Wakatsuki, veteran assembly line worker, age 62.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requests the memo

Congress has now asked Toyota to produce the memo written by the six assembly line workers in the fall of 2006 in light of recent safety and quality concerns regarding Toyota vehicles.


“If senior Toyota officials ignored important safety concerns raised by their own employees, it calls into question Toyota’s corporate priorities and its commitment to safety,” wrote Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, in a letter to Toyota North America president Yoshimi Inaba.


Toyota’s recent statements seem to be in line with the memo


Recent comments by several Toyota executives during Congressional hearings, including CEO Akio Toyoda, have suggested that Toyota has realized it lost its focus on safety and quality, and instead put too much focus on volume. This paradigm shift is what the six workers say they were trying to point out back in 2006, in addition to knowledge of harsh work conditions that were believed to have led workers to commit suicide, suffer work related illness and even death.


“Our responsibility as a labor union was to point out these problems that Toyota should have known about. People were overworked; some were committing suicide,” Wakatsuki said. “Of course, Toyota did nothing, but looking back we see how important this was. We just told them what we saw.”


“We used to test every one of our cars for safety and quality,” said Wakatsuki. “Now we do maybe 60 percent. The old 100 percent is a thing of the past.”


Wakatsuki formed a labor union in 2006 that not only recognized full-time workers, but also part-time and imported workers. A chief concern was the allegedly regular corporate policy that called on extensive unpaid overtime hours by many workers.


In one case, a Japanese court ruled that a man died from karoshi, which means he worked himself to death. The man, Kenichi Uchino, was 30 years old and reportedly worked 14 hours a day leading up to his final month in which he worked 144 hours of unpaid overtime, according to his widowed wife. Uchino died of heart failure while working at his desk.


Uchino’s widow managed to sneak into a Toyota stockholder’s meeting where she questioned then-president Katsuaki Watanabe about unpaid overtime – Watanabe gave no answer and said they would “look into it.”


In 1970, a man by the name of Fumio Matsuda formed the Japan Automobile Consumer Union, an organization which acted as a consumer advocacy group. Matsuda is often referred to as the “Ralph Nader of Japan” for his actions. Matsuda is a former Nissan quality control engineer and says he has spent decades watching Japanese automakers – including Toyota.


Matsuda claimed that Toyota often sponsored “secret recalls” in which Toyota would ask customers to visit dealers for checkups and then they would replace known defective parts and then chargecustomers for the repairs. “Everything Toyota does is hidden, ” said Matsuda.

[toyotaman]

http://www.theledger.com/article/201003 ... ?p=1&tc=pg

Millions of Toyotas Recalled, None in Japan

HIROKO TABUCHI

Published: Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 5:12 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 5:12 a.m.
( page 1 of 5 )

TOKYO — Feeling her Toyota Mark X station wagon lurch forward at a busy intersection, Masako Sakai slammed on the brakes. But the pedal “had gone limp,” she said. Downshifting didn’t seem to work either.


“I tried everything I could think of,” Mrs. Sakai, 64, said, as she recently recalled the accident that happened six months ago.


Her car surged forward nearly 3,000 feet before slamming into a Mercedes Benz and a taxi, injuring drivers in both those vehicles and breaking Mrs. Sakai’s collarbone.


As shaken as she was by the accident, Mrs. Sakai says she was even more surprised by what happened after. She says that Toyota — from her dealer to headquarters — has not responded to her inquiries, and Japanese authorities have been indifferent to her concerns as a consumer.


Mrs. Sakai says the Tokyo Metropolitan Police urged her to sign a statement saying that she pressed the accelerator by mistake — something she strongly denies. She says the police told her she could have her damaged car back to get it repaired if she made that admission. She declined.


The police say it was a misunderstanding and that they kept her car to carry out their investigation.


But veterans of Japan’s moribund consumer rights movement say that Mrs. Sakai, like many Japanese, is the victim of a Japanese establishment that values Japanese business over Japanese consumers, and the lack of consumer protections here.


“In Japan, there is a phrase: if something smells, put a lid on it,” said Shunkichi Takayama, a Tokyo-based lawyer who has handled complaints related to Toyota vehicles.


Toyota has recalled eight million cars outside Japan because of unexpected acceleration and other problems, but has insisted that there are no systemic problems with its cars sold in Japan. The company recalled the Prius for a brake problem earlier this year.


Critics say many companies benefit from Japan’s weak consumer protections. (The country has only one full-time automobile recall investigator, supported by 15 others on limited contracts.)


When it comes to cars, the rapid growth of the auto industry here and of car ownership in the 1960s and ’70s was accompanied by a spate of fatal accidents. A consumer movement soon emerged among owners of these defective vehicles.


The most active was the Japan Automobile Consumers Union, led by Fumio Matsuda, a former Nissan engineer often referred to as the Ralph Nader of Japan. But the automakers fought back with a campaign discrediting the activists as dangerous agitators. Mr. Matsuda and his lawyer were soon arrested and charged with blackmail. They fought the charges to Japan’s highest court, but lost.


Now, few people are willing to take on the country’s manufacturers at the risk of arrest, Mr. Matsuda said in a recent interview. “The state sided with the automakers, not the consumers,” he said.


It has become difficult for drivers to access even the most elementary data or details on incidents of auto defects, says Hiroko Isomura, an executive at the National Association of Consumer Specialists and a former adviser to the government on auto recalls. “Unfortunately, the Automobile Consumers Union was shut down,” she said. “No groups like that exist any more.”


For the government to order a recall, it must prove that automobiles do not meet national safety standards, which is difficult to do without the automakers’ cooperation. Most recalls are done on a voluntary basis without government supervision.


An examination of transport ministry records by The New York Times found that at least 99 incidents of unintended acceleration or surge in engine rotation had been reported in Toyotas since 2001, of which 31 resulted in some form of collision.


Critics like Mr. Takayama charge that the number of reports of sudden acceleration in Japan would be bigger if not for the way many automakers in Japan, helped by reticent regulators, have kept such cases out of official statistics, and out of the public eye.


In 2008, about 6,600 accidents and 30 deaths were blamed on drivers of all kinds of vehicles mistakenly pushing the accelerator instead of the brakes, according to the Tokyo-based Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis.


But Mr. Takayama has long argued that number includes cases of sudden acceleration. “It has become the norm here to blame the driver in almost any circumstance,” he said.


“Regulators have long accepted the automakers’ assertions at face value,” said Yukiko Seko, a retired lawmaker of the Japan Communist Party who pursued the issue in Parliament in 2002.


The police strongly deny pressuring drivers to accept the blame in any automobile accident. “All investigations into auto accidents are conducted in a fair and transparent way,” the Tokyo Metropolitan Police said in response to an inquiry by The Times.


Figuring out who is really to blame can be hard because of Japan’s lack of investigators.


Japan’s leniency has also meant that automakers here have routinely ignored even some of the safety standards for cars sold in the United States. Until the early 1990s, Japanese cars sold domestically lacked the reinforcing bars in car walls required of all vehicles sold in the United States. Critics say skimping on safety was one way automakers generated profits in Japan to finance their export drive abroad.


A handful of industry critics like Mr. Takayama and Ms. Seko have, over the years, voiced concern over cases of sudden acceleration in Toyota and other cars in Japan. Under scrutiny especially after the introduction of automatic transmission cars in the late 1980s, Toyota recalled five models because a broken solder was found in its electronics system, which could cause unintended acceleration.


In 1988 the government ordered a nationwide study and tests, and urged automakers to introduce a fail-safe system to make sure the brakes always overrode the accelerator. This month, more than 20 years later, Toyota promised to install a brake override system in all its new models.


Meanwhile, Toyota maintains a large share on the Japanese market, with about 30 percent. The Prius gas-electric hybrid remained the top-selling car in Japan in February despite the automaker’s global recalls, figures released Thursday showed.


But Japan’s pro-industry postwar order may be changing.


In 2009, in one of the last administrative moves by the outgoing government, a new consumer affairs agency was set up to better police defective products, unsafe foods and mislabeling.


The new government’s transport minister, Seiji Maehara, has been outspoken against Toyota.


He said last week that he would push to revamp the country’s oversight of the auto industry, including adding more safety investigators. The government has also said it was examining 38 complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas reported from 2007 through 2009, as well as 96 cases in cars produced by other automakers.

Toyota continues to deny there are problems with unintended acceleration in Japan.

“Yes, there have been incidents of unintended acceleration in Japan,” Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota’s quality chief, said at a news conference last week. “But we believe we have checked each incident and determined that there was no problem with the car,” he said.


Mrs. Sakai said she has called and visited her Toyota dealer, as well as Toyota Motor itself, but has not received a response.


A Toyota spokeswoman, Mieko Iwasaki, confirmed that the automaker had been contacted about complaints of a crash caused by sudden acceleration in September. She said, however, that she could not divulge details of how the company handled each case.


“We are investigating the accident alongside the police, and are cooperating fully with investigations,” she said. “Anything we find, we will tell the police.”

[toyotaman]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35787181/ns/business-autos/

Toyota recalling all 2000 to 2003 Tundras

Frame corrosion could allow spare tires or gas tank to fall off the vehicle

updated 7:05 p.m. ET March 9, 2010

DETROIT - Toyota said on Tuesday it would fix all Tundra pickups sold in the United States for the 2000 to 2003 model years to address a risk that part of the truck's frame could corrode, causing spare tires or even the gas tank to drop to the road.


In November, Toyota Motor Corp recalled 110,000 Tundras sold in 20 cold-weather states, saying exposure to heavy road salt could cause the corrosion. Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons was unable to say how many additional vehicles would be involved.


Toyota told its U.S. dealers in a notice on Tuesday that it would expand the recall to Tundras sold in all 50 U.S. states. Reuters reviewed a copy of the notice, which Lyons confirmed had been sent to the company's U.S. dealers.


Toyota said the rear cross-member of the frame of the Tundra could corrode in some cases, and that could cause loss of rear brake circuits, making it harder for drivers to stop.


In "the worst case," the fuel tank may drop to the ground and could be separated from the vehicle, potentially causing a crash or fire, the company said in its notice to dealers.


This repair campaign adds to several safety problems with which Toyota, the world's largest automaker, is grappling.


Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles worldwide for mechanical problems with its accelerator assembly that can cause sticking and for the risk that floor mats could trap an accelerator.


In February, Toyota recalled nearly 500,000 hybrids, including its top-selling Prius, because of braking problems.


The Tundra, which Toyota redesigned in 2007, represents the Japanese automaker's attempt to crack a market for full-size work trucks that has been dominated by Ford Motor Co, General Motors Co and Chrysler.

[toyotaman]

http://www.lohud.com/article/20100309/N ... n-Harrison


Stuck accelerator sends Toyota Prius into a wall in Harrison
Leslie Korngold • [email protected] • March 9, 2010


PURCHASE — A woman smashed into a stone wall this morning because of a stuck accelerator on a Toyota Prius, Harrison police said.

The 56-year-old driver suffered non-life threatening injuries, acting Chief Anthony Marraccini said.

The woman was pulling out of the driveway at 3700 Purchase St. facing forward when the accelerator stuck, police said.

The car "shot" across the street smashing into a stone wall, Marraccini said.

The collision sent "some pretty big boulders" fairly far, Marraccini said.

Marraccini said the floor mat has been pretty much ruled out as a cause. The 2005 car appears to have had corrective action taken, Marraccini said. The floor mat was tied to the seat base with plastic ties.

The car has been taken to police headquarters for further analysis.

The driver was being evaluated at White Plains Hospital Center.

On Monday, a 2008 Toyota Prius was finally stopped after attaining 94mph on a California interstate due to a stuck accelerator pedal.

According to media reports, California Highway Patrol figured the car had traveled over 20 miles with the stuck pedal.

That car was stopped by applying the emergency brake, standing on the brakes and turning it off, according to media reports.

[toyotaman]

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2009-04-22 ... fect-prius

The Flip Side of the Perfect Prius

Sometimes the cars accelerate on their own. Sometimes they stop dead. Drivers of the hybrid Prius have discovered they can be an unexpected adventure.

By Paul Knight Wednesday, Apr 22 2009

Bobette Riner publishes an electricity index used to promote renewable energy, and she bought a brand-new Prius last year to shoot the bird at the oil companies.


"I felt so smug for a while," she says. "Especially being in Houston."


Elizabeth James says her Prius surged out of control near Lawson, Colorado, sending her plunging into a river.She had been lucky to score the car from a dealership on Houston's south side, because for nearly a year there had been a three-month wait to get a Prius. The dealership couldn't even keep a model for the showroom.


The car had a "cute little body" that Riner loved, and she reveled in driving like a "nerdy Prius owner," watching the energy-usage display on the car's center console, trying to drain every possible mile from a gallon of gasoline. When she hit 2,000 miles, she could count her trips to a gas station on one hand.


On a rainy night last fall, a couple of months after Riner bought her Prius, she was driving toward the Houston Galleria for a sales meeting. She hated driving in the rain because a car wreck in college catapulted her through the windshield, and doctors almost had to amputate her leg.


Traffic near the mall was congested but moving, and Riner kept the Prius pegged at 60 mph, constantly looking at the console to manage her fuel consumption.


Suddenly she felt the car hydroplaning out of control, and when she glanced at the speedometer she realized the car had shot up to 84 mph. Riner wasn't hydroplaning; quite simply, her Prius had accelerated on its own.


She pushed on the brakes but they were dead. Then just as suddenly as the car had taken off, it shut down. The console lit up with warning lights, leaving Riner fighting a stiff steering wheel as she coasted across four lanes of traffic and down an exit ramp.


The car stopped near a PetSmart parking lot, and Riner sat in disbelief, listening to fat raindrops pelt the Prius, wondering if her new car had actually gone crazy.


The Prius is one of the great success stories of the past decade, becoming the one car synonymous with "hybrid" and helping Toyota drill into a skeptical American auto market while the Big Three failed and failed again to produce efficient vehicles. But from day one, it has come in for criticism as well. Early reports claimed that the manufacturing is so complex and uses so much energy that the Prius stomps out a troublingly deep carbon footprint.


Now another side of the Prius has orbited into view, as owners share horror stories on blogs and message boards about crashing their cars through forests, garage doors, and gas stations.


Take Lupe Egusquiza from Tustin, California. She was waiting in a line of cars in September 2007 to pick up her daughter from school when her Prius suddenly took off and crashed into the school's brick wall. Egusquiza reported $14,000 worth of damage to her car.


Or Stacey Josefowicz in Anthem, Arizona, who bought her new Prius in May 2007. A couple of months later, driving down a four-lane highway toward a stoplight, she stepped on the brakes but nothing happened. She freaked, then weaved into a turning lane, coasting to a Target parking lot with the brake pedal jammed to the floor. A Toyota technician told her she ran out of gas, but she objected that that wasn't true; there was fuel in the car. Still, he returned her Prius to her with no repairs.


A month later, she sped through a stop sign when the brakes went out again. "I think they thought, 'She's a woman driver, she obviously let the car run out of gas,'" Josefowicz says. "Thank God I didn't get killed or cause an accident; it would have been on their head."


Or Herbert Kuehn from Battle Creek, Michigan. In October 2005, his Prius sped out of control on a highway before he "labored" the car to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the road. He was so scared of his Prius that he stopped driving it, but "under good conscience did not feel that I could sell it."


Jaded Prius owners say there's no resolution with Toyota—through their hometown dealer or corporate arbitration—and the company hasn't lost or settled a single lawsuit concerning "unintended acceleration."


The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has two Prius investigations in its database from 2004 and 2005, but those involved the car's cooling system. During a recall of floor mats used in other Toyota models, Prius owners were simply cautioned to make sure their floor mats were properly installed. [NOTE: This paragraph has been corrected since the story was first posted. The story originally said that Toyota had recalled faulty floor mats in the Prius.] Another explanation from Toyota is simple driver error.


"You get these customers that say, 'I stood on the brake with all my might and the car just kept on accelerating.' They're not stepping on the brake," says Toyota corporate spokesman Bill Kwong. "People are so under stress right now, people have so much on their minds. With pagers and cell phones and IM, people are just so busy with kids and family and boyfriends and girlfriends. So you're driving along and the next thing you know you're two miles down the road and you don't remember driving, because you're thinking about something else."


Most owners, like Riner, deny they were mistaken about where the brake pedal is. At the same time, most aren't looking to sue; they say they just want an explanation and a fair deal.


As Ted James from Eagle, Colorado, puts it (his Prius ended up in a river), "We're not the kind of people to go through a lawsuit, and it's not in our nature. Our concern was that no one else got hurt, that Toyota own up to its problem."


From 2000, when the Prius was introduced in the U.S., through last year, about 1.3 million hybrids sold in the country, according to numbers from the U.S. Department of Energy; Priuses accounted for more than half those sales. But if things had gone as planned, American carmakers could have been dominating the hybrid market.


In 1993, the Clinton administration developed the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, awarding federal funds to Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and giving them access to federal research agencies. The goal was to develop a car that got more than three times the gas mileage of full-sized vehicles already on the road.


Toyota was left out of the New Generation program, but it responded in 1994 by officially starting Project G21, a program to develop an environmentally friendly car. Three years later, the first Prius was released in Japan.


Chrysler, Ford, and GM still hadn't shown any New Generation prototypes by the end of the decade, but an unveiling was scheduled for January 2000 at Detroit's North American International Auto Show.


Heralded in newspaper accounts as a possible breakthrough, some of the designs certainly were radical, but, as it turns out, actually were just for dreamers. Each company rolled out a New Generation car, but after the show the prototypes disappeared from public view.


The federal government had already fed more than $1 billion to the three automakers—at a time when the American manufacturers were still highly profitable—with few results. The New Generation program was a failure at best; Ralph Nader called it "corporate welfare at its worst."


The project was killed by the Bush administration in 2002.


Meanwhile, Toyota was priming the U.S. market for the Prius, led by David Hermance, now known as the Father of the American Prius.


Hermance, who lived in Gardena, California, worked as the top hybrid engineer at Toyota when the car was released in the U.S. in 2000, and while he didn't have a hand in designing the first-generation Prius—it was strictly Japanese engineering—he furiously promoted and explained the car's technology to the media and legislators.


In a 2004 interview with the Web site www.hybridcars.com, Hermance said his involvement with the Prius was an environmental mission for him, even if it wasn't for "the mainstream marketing folks."


"I'm convinced that global warming is real, and that if we're not principally responsible, we're at least contributing to that," he told the interviewer. "I'd like to leave the planet a little better than I found it."


The second-generation Prius, the model in production today, was directly engineered by Hermance, and he focused on making the car fun and peppy; his designs and marketing are credited with breaking the car into the mainstream. The new Prius was released in 2004, winning the Motor Trend Car of the Year award and a heap of other accolades.


A year later, Toyota sold 100,000 Priuses for the first time, and sales more than doubled each of the first two years the second generation was built.


"He was just a brilliant engineer and was really for the hybrid. He educated a lot of people," Kwong says.


Hermance died in the fall of 2006 when he crashed his airplane into the Pacific Ocean.


Celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz drove the Prius from the beginning, but in 2003 Toyota hired a public-relations firm to "bring Hollywood stars and Prius cars together [at the Oscars], replacing the gas-guzzling stretch limo as the ride of choice for eco-aware celebrities," according to a Prius newsletter. Diaz, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins arrived in chauffeured Priuses.


Celebrities drove other hybrids, too, but the Prius had the advantage of being ugly.


"People were buying hybrids as a fashion statement. What's the good of driving something you paid extra for, because you think you're saving the universe, and nobody knows it?" says Art Spinella, co-founder and president of CNW Marketing Research, headquartered in Bandon, Oregon. "One of the things we found with the Honda Accord hybrid—they stopped producing it—was that people complained because it wasn't visible enough."


In 2007, The New York Times published data from a CNW report that said almost 60 percent of Prius owners bought the car because it "makes a statement about me." For its other hybrids, Toyota made the "Hybrid Synergy Drive" badges on the outside of the cars 25 percent bigger, hoping to cash in on the Prius effect.


"The Prius is kind of a gimmicky car. Toyota originally designed it for young geeks in Tokyo: gadget-crazy young guys," says Jim Hood, a writer who worked for the Associated Press for 15 years and covered the automotive industry for part of that time. "Then the crazy Americans fell for it."


Gas mileage is another big draw for the Prius, and "hypermilers" take that to the extreme. Dan Bryant, a computer engineer in Houston, is a self-admitted Prian—a name fanatic Prius owners affectionately call themselves. He's turned driving his car into a full-time hobby. He installed aftermarket gauges and an engine kill-switch—ordered from Japan—that makes driving seem like playing a video game, Bryant says, with the goal of getting the most mileage from a tank of fuel.


He's constantly shifting the car into neutral, switching off the engine, and looking at his gauges to track things like pressure on the gas pedal and engine temperature, both of which affect gas mileage. Bryant coasts into stops without brakes when he can. He usually averages about 60 to 70 miles per gallon, but he got 91 out of his best tank and took a picture to prove it.


"When you're only buying 40 gallons of gas [a month], $2 a gallon or $5 a gallon is basically the difference between eating out a couple nights," Bryant says. "The biggest thing about it was that we didn't really notice it."


Many auto reviewers have also raved about the Prius. In 2008, the car ranked second in overall quality in a survey by J.D. Power and Associates, and it won the IntelliChoice Best in Overall Value award in its class.


Pete Bednar, the fleet and communications manager for the city of Bellevue, says the Prius is "one of the lowest-maintenance vehicles we have." The city owns seven of the cars, and Bednar says they're a good fit for white-collar staff, though not as useful for building inspectors and others who need to haul a lot of gear and climb in and out of the vehicle all day. (For them, the city has opted for the Ford Escape hybrid.) "I deal with fleet managers around the state, and we have not seen a lot of issues with Priuses," says Bednar. "They've held up really well."


Several Seattle-area mechanics also described the car as "great."


Ted James was a believer, not only in the Prius but also in Toyota.


About the time the Prius was released in America, James, a middle-school math teacher from Eagle, Colorado, received a $10,000 Toyota Time grant, awarded to 35 math teachers around the country to develop inventive programs. James used his money to buy equipment to monitor local water quality, and his students used math to analyze the data.


In 2002, Toyota paid for James, along with the other Time winners, to travel to company headquarters in Torrance, California, and talk about their projects. One day during a lunch break, Toyota executives introduced the group to the Prius. Each teacher was outfitted with one of the hybrids for a day of driving around Torrance.


"I thought they were the coolest thing ever," James says. He and his wife Elizabeth, who teaches at an elementary school, bought their first Prius three years later.


"I was very proud because we were the first teachers in the parking lot to be sporting a Prius," he says.


On August 10, 2006, Elizabeth was driving the car east on Interstate 70 toward Denver to catch an early-morning flight. Near the small town of Lawson, she pressed the brakes to slow down, and when she let off the pedal, the Prius took off. The car wouldn't slow down "no matter how hard I pressed on the brake," so Elizabeth used her left foot to slam down the emergency brake. Nothing.


The brakes spewed blue smoke from the back of the car, and when Elizabeth glanced down, the speedometer read 90 mph and the Prius was rocketing toward a car in the slow lane. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, she whipped the car around along the shoulder of the interstate, exited the Lawson ramp, ran a stop sign, passed a couple of people walking in the road, and steered into a grassy field when the feeder cut to the left.


"She said she felt like the pilot of a plane that was trying to crash-land," Ted says. "So she was looking for a place to crash the car, and that was one of the things that were really tough: She thought she was going to die and had enough time to think about it."


The Prius sped through a wooded area, clipped a weather monitoring shed, flipped, and landed in a river.


Elizabeth survived the wreck, but her legs and back were banged up and she's still hobbled, despite a year of physical therapy. Scar tissue on her intestines requires her to drink MiraLAX for the rest of her life to ease stomach pains.


After the crash, Ted enlisted the help of a childhood friend, attorney Kent Spangler (who practiced family law at the time and now is a magistrate in Fort Collins, Colorado), to steer the Jameses through arbitration with Toyota. They wanted Elizabeth's medical bills—about $15,000—paid, and to have the smashed Prius examined for a cause of the wreck.


"You'd think Toyota would be interested in how their car functioned in that crash," Ted says. "My wife's brother and sister owned Priuses, and we were really worried that this could happen to someone else. Toyota's whole reaction was really disconcerting. It was like, deny everything."


Toyota's response was in fact minimal. In a letter to Ted, the company blamed the problem on excessive brake wear, stating "We are sure she believes that her vehicle accelerated on its own; but our inspection of her vehicle did not reveal any evidence to support her allegations."


Bobette Riner's experience wasn't much better. When her Prius died in front of the parking lot, she composed herself and started the car again because she desperately needed to make her sales meeting. The Prius sputtered along for about a quarter-mile before shutting down again "at a spot where people coming from the Galleria couldn't totally plow into me." The Toyota dealership where she'd bought the car sent a tow truck and the driver took Riner to her meeting.


"I ended up being an hour and 20 minutes late, and only one guy stuck around, so I missed that opportunity," Riner says.


The next day she went to the dealership to find out what had happened with her car, and the technician told her, "We know what's wrong with it; you were out of gas."


Riner was shocked because she was certain her gas tank wasn't close to empty, and she wasn't concerned that the Prius had shut down; it was the sudden jolt of speed that scared her.

"That was more than being out of gas," Riner says. "How do you explain it suddenly being 84 mph?"


Stories from other Prius owners involving unintended acceleration are fairly common, and one of the first places to publish them was the Web site www.consumeraffairs.com, which each day collects about 400 complaints that are read by editors and stored in an online database.


"One of the trends we started to see was that there were odd things going on with the Prius, not only with the acceleration but with loss of traction on slippery surfaces," says Hood, the former Associated Press writer who now owns the Web site. "The Prius was something a little different when it came out, so we paid a little more attention to it than if it was a brand-new pickup or something."


The site's automotive writer, Joe Benton, wrote about unintended acceleration for the first time in the summer of 2007, telling the story of a woman in Everett whose Prius took off while she was on the freeway and wouldn't slow down even as she repeatedly pumped the brakes.


Hood received hate mail from Prius owners when the negative story was posted. "They're zealots and religious about their cars," Hood says. "Quite honestly, we don't give a damn about anything. If people want to drive those things, fine by us, but our job is to criticize and nitpick."


Then other horror stories rolled in.


One came from Richard Bacon, a Tacoma resident who wrote, "This week our 2008 Prius tried to kill me twice." First, Bacon's Prius died while he was driving up his snowy driveway, causing him to slide into oncoming traffic "that just missed hitting me broadside."


Then, driving with his wife and merging into traffic at 45 mph, he crossed a patch of snow. The Prius locked up, and Bacon lost control and skidded toward a 30-foot drop down the side of the road. "Only a snowbank kept my wife and me from serious injury or death," he wrote.


Toyota sent out the caution about the Prius's floor mats about two months after the first story on Hood's Web site. [This sentence has been corrected since it was first posted. See correction described above.] From a company press release: "If properly secured, the All Weather Floor Mat will not interfere with the accelerator pedal. Suggested opportunities to check are after filling the vehicle's tank with gasoline, after a carwash or interior cleaning, or before driving the vehicle. Under no circumstances should more than one floor mat ever be used in the driver's seating position: The retaining hooks are designed to accommodate only one floor mat at a time."


But floor mats don't explain why many of the Priuses took off, including the case of the Houston man who parked his Prius in his driveway but left the car running as he walked toward his house. The Prius surged forward through his garage door, slamming into the back of his Nissan Altima.


"It was a pretty rough accident," says Markus Drunk, a mechanic who worked on the Prius at Autohaus K&H in Houston. "He was lucky that the Altima was parked there, because his backyard is not too long, and the neighbors had a family gathering. It would've ran right into all those people, and he was a little shook up over the situation."


Then there's Kevin McGuire, who test-drove a Prius one afternoon last fall—a year after the safety notice—at Dorschel Toyota in Rochester, New York.


"There was a wait list to buy one, but they happened to have one in the showroom for me to drive," he says. "The saleswoman was very knowledgeable on the vehicle, and I was impressed with the car. Everything seemed to be in order."


The weather was crisp and sunny, and with the saleswoman along for the ride, McGuire drove the Prius away from the city to a hillside road without much traffic. As he recalls the conversation:


"What do you think?" the saleswoman asked.

"I like this feel," McGuire said.

"Well, go ahead and jump on it and see what you think about the acceleration."

McGuire stomped on the gas pedal and the Prius zipped forward, but when he took his foot off the accelerator, the car kept going faster. He turned to the saleswoman.

"This is all well and good, but there's one problem," McGuire told her.

"What?!"

"It's not stopping."

"What?"

"Lookit, we're still going."

"Take your foot off the accelerator," she told him.

"I did!"

"Pull over!"

McGuire hesitated to steer the car off the road, because he was slamming on the brake with all his weight and the Prius wouldn't stop. Smoke poured from the tires, and finally the car shut down and he pulled to the shoulder.


"She was scared and I was scared, too. We just sat there for a couple of minutes and caught our breath, and then she said, 'OK, start it up,'" McGuire says. "You could hear the engine rev up, and when I put it in drive—boom! The car took off again."


This time the car died almost immediately and McGuire pulled over again. After starting it a third time, all was OK, and he cautiously drove back to the dealership. The saleswoman asked a technician to look at the Prius.


"Oh, people put in too many floor mats," the technician said. "So the accelerator gets stuck."


McGuire responded, "Wait, this is not my car, this is your car. I haven't done anything. It's not me, there's something wrong with this car."


Our reporting found just one person currently in litigation with Toyota concerning unintended acceleration. Art Robinson, the man involved in that 2007 crash, wouldn't discuss the situation (saying his lawyer has advised him not to), but a Toyota spokeswoman confirmed the lawsuit, declining to comment further.


Apparently, hours after Robinson purchased his used 2005 Prius in Tacoma, the car began to handle funny, and as he was driving back to the dealership, the car took off. Robinson stomped on the brake and the emergency brake, but the car wouldn't slow down.


He exited the freeway and shot through an intersection safely, but then lost control and drove through a convenience store. Robinson escaped before the Prius and the building burst into flames.


"It happened so fast I didn't have time to be scared then," Robinson told KING5 News.


Despite Elizabeth James' injuries, the couple never pursued a lawsuit against Toyota, and even if they wanted to, the Colorado statute of limitations ran out last summer.


"I'm not out to get Toyota; we owned three Toyota vehicles at one time, and we still have a 2000 Sienna and a 2006 Corolla that we'll drive until they die because they're good cars," Ted James says. "The fact that she could crash at 90 miles an hour, well, she'll say, 'First the Prius tried to kill me, and then it saved my life.'"


It doesn't take much of a pitch to sell a Prius, says Johnny "J-Mac" McFolling, a salesman at Houston's Mike Calvert Toyota.


McFolling wouldn't drive a Prius, he says, because he's a big man and everyone in his family is big too, but he loved the car when they all sold at "sticker price or higher."


"You can tell a Prius owner, not by looking at them, but as soon as they start talking," McFolling says. "You don't have to sell a Prius; they're already sold when someone comes through that door."


Those buyers haven't been around much in the past six months, and McFolling says Prius sales have dropped 90 percent since lastsummer while Toyota truck sales have increased. The dealership was selling 25 Priuses a month and could've moved more if Toyota had delivered them, but those days are gone.


Mike Calvert sold Riner her Prius, but after the technician told her the car took off because she was low on gas, she wanted nothing to do with it. The dealer offered about $12,000 less than what she'd paid for the car, explaining he couldn't sell a Prius to save his life.


"He said, 'The market is soft for Priuses because of gas prices,'" Riner says.

The other owners of runaway Priuses have fared differently:

After his wild test drive, McGuire walked away from the Prius but was determined to buy Toyota. He got a Camry that rattles more than any American car he's owned, and he says he won't buy Toyota again.


The Jameses kept their mangled Prius for as long as possible, hoping Toyota would take it to a laboratory for examination, but when their insurance company pressured them, they let it go. Ted James bought a new Volkswagen Jetta six-speed, so if it goes wild, "all you have to do is push in the clutch."


The Prius that Riner bought brand-new sat in her garage for a while because she hoped Toyota would change its mind about its offer. She just recently set an arbitration date with the company, and given the option of meeting at a dealership or fighting the case through the mail, she chose not to meet.


Unless she eats the $12,000, she's stuck with a car she's afraid to drive.

[the-mantal]

omong2 soal unintended acceleration, mo share pengalaman aja :

saya pernah alamin unintended acceleration pake mobil toyota corona matic 97, waktu mo parkir pada kecepatan rendah kan mobil matic itu laju ga usah diinjek gas nya, jadi kaki biasanya langsung siap2 di pedal rem... jadi waktu mo parkir di depan ruko itu kirain kaki udah siap di pedal rem, ternyata begitu diinjek loh malah tambah laju...
untung nya masih sempat angkat kaki dan pindah ke pedal rem segera. in a split second mobil berhenti dan ga nabrak apa2. God really bless me.

klo seandainya saya ga sempat angkat kaki n injak rem, mungkin sekarang lagi di penjara nih (waktu itu di dalem ruko lagi full orang.... ga bisa bayangin berapa banyak korban gara2 human error ini...)

[FortunerMan]

Untungnya buat pemilik Rush dan Avanza banyak pake parts Daihatsu ya....walaupun pake platform RAV4 lama, seperti di diskusikan di sini

http://www.serayamotor.com/diskusi/view ... 0&p=376760

ya gak om toyotaman?

[khens]

Untungnya buat pemilik Rush dan Avanza banyak pake parts Daihatsu ya....walaupun pake platform RAV4 lama, seperti di diskusikan di sini

http://www.serayamotor.com/diskusi/view ... 0&p=376760

ya gak om toyotaman?

WOW ...ngRRRIIIII...makanya yang smart jangan beli to**** avan**......belinya daihatsu xeniaa...kekekekekeke

[FortunerMan]

Untungnya buat pemilik Rush dan Avanza banyak pake parts Daihatsu ya....walaupun pake platform RAV4 lama, seperti di diskusikan di sini

http://www.serayamotor.com/diskusi/view ... 0&p=376760

ya gak om toyotaman?

WOW ...ngRRRIIIII...makanya yang smart jangan beli to**** avan**......belinya daihatsu xeniaa...kekekekekeke

Nggak ah, ane baru beli Avanza 1.5 buat mertua - resalenya bagusan Avanza, tampangnya bagusan Avanza, males mesti servis di be-res Daihatsu...enakan di Auto2000 dkk...

[FortunerMan]

Wah gimana nih om toyotaman...kalo bener mungkin ente kurang gigih copy pastenya Harusnya di lebih banyak forum lagi copas2nya

Toyota Buyers: They’re Baaack!

Further in the Toyota caper, there are new reports of sudden acceleration – in Toyota sales.

Toyota buyers seem to have a big case of the bashing fatigue. And they are coming back in droves. Toyota said (via The Nikkei [sub]) that “its new cars sales in North America jumped around 50 percent from a year earlier in the first week of March due to recently introduced sales incentives.”

After a pow-wow with their dealers in Miami, Toyota announced new deals: Existing Toyota owners who buy another vehicle from the company will receive two years of free maintenance. There are also zero-percent financing and low-priced leases for several of the recalled vehicles, including Corollas, Camrys and Avalons. Toyota apparently isn’t ready yet for the 10 year warranty that had been discussed in Miami.

Bloomberg predicts that “sales in March may jump 30 percent.” The prediction came after Bloomberg talked to Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of Edmunds.com. “Americans love a bargain,” Anwyl said.

Should things get worse, then Toyota still has room to maneuver. According to Edmunds, Toyota put an average of $1,833 on the hood of each vehicle in February, way below the industry average of $2,588.

[FortunerMan]

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/toyota ... re-baaack/
Sayang cuman di Amerika doang hebohnya, kalo gak kan kite2 bisa dapet 2 thn free maintenance + segala macem bonus + 0% financing juga kalo beli Toyota.

Ayo om toyotaman, lebih gigih lagi copasnya

[ilhami]

makanya kita harus cari error produk-produk toyota di indonesia, kemudian publikasi besar-besaran

[grandscenic]

1990 Daihatsu Rocky Recalled in the US
http://www.autoevolution.com/news/1990- ... 17880.html



"Unfortunately, Toyota is not the only car you can get yourself cremated in. Recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration studies show that the Daihatsu Rocky model produced between 1990 and 1992 might have some problems with its engine, engine cooling system, exhaust systems and emission control. Therefore 4,000 vehicles will be recalled in the United States."

Ayo ikutan recall semuanya..

[DOHC]

jiahhhh daihatsu rocky mahhh ga herann... paman ane punya aja uda perna kejadian tuh piping coolant nya keropos gt ampe bocor.... rawan banget dehh kalo pake coolant sembarangan apalagi pake air ledeng biasa.... dan kalo yg ane baca di used car guide nya salah satu tabloid sini, emang gt tuh penyakit daihatsu awal2, rentan di cooling system nya...

[FortunerMan]

makanya kita harus cari error produk-produk toyota di indonesia, kemudian publikasi besar-besaran

Tenang, tukang copas bisu SM toyotaman sedang mencari bahan2nya, FREE MAINTENANCE, 0% FINANCING here we come!

[DOHC]

bahh... produk2 indo mah kalo mo dibilang recall, bakal perlu di recall smua... honda, toyota, nissan, suzuki pun pasti ada penyakit2 nya.... so far baru honda doank yg brani recall....

btw, OOT dikit ahhh..... stelah perjalanan panjang dan stelah sempet berbelit2 dibikin belit ama pihak nissan, akhirnyaaa batok lampu ane diganti jg... beserta bohlam2 didalem nya.... fiuhhh akhirnyaa.... tapi yg ada skrg lipina ane lampunya kaya jereng gt, terang sebelah...

[maskopat]

bahh... produk2 indo mah kalo mo dibilang recall, bakal perlu di recall smua... honda, toyota, nissan, suzuki pun pasti ada penyakit2 nya.... so far baru honda doank yg brani recall....

btw, OOT dikit ahhh..... stelah perjalanan panjang dan stelah sempet berbelit2 dibikin belit ama pihak nissan, akhirnyaaa batok lampu ane diganti jg... beserta bohlam2 didalem nya.... fiuhhh akhirnyaa.... tapi yg ada skrg lipina ane lampunya kaya jereng gt, terang sebelah...

om dohc, mitsu gak perlu recall? emang mobilnya bagus? ente anteknya mitsu ya??

......

[jalu]

liat2 di forum2 tetangga khususnya pengguna mbl cina (cherry), banyak yg merasa puas dng pelayanan beresnya, karena jika ada defect/claim garansi, beres cherry umumnya lbh memilih untuk melakukan ganti part assy ketimbang diperbaiki.

[barryaje]

http://oto.detik.com/read/2010/03/11/10 ... rjadi-lagi

New York - Insiden pedal gas nyangkut terjadi secara beruntun kepada warga AS yang memiliki Prius. Setelah satu insiden di California, pemerintah AS tengah menyelidiki kasus lain di New York.

Seperti dikutip Reuters, Kamis (11/3/2010), pengendara yang malang di New York adalah seorang wanita berumur sekitar 56 tahun.

Wanita yang belum teridentifikasi namanya itu tengah mengemudi di jalan Westchester County, sekitar 25 mil arah timur laut New York.

Tiba-tiba mobil Prius tahun 2005 itu menjadi tidak terkendali dan akhirnya menabrak dinding pembatas jalan. Saking kuatnya benturan, beberapa bagian dari dinding itu terhempas.

"Toyota memperhatikan insiden ini dengan serius," ujar Kapten
Anthony Marraccini.

"Karpet tidak nyangkut di pedal gas," ujarnya memastikan.

Marracini menyatakan, mobil itu sebelumnya sudah diperbaiki sebelumnya oleh diler Toyota terdekat, ketika ada pengumuman recall.

Sebelumnya Toyota menarik kembali mobil Prius keluaran tahun 2004-2009 pada bulan September tahun lalu.

Penarikan itu dilakukan karena mobil itu ditengarai karpet mobil di bawah kursi jok pengemudi tidak terkait sempurna ke lantai kabin, sehingga menekan pedal gas dan mengakibatkan mobil melaju tidak terkendali.

( ddn / ddn )

[FortunerMan]

http://www.smh.com.au/business/toyota-s ... -phpc.html

Toyota has overcome a month of negative publicity regarding its recall woes to record increased sales in Australia.

The Japanese brand's reputation for quality and reliability appears to be intact despite the company recalling nearly nine million vehicles because of safety concerns that have resulted in a number of lawsuits being filed in the US.

Toyota increased its local market share to 20.5 per cent in February, with sales increasing year-on-year by 13 per cent to 16,814 to retain the company's status as Australia's favourite brand.

[FortunerMan]

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site ... ewsLang=en

Sementara...di Amerika...dikasi diskon dikit (gak banyak2 amat malah...masih di bawah industry average), langsung meroket...

Thanks to its incentives program, Toyota’s retail market share so far this month is about 16.8 percent, up 10 percent from last March's 15.2 percent, and up 31 percent from 12.8 percent last month when the company’s widely publicized recalls impaired sales. Toyota's daily retail sales rate is running at about 47 percent higher than that of the same period last year, and about 71 percent higher than that of last month.

[Captivated]

emg data sales maret 2010 udh kluar ya? data sales terakhir bukannya ini....

http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/toyo ... 54582.aspx
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35662491/ns/business-autos/

All major automakers but Toyota reported higher U.S. sales in February, and most took customers from their powerful Japanese competitor, which has been struggling with a series of massive safety recalls.

Toyota Motor Corp. said its U.S. sales fell 9 percent last month, while Ford, GM, Nissan, Honda and Hyundai all reported double-digit growth compared with February of 2009, at the depth of the recession.

[FortunerMan]

Kenapa...heran ya sales Toyota cepet banget bangkitnya Tadi pagi ada di CNN kok...
Nih lagi kalo gak percaya..
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/03/11/repo ... -in-march/

Report: Toyota sales may bounce back big time in March

On March 1, Toyota announced zero percent financing, subsidized leases and free maintenance for two years, and the early results appear to be extremely favorable. Automotive News reports that analysts are seeing big-time gains for the Japanese automaker, with evidence that sales are up 50 percent so far for the month. A 50 percent sales increase for the month would more than wipe out Toyota's depressing January and February, but analysts like Edmund's Jessica Caldwell reportedly feel sales will level out to a predicted 30 percent rise by March 31. "Incentives work best in the early going, but they start to peter out as the month goes along."

Sayangnya, di Indonesia gak ada insentif2an begini (mungkin si toyotaman kurang gigih copas2nya jadinya gak heboh )...coba ada, beli TOYOTA lagi deh ane

Lagi... http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Toyota-sa ... l?x=0&.v=3

Esmond said many loyal Toyota buyers seem to be sticking with the brand. He defended the increase in incentives, which has forced General Motors Corp., Chrysler Group LLC, Ford Motor Co. and others to match Toyota's deals.

"Our incentive program is probably stepped up but it still doesn't approach what our competitors are spending in the incentive market," he said. Toyota's spending of $1,833 per vehicle in February was below the industry average of $2,588, according to auto information site Edmunds.com

Insentifnya juga gak jor2an...well below industry average. Tau kan siapa yg paling doyan kasi diskon?