California Highway Patrol Assists Runaway Prius

James Sikes, a Prius driver near San Diego, went to pass another vehicle Monday when, he says, he noticed the car continuing to accelerate. After he passed 90 mph, he called 911.

Originally, it was reported that a California Highway Patrol officer used his car as a brake for the Prius, but that turns out not to be the case. The rest of the story from the California Highway Patrol:

“The California Highway Patrol immediately went through a series of actions with negative results.

“CHP Officers immediately responded to the area were able to locate the vehicle eastbound I-8 east of Kitchen Creek Rd.  A CHP Officer was able to pull along side and instruct Mr. Sikes via the PA system. With the Officer's assistance, he was able to slow the Prius to approximately 50 m.p.h. The Officer then placed his patrol vehicle in front of the Prius as it came to a stop in the number #1 lane of e/b I-8.  The Officer then placed the patrol vehicle against the front bumper of Prius.   

“The vehicles did not touch until after they came to a stop.”

Toyota executives said a technical specialist his been dispatched to look at the car.

Runaway Toyota Prius Stopped By California Patrol Car (Jalopnik)

Comments

wow whats going on at toyota

So it was a runaway Toyota until the guy stopped it using the brakes. Maybe he should have tried that before calling 9-1-1.

leave it to the media. I swear our government is behind this all the way. How else can they recover wasted money given to GM .....try and take out the largest automaker we have. What the freaking Obama Admin doesn't understand is just how many jobs Toyota provides this country. Rather than point fingers and allow the media to run away with this the WHITE HOUSE needs to step up and assist in determining just how much of this is fact! ABC news should be punished for showing false footage as well.

@ Zack and cory,

It's nice to see you Toyota salespeople enjoying your down-time posting the same tripe on blogs and news sites while awaiting your pink slips. Seriously, the cars are a menace and no amount of public apologism is going to help. Get a grip on that bit of reality.

I've often wondered how the electronic emergency brake would operate in an emergency. At least with a hand brake, you have some control over the amount of brake pressure. If you pop the switch on an electronic emergency brake such as on the Prius, does it just issue full brake-force?

There was a time when I was interested in Toyotas because of their reliability ... not anymore. It's not just the problems current and late model Toyotas are experiencing but also the high level of denial at Toyota in regard to the problems.

the act of putting the transmission into neutral seems to have been lost amongst the media hype about the acceleration bug. (anyone remember CBS's rigged audi?)

When panic sets in,your natural instinct is to step on the brake.No matter what Toyota claims,using the brake at 60mph and with the engine still racing (and not backing down)you will NOT stop the car.You will only warp the rotors,glaze the pads and boil the brake fluid.Then you have NO brakes whatsoever.
Why do we not see old K cars,Escorts,Cavaliers,Chevettes doing this?? I'll tell you why,cars are TOO computerized today and we NEED to go back to the past when minimal government interference in regulations still gave us 6 passenger,high mileage cars.Today WITH government regs we get less gas mileage,more 4 and 5 passenger cars,and have more of this runaway malfunction crap.

From another article:
“After the car decelerated to about 50 mph, Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt.”

Maybe he should of thought of that when it was doing 94?

James Sikes was travelling @ 90mph. He did not apply emergency brakes nor change the gear to neutral or turn off the engine. He called 911 first and when office advised to apply emergency brakes he did and than turned off the the engine.
He probably did'nt know how to operate the car or panicked during UIA. This might be genuine but I will not be surprised to read more of this in coming months.

@ realhuman

I agree that toyota should step up and own it's mistakes and responsibly correct it. I can see anger in all real human beings but everyone has their opinions and that is what Zack and cory were doing.

Check THIS out, and note the official police report at the end. The driver drove the car for 20 minutes, had time to call on his phone, and he turned the key off and the car rolled to a stop.

The police car did NOT stop the prius, they never touched until after the cars were stopped at the side of the road according to police, however, the media reports state that the police stopped the "runaway Toyota".

How runaway was it really?

http://www.cardealerreviews.org/?p=253071

Paul the brakes will stop you going 60 mph and the gas pedal to the floor. Car and Driver did a test with 3 cars including a 540hp Roush Mustang and they were able to get the cars stopped from 100 mph at full throttle.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept

Honestly people need more driver education to deal with these situations. A stuck throttle is nothing new and has been happening for over a 100 years.

FlanKitty ...I watched the cop interview this morning on MSNBC. Someone asked "What about shifting car into neutral"? Prius has an electronic shift & not mechanical one. My guess with that answer is that under certain speeds the electronics won't allow you to shift it. The cop said he told driver to apply ebrake &pedal brake together and got it to slow enough to then put it in neutral. Once stop the cop said he spelled burnt brakes and verified pedal and carpet NOT stuck. Funny thing reported this car had just contacted his local dealer about the recal and was told by Toyota that his Prius was NOT on the recall list, hmmmm. Now lets see if all the Toyota lovers still drinking the Purple Lemonade argue this one. Or the 60 plus cars "just fixed" to have accel problem.

Everyone seems to the concerned with what the driver did or didn't do to stop the car, well the car shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. It is not the driver's fault.

Broq

My 2002 VW Jetta did this same thing on more than one occasion and all I ever had to do was turn the car off and restart it. I did that quite a few times while still driving on the highway. The problem seamed to fix itself as it didn't occur again for the last three years that I owned it. Overall I'd say it probably happened 6 or 7 times. I mentioned it to the dealer but there was never any fault codes so we just forgot about it.
I think if a person can't come to the conclusion that they should turn off the car then they shouldn't be driving.

Max, you're right, no car is perfect it's up to the driver to know what to do in various situations. I agree with Judy's comments that the car really wasn't a runaway toyota, it was an incompetent driver. I don't believe his story for a second. A Prius automatically goes into park when you shut off the engine so he must have shifted into neutral to coast to a stop. Also, another person here commented that the Prius has an electric emergency brake - wrong it's a mechanical brake activated by a pedal, and also released by pushing the same pedal again. And Realhuman, it's great to know the county jail now offers inmates a few minutes each day to use the internet.

Another thing it's called a PARKING brake NOT an EMERGENCY brake. It is meant to assist in holding a stationary car not slow/stop a car in motion.

If the brakes are not working or slowing a car fast enough the parking isn't going to do much. In most cases it is not a separate brake just another way of applying the same brakes. On some cars with 4 wheel discs the parking brake is a puny drum brake assembly inside the hub of the rear rotors. Using that kind of parking brake at highway speeds probably has the same effect as sticking your feet out Fred Flintstone style.

Anyone else notice the sharp increase of complaints now that there is a recall? I feel like some of these owners are probably upside down on their loan and have found an easy scapegoat to claim on their insurance if they wreck it purposefully…or get Toyota to buy them back under lemon law.

Re: the parking brake/emergency brake/ e brake/whatever you want to call it --

pulling it at a moderate or high speed will significantly increase the chances that you will fishtail.

As in, people who want to hang their rear ends out while drifting pull up the e-brake as one of their maneuvers. Even idiot movies like Tokyo Drift had it right.

I agree with many of the other posts regarding this highly suspect scenario...

So this guy was driving 90mph and he reached down and tried to pull the pedal back up? I know that Prius are not known for their high speed stability so I find it hard to believe this guy can be driving down the freeway for at least 20 minutes all while on the phone with 911 or trying to pull the pedal back up and not crash. His story seems to be filled with inconsistencies. I think people need to not believe everything the media says.

If this is just the new way to gain celebrity and get money, why are only Toyota owners doing it? You'd think everyone who'd ever had a stupid accident would now be in front of a camera saying that their car did it, too. Hyundai's profitable, a lot of the owners of their older cars probably could use the money, they have a bad rep for quality to draw on, yet over and over it's a Toyota. Even if it IS a floor mat as Toyota is now saying, why can't they, after all these years of making cars, get such a small thing right and respond before several years. These conspiracy theories predicated on the slightest of imagined inconsistencies just don't pass the smell test.

Oh yeah, speaking of inconsistencies, let me offer up another: the 2008 Prius has a foot operated parking brake. The cop said he saw the brake lights. There's more than an average human's foot distance between the regular brake and the accel pedal. Yet the car only got down to 50 before he could manage to get the start button to turn the car off, whether from his own lack of composure or the button's function. For it to be just the driver's doings, it'd require quite an awkward and purposeful heel-toe action to keep the car moving with one foot while he put on the parking brake with another. Someone explain that.

I personally dont believe this
the goverment is scared after they invest all the money on GM and not seeing any good results from GM of course they want to hit on Toyota the largest automaker and its funny because i've been reading the web about all the recalls lately with other automakers and nobody say anything. I dont doubt that GM have good cars because its all about the care the driver give to the car. I have a 99 corolla, i bought it 2 yrs ago used with 77k miles and have now 122k and recently on a roadtrip from PA to FL when i stop at virginia to fuel my car the oil light came on but i kept driving the car got to FL empty of oil and the car is still working perfectly now if that is not reliability please tell me what it is that was the only time it happen because i try to take the best care for my car but i just need to say this recall crap is not changing my mind about toyota and people if you dont want your toyota car anymore just trade it in dont use this recall crap to get other car

Sounds so complicated, why can't he just shift into neutral? I think more people need to learn how to drive stick shifts.

Heck yeah, we need to dump the automatic tranny and go to manual only.

http://www.azfamily.com/news/local/Local-woman-on-her-Prius-Neutral-doesnt-work-in-this-car-87164762.html

Can anyone enlighten us!!! Neutral does not work on Prius???

I drive 90mph regularly and there is plenty of time to think to shut the car off if it did accelerate. I can't believe people are so beyond stupid that they just dont shut the car off and/or put it in nuetral.

I can think of three ways to shut down a racing engine at any time with my standard shift Honda:

1) kick the clutch
2) shift into neutral
3) turn the key from ON to ACC

Note that in the Prius, not one of these controls is mechanical.

It should be absolutely mandated that all cars sold in the US come equipped with the traditional rotary ignition lock. That way, the cop can shout to turn the key one space left and the drama ends.

I just don’t believe this, that guy don’t look so convincing (he is another balloon boy) I own a 2009 Toyota Venza and Corolla , I never had any problem with any of my Toyota. this is just a mass hysteria , people believe anything in this world (they even believing in aliens so stupid ). If tomorrow some experts says this is all because of some kind of mental depression, believe me most of them going see a psychiatrics before they think twice.

People just think and act sensibly

One more...and more to come!!!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35781956/ns/business-autos/

Ok now, I suppose this piece of news out 3/10/10 is also "drivers fault"? Some nice comments written with this. Wake up people, it's all "hitting the fan" for Toyota.
http://news.pickuptrucks.com/2010/03/toyota-may-expand-tundra-frame-recall-.html

you have to remember that enough toyota/honda drivers don't care or know much about cars. all they want is to get a good car that gets them from point a to point b. they don't want to take to the mechanic and get some value.

I really don't understand why they don't try putting the shift to Neutral. Anyway, this kind of accident happens only with an automatic car. In my opinion, the automatic shift should be banned.

Oh, I just watched the NBC news linked above. The police actually told the driver to try shifting the gear to neutral, but the driver didn't sound to understand what the 'neutral' was. I chatted with my colleague this morning, and she also said she did not know what N was for in her car! I really really think automatic cars should be banned. If this happens in town, you will end up killing many pedestrians!

I personally do not think the driver did it himself, but you still can't deny that part of this story just doesn't seem to add up. For one, after being told by 911 dispatchers AND the CHP officer to shift to neutral the driver refused to because he thought it would flip the car. Since when does shifting into neutral cause a car to flip?

Wow. I can't believe the amount of posts flaming the driver. Screw what he did or did not do. The simple fact is the accelerator got stuck. I've already ready plenty of reports that have stated that there were little to no brakes left.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35855757/ns/business-autos/

James Sikes has been exposed for the fraud he is. It's also no coincidence that he has a Obama sticker on the rear passenger door window. Two fraud's that Americans are more than familiar with.