Total Recall
(Be Afraid • )
I remember this like it was yesterday…wait, it was yesterday…
Got up early and drove off in the dark before the coffee was ready, because “Tammy” at the Toyota dealership advised me that if I got there by 6:50, I’d be the first one in line. See, my 2007 Camry was subject to two recalls, Tammy said, one having to do with an accelerator pedal that apparently periodically grows, extending down into the floor mat and getting stuck. The other recall involves an accelerator pedal that doesn’t bother changing in size – it just sticks itself to the floorboards til you hit 120 MPH. But only in extremely rare circumstances, so no worries really – it’s like playing Russian roulette with a gun that only has one bullet, but holds 187.
I pull in to the dealer’s service area in the early morning darkness, and park the car amongst several others. Four people are inside ahead of me and I take my place in line. I notice the ceilings all over the dealership are covered in helium-filled balloons. It’s amazing how much that makes me want to buy a new car.
When I finally get to sit down at the service desk, some guy comes around the corner and stares straight at me while speaking to my service dude. “Excuse me, but I’ve been outside waiting for at least 10 minutes before anyone else even got here.,” he whines. I guess he thinks I’m going to get up and tell him to please take my seat as a Good Do-Bee award so that I can wait some more. I give him a brief primer on how doors and lines work and that makes him unhappy. A woman in line behind me looks like a frightened rabbit and apparently thinks we’re going to uncork our concealed handguns right there in the dealership.
My service guy looks like he knows it’s going to be another crappy day. He takes my paperwork and goes outside. The goofball who was out sitting in his car waiting for an invitation to get in line just continues standing there, still looking at me, but out of the corner of his eye. I haven’t had any coffee yet and feel like picking a fight. I tell him he could’ve come inside like the rest of us, and sorry, but he’s not cutting in line now. “It’s not a matter of cutting in line,” he says, and then whines some more about how long he’s been sitting outside and how the dealership wasn’t even open yet when he got there. The lady behind me is actually starting to shake. Everything that immediately comes to mind to say to the guy includes swear words, and in the span of a couple of seconds my mind rejects all of them because I think if I utter them the lady behind me will have a stroke. So I revert to the brilliant come-back my 6- and 8-year-old hurl at each other a dozen times each day.
“Whatever.”
He stomps off and goes back outside. As the door closes I can hear him whining to another service guy about how he and a whole bunch of other people have been waiting like good boys and girls outside in their cars, and they aren’t being taken care of properly like the important people they are.
My service guy comes back inside and wants me to look at something. We go out to my car, and he bends down inside the driver’s area and shines a flashlight on the accelerator pedal. My car doesn’t have the pedal-to-the-metal recall problem, he says. It just has the pedal that mysteriously grows longer and embeds itself in the floor mat. That, my service guy tells me, will take three or four hours to fix.
Tammy told me both problems together would be fixed in an hour and 15 minutes, but what does she know?
I took the floor mat out a couple of months ago, even though there was at least a full 2 inches between it and the accelerator. I am not waiting four hours without coffee for these guys to grind off the bottom of the pedal. I tell the service guy to pull the pickup truck over in front of me, and I drive between the rows of cars lined up for the Great Recall and make my escape.
The sun still isn’t up, but I’m driving around in the dark outside a car dealership. There’s an HEB grocery store just up the street, and we’re out of grub, so I find myself shopping at 7 a.m. As I do, I think about how, when I pushed down the accelerator on my cars from years past, the pedal was physically attached to the engine, and there was an actual physical relationship between the amount of pressure you put on the pedal and the speed at which the car accelerated.
But now pushing the pedal is supposed to activate a computer sensor, or something approximately like that, which in turn interacts with the car’s on-board computer system and prompts the car to go faster. So when Toyota first comes out with this idea that the accelerator pedal grows all long and gangly and gets tangled in the floor mat, I think, this is bullshit. And then, when Toyota says, no, now we need to put a metal rod in your accelerator assembly to keep the plastic part from wearing down, I think, OK, no one bought the floor mat thing, so now they’re making up more expensive bullshit to do, but it’s still probably bullshit.
Because the acceleration is more logically controlled by a flawed on-board computer and/or some flawed car computer software (but please lets not tell her OK? She’s flighty enough as it is). Fixing that probably would cost Toyota 20 times more than the “solutions” the company’s come up with so far.
Whatever.
The Toyota service guy says I am absolved from worry (no floor mats, please), and if he’s wrong, all of you are my witnesses that the company steered me in this direction. Lawsuits and good times all around.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 06, 2010, 11 30 am
Hey. That was me at the dealership. I know where you live. I’ll be there shortly.
Just kidding.
Seriously, betcha $100 you don’t get killed in your Toyota. You can pay me whenever, no hurry.
jd
— jdallen Feb 6, 08:36 pm #
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It’s already killing me to drive this car – does that count?
The problem isn’t too much acceleration, it’s not enough. You hit the gas pedal to get out in traffic, then randomly it just sits there for two full seconds deciding whether to stall or get moving.
Toyota’s known about that one since at least 2007, but no one’s died from it yet so I guess that means it ain’t a bug, it’s a feature.
— bob Feb 8, 05:29 am #
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I read it was the feds who pushed Toyota to do this. Toyota and Ford supposedly have problems. Not Government Motors, however. Oddly enough.
— Dick Stanley Feb 9, 08:36 pm #
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