Re: UNINTENDED ACCELERATION

[LToy@aol.com]

Psychos 'R Us gives us a few psychotic facts--:

>In the late 80s, the most hoopla-ed about is the Audi by the 60 Minute 
>show -- although they could never get it to repleat even with rigged 
>Audi. On the other hand, they did nice demonstration of several Ford trucks 
>exploding.

Actually, they did get a rigged Audi to depress its accelerator all by its
lonesome, when they monkeyed with control pressures in the auto tranny.  As
for those droF trucks, see below...

[snip]

>So what the heck is with this uninteded acceleration? Although no one who 
>has researched this topic is not certain, they found something in Audi 
>that may explain this phenomenon. It appears to be that the gas pedal and 
>the brake pedal are closer to each other than almost all other production 
>automobiles -- especially against American domestic automobiles. From 
>that, it's accepted that for these people who reported the UA, that they 
>are used to more spacing between the gas pedal and brake pedal -- and in 
>some situations, they pressed the wrong pedal in the Audi -- and fly they 
>go and panicked they did.

Well, our Fiendly government researched it and confidently called it "driver
misapplication" (talk about double speak).  As for the gas-brake pedal
spacing, R&T did an excellent article on this with statistics about pedal
spacing--don't recall the numbers, but the difference was something small--
1/4" maybe 3/8" over several inches.   Problem with this theory is, no one
claimed they hit the wrong pedal by mistake--they in fact claimed they did
NOT press the wrong pedal or even pressed the brake pedal as hard as they
could, and that the Audi took off on it's own.  Didn't someone here recently
post about 2000hp of braking power?  kinda hard to see that overcome by our
5cyl motors, even if turbo'd

IMHO, there is something different about Audis than other cars of this
vintage (besides the obvious that I think contributes to this.  The idle
stabilizer (air valve) seems to cause a coase adjustment to engine idle
speed.  When you put a load on the motor (like when you shift from P to D),
the motor slows, the idle stabilizer over-compensates, the motor surges, the
driver is suprised/scared.  As an occupant in a car, what do you usually do
if you are suprised or scared?  Push on the floor--and hard.  If you engaged
the tranny like some people I know (with right foot casually somewhere on the
floor, not firmly on the brake, or worse, covering the loud pedal), the
result is kinda obvious.

>I believe all Audi automatics had this problem. Of course, the reason 
>those Ford trucks keep exploding in the 60 Minute show, Ford added 
>(through their LAWYERS -- in which Audi did not), is that 60 Minute show 
>has somehow misplaced some explosives near the gas tank...

Make that GM trucks (i'd reverse them, too, but there's a funny little
british car that goes that way--what are we gonna do about this convention?)
and I don't think it was 60 minutes, but some other newsrag (i think on abc,
not cbs).

Sorry--can you tell I've had a strange day at work?
--Linus.