In my mind, Toyota’s problem is an electronics issue. I’ve worked my entire working career (now retired) as an Electrician and Electronics Tech. Electronics will do strange things when spiked with ‘dirty’ power. The electrical systems in today’s cars and trucks are much better engineered than those of just 20 years ago. The biggest problem is the alternator. If you were to hook an oscilloscope to the alternator’s output or the battery while the engine is running, you would not see a smooth 12 volt DC line on the oscilloscope’s screen, but all sorts of spikes jumping all over the screen. Now, it’s up to the vender that builds all the electronics for today’s vehicles to clean all that dirty voltage using all sorts of filtering.

With more and more electronic control being put into vehicles and the auto industry looking for ways to cut cost, electronics was not over looked. Soon electronic venders found ways to cut their costs so they could continue to compete. Something has to suffer. Venders find cheaper made electronic parts to produce the control computers and even farm out the total product to other countries to be made.

Some years ago the throttle body (used to be the carburetor) of all vehicles was linkage or cable controlled. You pressed on the accelerator pedal and in turn a plate opened to provide more air to the engine. A little unit called the “Throttle Positioning Sensor” that is mounted on the end of the throttle body plate shaft sends a variable voltage to the vehicle’s engine computer. Without going into a lot of detail, the computer now controls the amount of fuel needed to run the engine in relation to the opening of the throttle.

Just a few years ago linkage and cable control began to disappear and electronic control took its place. A new phrase “Drive by Wire” was coined. Now when you press on the accelerator pedal you’re sending a variable voltage directly to the engines computer and a electric servo motor is opening and closing the throttle plate. And here is where I believe the problem starts.

With electronic control being built with cheaply made parts, a spike missed by the filtering can, and will, cause all sorts of problems. The engine’s computer might read a spike as someone putting the accelerator pedal to the floor. It might last a split second or maybe the spike destroys a part within the computer and the servo motor never returns to close the throttle plate.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the fix for this is to return to the cable controlled throttle system. At least if the computer begins to dump a lot of fuel into the engine you can take your foot off the accelerator pedal, closing the throttle plate thus starving the engine for air, flooding (stalling) the engine.

Why is this problem only affecting Toyota? I believe this is just the first vehicle producing company to have this problem. Others will follow or is it happening with other makes now?

My oldest Son who teaches computer programming and repair once told me that sophisticated electronic control does not belong in vehicles. I tend to agree with him.

Does anyone agree? Your commects please.

 

to be honest i didnt want to real all of that haha

 

i dont think there is anything wrong with the older toyotas (80s to mid 90s) i like them and they last fore ever until the frames rot out of them.

 

Well I read it and I must agree with you. Supposedly since I'm an engineer in school people think we like to complicate things but it seems to make perfect sense to me to stick with what worked for decades (the cable). And man you really seem to know what you are talking about and that stuff about the alternator is not something I have any way of knowing about. I find it very interesting so keep posting lol.

 

DBW (Drive by Wire) or even FBW (Fly by Wire) is hardly new (heavy trucking industry have been using it in large diesel engines for almost 20 years), and there is "supposed" to be fail safes built into the software. If the electronics fail, it has a fail safe (mechanical override spring), which causes the throttle to close and return to idle or shut the engine off completely (in the case of fly by wire, there is redundancy built in). Most other manufacturers have been using DBW systems successfully for many years without these problems. I think you hit the nail on the head on why Toyota may be unique....... CUTTING corners to save money by farming out the contracts on these parts to the lowest bidder........ They are experiencing serious quality control problems, simply because they don't care about anything except becoming number 1 in volume sales and profit..... now its coming back to bite them in the ***.... I'm sure things will work out in the end, they will finally admit they goofed, change suppliers, spend more money in quality control, and the problems will go away.