I was reading CNN today and there was a story about a guy whose Toyota randomly started accelerating and he crashed into two cars at 70mph. This was back in 2006 before all the recent Toyota issues. The man has finally been freed as the court found it wasn’t his fault.
It brought back the memory of how the same thing happened to me back in 1991 when I was working on Commander Keen 4-6. I was driving my brown 1975 Cougar in the winter down a pretty short road that was just in front of id’s apartment. I had the accelerator down to get some speed, and when I took my foot off the car kept accelerating! I started messing with the pedal but it didn’t stop. I realized the smartest thing was to put the car in neutral and hit the brakes before I got to the intersection. It worked and I quickly pulled over and popped the hood while the car engine was whining loudly as it was still accelerating. I pulled the fuel hose out to stop the engine and then pulled back on the accelerator cable to get it back to normal. That was pretty terrifying for about 30 seconds.
The reason the accelerator got jacked is because I changed the cable assembly because the previous one broke. But it wasn’t calibrated correctly and the cable snagged on something that time.
The lesson? DON’T TRY TO FIX YOUR OWN CAR! Lol.
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It happend to me once, the pedal was stuck at the bottom. I just removed the keys and it stops.
Great moral.
A few years ago I was driving along the motorway, doing about 80 when all of a sudden the car jumped out of gear. I drive manual cars and it’s quite a jolt when they decide to do this. It feels like something has just fallen off and of course your foot is flat on the floor so the engine immediately hits full revs and sounds like it’s going to explode.
After a large WTF moment I noticed and put it back in gear and continued. This happened twice more on the way home so I booked the car into a garage for them to look at it.
Turns out the rubber seals on the gearbox had failed and all the gearbox oil had come out. Fortunately no damage had been caused and all it cost me were some rubber seals and new oil, plus the “labour charge”.
Moral of my story – when mechanics are waffling on about your car, ask if you can see it. It’s pretty interesting.
So… That’s the famous “ass car” is it?