No, but the quality of Asian cars is also going down, that's what I'm telling. Toyota used to be THE reference for Asian cars, right ? - - - Updated - - - You said it : simple.
Title says : American cars And the answer is, because Europeans think they are less good. Have a good read, and know it states the word THINK. Whether or not they are right, is something else.
Doesn't mean we can't have a civilized discussion comparing American cars to European cars to Japanese cars. I don't see a problem with debating the general build quality of cars that aren't American or European. It's a pretty general thread.
Modern Toyota should be avoided. ECU, number 1 most safety critical thing on the car and they can't get it right (spontaneous acceleration issue on certain automatic equipped vehicles caused by an easily avoidable stack collision, several of their ECUs completely fail industrial safety standards). Alot of recalls for physical faults too.
You could argue that the ingition switches killed people, but not really actively. I see neither of those as fatal problems, really. Just problems. The ECU is quite a serious problem, however. If your ignition turns off, just pull over like you normally would. It's just harder to steer and brake. If your throttle sticks, stand on the brakes, shift into neutral, and continue standing on the brakes until you stop. Shut the car off. Both can be solved safely with a little bit of common sense, which is exactly the problem.
i was actually going to post about the ignition, but i was thinking about the electric shock ignition recall, not the randomly turn off
Standing on the brakes did not help in the toyotas actually. Part of the ECU crash which caused the WOT condition also causes the brake assistance pump to disable, you are left with no braking assistance against a motor on wide open throttle, the motor won. Counter intuitively the way to recover from the crash was to slam the throttle to max and hold it there long enough while the watchdog timer to overflow and reset the chip (or plain speak, have the throttle at max as the CPU resets itself automatically, which is about every 5 seconds, bizarrely watchdog itself didnt recover from the crash which is partly the purpose of the watchdog - which is yet another safety standard failing toyota had in their code). There are at least 5 major crashes attributed to it. Several minor ones may have also been falsely attributed to driver error over the years when infact caused by the car (there are more than a few unusual ones in the UK where toyota claimed no car was effected). Seems people just panicked and didnt know what to do, wide open throttle certainly isnt one you'd think to do.
You stand on the brakes to activate the shift interlock so it'll let you shift to neutral, then you just have an engine bouncing off the redline. Leave the engine on (because power brakes/steering), and continue to stand on the brakes until you come to a stop, then shut it off. The reset thing is definitely interesting, too. Your typical joe wouldn't know to do that, though. I sure as hell didn't. Computers aren't really my thing.
Alot of embedded processors have a watchdog timer. Its a timer that counts from 0 to however many bits wide the timer is (lets say its 8 bit, it'll count to 255 or 2^8 - 1), it increments on every CPU clock so on our 8 bit one, after 255 clock cycles the timer will hit its max. When it does that, the processor will reset itself. Then is there usually a way to reset the timer in software. In your program you keep resetting the timer so that the timer can never hit its maximum and cause a reset. Of course if your program then crashes somehow, the timer continues counting and eventually resets the processor to allow it to recover from the crash (in theory). Except on the toyota ECU, the error causing wide open throttle seemed to persist through the reset which it really really shouldn't. Regardless. I think most people were just completely confused when the car did it so didn't immediately think about how to recover from it (even via standing on the brakes and shifting to neutral)
Well it if you look, our cars are really big and bulky, while European cars are very small. Also the drivers seat is on the opposite side of a car. I think Europeans hate American cars because their roads aren't as wide as American roads, hence they don't like big, wide vehicles.
Errm, what the what? Almost entirely of europe drives on the right hand side of the road and sits on the left hand side of the car. The UK is the only exception to that in the EU.
It's kind of funny how Top Gear makes fun of American cars specifically for only having left hand drive when all of Europe does to.
Except almost every european car is available in RHD for UK and australian markets. Most american cars are not. That is what they really make fun of, the american cars, not that america itself is LHD.
only way to get american cars there is also via importation as they are not sold there in the first place, so american manufacturers see no reason to make it RHD, so top gears logic is invalid with that
Not really. Euro companies export cars to australia in RHD. Why can america not export to england in RHD? No harder to do so.
they already have to make cars in RHD though for the UK, america doesn't because they only make their cars for america
