Don't bother w/Consumer Affairs. As people on Priuschat have put it "They specialize in making mountains from molehills" and "Consmer Affairs is run by a bunch of lawyers who are trying to drum up business. They're searching for ambulances to chase. The lowest of the low."

They have an ax to grind against Toyota, Priuses and anyone else. Example: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0...mon_prius.html
Gee... the Prius is amongst the most reliable vehicles per Consumer Reports.

If you looked at http://www.consumeraffairs.com/autom...an_altima.html, you'd think that Altimas are pieces of crap. Going there is like going to slashdot.org for unbiased OS opinions.

 

That's because Altimas from 2002-2006 were defective pieces of crap. Cheap interior plastic, massive recall in 2006 for engine fires, another recall for loose screws in the engine etc.. Nissan finally figured out how to build a good Altima starting with the 2007 model year. Sure Toyota has great mechanical reliability, nobody is doubting that, in fact I admire Toyota for that and that is one reason I really like the NAH, it has the best of Toyota and Nissan put together in one nice package. It is very common to see Toyotas from the 1980s and early 90s still on the road, and there's a good reason for that, those cars have more mechanical parts to them than electronic and software parts (like the accelerator). But starting from 2002 Toyota computerized the accelerators, and that's when the trouble started. There must be a glitch in the software or in the electronics. It could be a missing semicolon in the software, who knows?! NASA lost a space probe on Mars in 1999 because of a simple mathematical error in metric conversion in software. These mistakes are made even by the best and the brightest.

 

Sounds like the problem with the accelerator is a spring that is not tense enough. The fix? A shim.

 

I think this is still a coverup. unless the spring pulls the pedal down (I'm pretty sure that goes against newton's law though). What might help is the brake pedal that disables any gas input.

 

Yes, I know about the cheap interior plastics as I cross-shopped the 02 Altima when I bought my 02 Maxima and I've had a rental 04 Altima before. Yep, I know about 1st recall you mentioned. FWIW, in looking at Consumer Reports, it seems every year of 02-06 Altima still had average or above average reliaiblity, so it's not THAT horrible.


Besides the graphic at http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/p...38&id=E0C18554, there's http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/20...a-graphic.html. I don't think it's a coverup. Why would Toyota waste all this time and money to engineer and "fix" million of cars w/something that doesn't work and has customers still facing the problem? It and a coverup would expose them to a whole bunch of legal liability too. There are already a bunch of class action lawsuits against Toyota if you check http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=tm (probably some from amublance chasers).

That said, I think that this and the floor mat recall remedies problems that exist on these cars, BUT there could be something else that we and they don't know that make up a subset of these unintended accelerations/"sticky" gas pedals.

One always has to filter out all the noise from incident/repair reports such as user error, floor mats vs. real defects. All they can for now is fix known causes and keep a vigilant eye on new reports (if any) come in, esp. on the retro-fitted vehicles or those w/newly designed accelerator assemblies.

 

I still think it's the software they have for their drive by wire. But if the brake-gas pedal override will work when a car is accelerating, then I don't think there will be as many problems.

I still don't see how a sticky pedal will cause a car cruising between 38-42 keep accelerating to 120. just think about the pedal position

 

There's a LOT of great analysis and comparison of the totally different CTS and Denso pedals at http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/tag...edal-analyzed/. They also went further in discussing the fix, replicating it and giving some conclusions.

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/toy...lusive-photos/
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/toy...t-by-too-much/
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/why...r-denso-pedal/

Interesting. I now understand this better than from the Toyota diagrams.

 

Explanation and pics at http://www.autoblog.com/2010/02/04/t...npage_autoblog.

Video at http://www.autoblog.com/2010/02/04/f...-doug-the-mas/.

 

I have tried to go back through the reviews of the Altima Hybrid to try to determine what parts are "procured" from Toyota and what parts are "licensed" from Toyota. I have to admit, it's not clear. "Licensed" parts mean Nissan is allowed to use the Toyota design, but doesn't necessarily mean they are using the actual Toyota parts. Ford and Toyota have cross licenses for almost the entire hybrid system, but they each make their own parts. It is reasonable to believe Nissan at least modifies the parts to work with the Altima.

 

Yep. It's not totally clear. I glanced thru the hybrid section (C) of the 07 NAH service manual and it's not obvious either although there are a few references to THS and Toyota in there.

The inverter I'm pretty sure is sourced from Toyota or their supplier. The plastic cover was detached from a NAH I saw at an auto show and I saw a Toyota part # and bar code on top.

I'd imagine that the power split device, battery pack and some of the ECUs would come from Toyota or its suppliers too. Other likely candidates include the portions of the braking system, electric AC compressor and power steering. It'd be interesting to see the manufacturer's labels on all of these parts and compare them to those on a HyCam.