Pondering the Prius dilemma (March 18)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The man whose 2008 Prius ran away on him and accelerated up to 90 miles an hour on a San Diego freeway is having to put up with insinuations that he is some kind of publicity-hungry goofball, and is himself responsible for the behavior of the car.
I think that is not the case. If it had happened to me, it would not have been something I would have faked. In the first place, the driver, James Sikes, is 61 years old. When a guy gets to be 61 years old, he eases up a little on the gas pedal — he doesn’t floorboard it. If the car floorboards itself, even though you might be a driver with 45 years’ experience, you might not know what to do.
We are used to having cars do what we tell them to do. If we push down on the gas pedal, we expect it to speed up. If we push on the brake, we expect the car to slow down and stop, not speed up and tear the fabric off the brake pads.
The California Highway Patrol believes Sikes didn’t fake the incident. After all, they didn’t give him a ticket, even though he was going 90 and his brakes were smoking.
The Toyota people, who make the Prius, are naturally very upset by all this. They don’t believe their car was at fault. Neither do a lot of other folks.
The Toyota Prius for years has been at the top of reliability surveys by Consumer Reports, which rates cars, among other products, but does not accept advertising from carmakers, or from anybody else, for that matter.
A friend of mine has a Prius and thinks it is the best thing since the wheel. Actually, it is his wife who has it, and she doesn’t let him drive it that much, but she loves it and so he does, too. If he drove it at 90 miles an hour and jammed the brakes at the same time, she’d box his ears, which is another reason I don’t think Sikes was faking it.
