Ford, Toyota to Reprogram Hybrid Brakes, Software to be Fixed in Recalls, car moving, moving cars

Both Ford and Toyota are recalling their hybrid cars with similar braking issues. The big news of the day is that Toyota will be announcing a recall of its Prius to do a programming fix on its breaking system. Ford, while not calling it a recall, is doing a similar reprogramming of the breaking system on its Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrids.

In hybrids, the brakes are used to recharge the batteries when you get the car moving forward, but reverts to conventional stopping functions when the brake pedal is pushed down. The problem with the Prius appears to be that the brakes are slow to change over from recharging mode to stopping-the-car mode. The Fusion/Milan brakes are having much the same problem, which may be a bug of the type of regenerative braking system used in hybrids.

New technologies sometimes need some time to get all the bugs out, and drivers of this first major wave of hybrids may essentially be beta-testers. When Ford and Toyota are having the same type of problem, it might be the technology that did them wrong rather than a particular in-house problem.

Toyota will want to get back to moving cars out to dealers as soon as possible, and this doesn’t help matter. However, if it is a programming fix, it should be easier to administer and could be done in a few minutes rather than the half-hour estimated to fix the brakes on the non-hybrid cars in Toyota’s fleet.

What other glitches does Toyota have? At this rate, Murphy’s Law would say at least one more bug has to come out.

Sources: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100204/AU...to-recall-Prius
http://www.autoweek.com/article/20100204/CARNEWS/100209951

Toyota to Close NUMMI, Teamsters, UAW Protest Job Losses, car transport, car hauling

The NUMMI plant in California, a joint venture between Toyota and GM, seems to be on its last legs, much to the chagrin of Teamster car haulers. GM has abandoned its share of the plant during bankruptcy and Toyota is about to do likewise; the Corolla produced there is part of the recall that has set Toyota on its heels. Toyota is planning to shift production of the Tacoma pickup to San Antonio and move Corolla production to Canada and Japan.

That might please the Canadian Auto Workers, but the UAW doesn’t like it; the move has set up a tag-team protest of the NUMMI closure between the Teamsters, the UAW and the environmental group Friends of the Earth, who are going to exchange unpleasantries at the Japanese embassy in Washington on Thursday. Protesting in front of Toyota HQ might be more effective, but doing so in Washington in front of the Washington press corps makes for better PR; the Teamsters protested Chrysler’s apparent lack of interest in unionized car transport in front of the Italian embassy last year, playing up Chrysler’s Fiat connection.

The move should cost some Teamster car hauling jobs, as the Japanese imports are more likely to move by rail than the NUMMI-made cars. The environmental angle here is that moving the cars by sea from Japan will leave a greater carbon footprint.

However, NUMMI’s time has come and gone. When it got started in 1984, it was a way for GM to learn Toyota’s quality-control tricks and for Toyota to get pointers from GM on how to manufacture in the US. A quarter-century on, and Six Sigma black belts abound in US manufacturing; we’ve gotten the quality control bug and Toyota has gone native, as the Lexington high school football highlights from Toyota Stadium in Georgetown point out.

Source: http://www.joc.com/node/416309