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

Avis and Enterprise Stop Leasing Toyotas, Hertz Yet to Make Decision, moving cars, car hauler

The major car rental companies will be moving cars with Toyota decals to the back of the lot, as both Avis Budget and Enterprise are opting to not rent out the Toyotas currently under recall. The peddle problems generally don’t manifest themselves in the low-mileage cars in the rental fleets, but the rental car companies don’t want to be seen leasing flawed cars.

Fleet sales to rental car companies are large parts of car company’s sales. They are also good marketing tools, as people might go on to buy a car they drove as a rental; I recall giving the PT Cruiser a serious look after driving one as a rental car. Having the major rental car companies pull most of their Toyotas will mean that customers won’t get that experience.

If the affected Toyotas get a bad reputation and people prefer not driving them, the fleet cars could be retired early. That would lead to some premature car hauler business taking the old Toyotas in the rental car fleet to auctions or used car lots and bringing replacement cars in.

On the bright side, this might loosen up a tight used car market. The Cash for Clunkers program took a lot of old cars off the market, but there might be a new set of “clunkers” heading into used car lots to offset their loss. I put “clunker” in quotes, for the cars should be just fine once the accelerator issue is fixed, but they may well have a bad reputation if the press of this week is any indication.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...ustryCollection