Carquestions

Change Your Rusty Dodge Oil Pan DIY edition

2012-02-04T11:41:00.000-05:00

Recall Ford F150 Stalls No start Defective Fuel Pump Module

2011-12-23T20:36:00.000-05:00

Give Me The Gears

2011-10-28T19:23:00.000-04:00

I own a 2001 Corvette and what do you think I ~~like~~ love most about this car? Handling, acceleration, looks? Nope. Although I like all those attributes but I LOVE it's gas mileage. 23 city 36 highway Canadian. And it does this because of one fact. It has one of the lowest gear ratios ever put in car. This one characteristic, this one car, has made me so angry at the auto company decision makers I could spit nails.

Arguably, the major problems facing the auto industry are poor sales, fuel consumption and pollution.The solution is lower gear ratios. The more revolutions of an engine the more fuel it burns. Therefore the opposite is true, the less an engine revolves in order to turn the driving wheels the further you go on a gallon of gas, its that simple. What determines how many turns of the wheel you get from a given number of engine revolutions is and always has been the gears in a transmission and the gears in the differential. The Corvette's engine has to revolve 1.71 times in order turn the rear wheels once.

My point is this, to all the bonehead decision makers at all the major car companies, start putting very low final drive gearing in the top two gears and let me decide if I'd like to cruise along at ridiculously low revolutions to save gas and make the first 3 or 4 gears high for playing boy racer. This is exactly what my old Corvette does so well. You don't need expensive variable valve timing, hybrid systems, cylinder cancellation or carbon fiber. Gear technology is simple, cheap and proven effective. Chevrolet proved it over a decade ago and so have others. Do you want an across the board improvement of 15% or more in fuel mileage for your cars and trucks? Don't you want a home run across all model lines? You'll sell more cars, lower fuel consumption like never before in history and the environment well benefit from less fuel burned. Take my advice, if you give consumers performance and high fuel mileage you will be the next Steve Jobs of the auto industry.

2011-03-31T20:48:00.001-04:00

Waterloo Prof on Canadian Election

ON Friday, the minority Stephen Harper government fell on a confidence motion by a 156-145 vote. Speaking to the motion, Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff attacked the government for disrespecting Canadian democracy and treating parliament with contempt. The myth of Canada being dull is captured in the apocryphal story that in an international competition for the most boring news headline of the year, the winning entry was "Yet another worthy Canadian initiative".
Edmund Burke noted that all that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing. Canadians are certainly good and worthy folks, but they suffer an excess of civil obedience, politeness and lack of civic rage that could be harnessed to combat political atrophy. At a time when Arabs risk life and limb for political freedoms, Canadians seem largely apathetic about the erosion of their democracy.
The centralisation of power in the hands of the prime minister and political staffers - with the resulting diminution of the role and status of cabinet, parliaments and parliamentarians - is common to Anglo-Saxon democracies in Australia, Britain, Canada and the US, but the extent to which constitutional conventions, parliamentary etiquette and civil institutions of good governance have been worn away in Canada is cause for concern.

A minister told parliament she did not know who had altered a document that cut funding to a foreign aid group. Later, she admitted to ordering the changes, but did not know who had carried out the order. Lying to parliament, a cardinal sin of Westminster-style democracy, has become a political tactic.
Following rulings by Speaker Peter Milliken, for the first time in Canadian history, the government and a minister have been found to be in contempt of parliament for withholding information and misleading the house.
The Integrity Commissioner was so inept that she failed to uphold a single one of more than 200 whistle-blowing complaints.
Forced out of office by the ensuing public outcry, she was awarded a $C500,000 severance package on condition that neither she nor the government talk about it. That is, a public servant paid by the taxpayer was financially gagged by yet more taxpayer money to stop taxpayers finding out what was going on.

When a foreign service officer blew the whistle on the Canadian military handing over detainees to Afghan security forces, in likely violation of international humanitarian law, the government tried to destroy him and refused to give documents to a parliamentary inquiry. The Speaker reminded the government parliament controlled cabinet, not the other way round.

After the last elections, when the opposition parties were close to agreement on a coalition majority government, rather than face the house in a vote of confidence, Harper talked the governor-general into shuttering parliament for a month until he shored up his own support.
When the time came to choose a new governor-general, Harper opted for someone who had carefully drawn up terms of an inquiry commission to exclude the potentially most damaging aspects of a scandal involving a former conservative prime minister.
Four conservatives have been charged with exceeding campaign spending limits in the 2006 election that put Harper into power. A minister used public office and material to pursue party-political goals of courting ethnic vote banks for the conservatives.
Having come into office on campaign promises of greater transparency and accountability, Harper has silenced civil servants and diplomats, cynically published guidelines on how to disrupt hostile parliamentary committees, and suppressed research that contradicts ideologically-driven policy, for example data that show crime rates to be falling. Judges who rule against the pet causes of the government's ideological base are not immune to attacks from cabinet ministers.

Civil society groups that criticise any government policy or ideology risk loss of funding and hostile takeovers by boards stacked with pro-government ciphers.
Little wonder Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin describes the government's "arc of duplicity" as "remarkable to behold". What remains unclear is whether this adds up to an indictment of Canadians' indifference to democratic rights being curtailed or of the opposition parties, which have failed to harness the silent majority's outrage.

As Canadians head for the polls in early May, it remains to be seen whether Liberal Party charges of the Harper government being obsessed with secrecy, control, spin and attack ads will resonate with voters. Until then, Oh Canada, we cry our hearts for thee.
Ramesh Thakur is professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and adjunct professor, Institute of Governance, Ethics and Law, Griffith University

Michael Fumento Article - Mirrors Carquestions Feb Video - Toyota Recall - CBS, NBC, ABC, AP... statistics and their failure to find proof.

2010-08-02T22:39:00.000-04:00

93 AND COUNTING

Michael Fumento
08.09.10
Forbes Asia Magazine

The jig seems to be up on the runaway-Toyota scare. Mounting evidence indicates that those Toyotas truly accelerating suddenly can probably be explained by sliding floor mats (since fixed) and drivers hitting the gas instead of the brake. That is, the media have been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp for the better part of a year, whipping U.S. car buyers and Congress into a frenzy.

Where are Woodward and Bernstein when you need them? Shouldn't the accounts of alleged unintended acceleration deaths have been subjected to a little checking?

Remember the tale of the runaway Prius on a freeway near San Diego? In Forbes.com in March I observed that much of what the driver told reporters was absurd. He insisted he was "afraid" to try to shift into neutral because he needed both hands on the steering wheel; nobody asked about that cellphone he'd been holding while driving.

Likewise, the media pack is so focused on the number of those deaths supposedly from sudden unintended acceleration, now put at 93 from 75 crashes, that it can't be bothered to properly investigate them--or indeed even look at them. Otherwise reporters could have told you what I found: that most of the claims are spurious, even to the point that some of the accidents never even occurred.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration uses the term "allegedly" in listing the number of deaths possibly related to unintended acceleration. Yet too many reporters ignore that caveat. Thus, a U.S. News & World Report blog-post headline proclaimed: "NHTSA: 89 Deaths Caused by Unintended Acceleration in Toyota Vehicles." The Los Angeles Times stated in a headline that sudden acceleration "led to" the deaths. A New York Post headline early on declared that faulty Toyotas "have killed" 52 people. A CBS News Web headline (over an Associated Press story) similarly said the acceleration car fault "has killed" 89. (USA Today has been more careful in emphasizing the tenuous connections.)

The NHTSA "complaint database," available on its website, amounts to a motley collection of anecdotes, many of them absurd. Anybody can enter anything. An entry filed by someone named Damnable Liar claimed his car accelerated to the moon because of a child seat problem. That was mine.

Many "complaints" are merely comments, and since NHTSA has no "sudden acceleration" category but rather uses "speed control," the sudden-acceleration claims are lumped in with entries regarding vehicle sluggishness. But in the media conversion process they all become runaway Toyotas.

After the frenzy began, seven entries comprising ten deaths, originally blamed on other aspects of the cars, were refiled as unintended acceleration. Many simply deduce that since investigators found no cause other than driver error, then the accelerator must be responsible. Or they make the illogical deduction that since the brakes weren't applied, it was sudden acceleration.

One entry concerns Joseph Mele, who court records say last August crashed into a guard rail at over 100mph while driving a Toyota Scion. His best friend was trapped and burned alive. Witnesses told authorities he'd been smoking pot and was plastered, and a police officer stated he smelled strongly of booze. He's awaiting trial, charged with, among other crimes, vehicular homicide while driving under the influence of alcohol (something the Los Angeles Times, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its Toyota coverage, failed to mention in a February story).

His mother nonetheless entered a NHTSA complaint regarding Toyota. And then she entered 7 other Scion accidents under "speed control" that she found online, totaling 12 deaths. She told me "police quotes" indicated they were unintended acceleration. How many of those 7 accidents NHTSA includes in the 93 isn't clear, and the agency won't say. But the fact that at least 22 deaths come from news reports proves that the 93 total includes some of them.

All of which helps explain why, of the alleged 93 deaths, NHTSA has attributed only 5 to an acceleration defect. It doesn't explain why huge media outlets with teams assigned specifically to cover Toyota somehow missed all this.

Toyota Recall - CBS, NBC, ABC, AP... statistics and their failure to fin...

2010-08-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

Toyota Critic Faces His Own Recall

2010-07-23T13:47:00.000-04:00

Just-auto Toyota "plant" story just as fake as WSJ?

2010-07-19T18:54:00.007-04:00

The July 15 quote from Just-auto is as follows;

"That story was planted by Toyota," an NHTSA spokeswoman told just-auto. "Toyota is the source - yes we know that for definite.

"It is [the] Toyota PR machine. We knew they were going to put it out."

My questions are;

If you were writing for a living would you have missed the closed quotation mark after definite?
Would you have included an additional space between the first part of the quote and the second part as Just-auto did?
What reporter worth their salt wouldn't have asked the question "how did you know they were going to put it out?"

If I was playing reporter (as I am now) I would have asked a lot of additional questions such as "how do you know it for definite?" "did the WSJ tell you?" "did someone at Toyota?" "you claim to know in advance that they were going to put this story out, didn't you contact them or Congress and tell them they may be breaking the law?" "aren't there rules about congressional investigations?" "it was your information that was going to be leaked to the WSJ surely an administrator in NHTSA would want to contact Toyota to caution them at the very least, wasn't that done?"

Just-auto must have asked some of these questions, too bad they didn't bother to include the response (or lack there of) in their article. Maybe it would have made their source look bad?

As is often the case I find, what is not in a news story is more interesting than what is.

Wall Street Journal Toyota Story a Fake?

2010-07-15T12:48:00.000-04:00

GM selling recalled parts, NHTSA falls asleep

2010-07-07T15:32:00.000-04:00

Part 2 - GM Recall a fire waiting to happen

2010-06-21T21:16:00.000-04:00

GM Recall Blamed on Chinese parts - part 1

2010-06-21T07:09:00.000-04:00

Finally a Real sticking pedal

2010-06-19T20:36:00.000-04:00

Jeep brake Recall - a close up look at the defect

2010-06-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

GM Recall letter calls customers and technicians stupid

2010-06-10T20:26:00.000-04:00

GM Recall 1.5 million and counting - June 4/10 -

2010-06-09T21:36:00.000-04:00

The shocking details left out of the main stream news - 41 confirmed cases of vehicle fires while car was parked and turned off! 13 of the 41 cases had the heated washer fluid option the rest did not! NHTSA has been investigating this since before February 4, 2008!

NHTSA documents vanish

2010-06-06T13:59:00.000-04:00

NHTSA linked to Identity Theft

2010-06-06T13:58:00.000-04:00

Honda Civic Defective fuel door - the cause and solution

2010-05-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

Toyota Recall - the final solution, a shielded gas pedal

2010-05-08T00:06:00.000-04:00

YouTube - carquestions's Channel

2010-05-03T12:21:00.000-04:00

YouTube - carquestions's Channel: "Outrageous - Dodge Calibers made after March 06 are being investigated by NHTSA for a sticky pedal. Chrysler admits its a mechanical problem involving 161,000. and blames it on a parts supplier CTS. Where is the recall? Where is the 'stop selling orders' Where are the plant closures? - Where is the level playing field? Where is Ray LaHood?"

Edmunds or Sero removes posts of April 22

2010-04-23T17:12:00.000-04:00

After a little back and forth between me, Sam and one of his fans, Edmund's removed all our posts including the two above and stated the following;

Hi Mark,

Some posts have been removed for they violated our member agreement. Your post has been removed too, since it's off-topic. :-)

You can check out the rules by clicking on the Member Agreement link at the bottom of any forum page.

best,

Steve, Host I have sent a reply asking if it was due to a complaint or something we said. We were simply discussing SUA and there wasn't any foul language or comments. My guess is Sam Sero put in a complaint and would rather not be caught. The last thing I said to him was that he should enter the Edmund's contest since it was tailor made for a guy that has been pushing EMI theories for the past twenty years and that if he didn't enter the contest it would prove he doesn't believe in his own theories or at the very least is afraid of having them scrutinized by a panel of independent experts outside of a courtroom. - we'll see if there is a reply from Edmund's.

Following Edmund's contest on SUA

2010-04-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

The following post is by Sam Sero - famous for his SUA theories about electrical malfunctions causing SUA - he posted this on Edmund's under the unintended acceleration contest postings; "I have been investigating SA or UA incidents for over twenty years and I am certain that the actual cause of these events is electromagnetic interference. EMI is something that has plagued not only the auto industry but aircraft, cranes, wheelchairs, pacemakers and comp[uters to name a few. I have compiled an extensive history of documents that trace the advent of the condition to the fuel injected engine with electronic cruise control. Toyota's problem is not unique. The control of the throttle from an ECM is equivalent to what Ford tried in its 1989 and 1990 integrated engine and cruise control systems and experienced a 600% increase in the rate of sudden accleration events in the models it placed this control in. For more info go to www.forensicfacts.com." My Reply; Mr. Sero - Given the fact that in the history of building automobiles no one (including NHTSA, Toyota etc.) has ever documented a single vehicle that would accelerate out of control by itself due to an electrical system malfunction please cite one case or vehicle where investigators found a real world example of a car that had a defective electrical part that caused it to accelerate out of control by itself. No theories please, just one single real world example that is verifiable. After all your site is Forensic Facts - not Forensic Theories.

Toyota Recall - Evidence the gas pedal isn't the cause

2010-04-20T17:42:00.000-04:00

Will GM Recall broken exhaust bolts on the Silverado Sierra Suburban

2010-04-20T17:32:00.000-04:00