Comment Re:First Hand Experience (Score 1) 1146
Well, my first hand experience is that the all weather mats DO cause this problem. Just because you had a different type of mechanical failure with a 10 year old Toyota doesn't mean that it is the same thing going on now.
I drive a 6 speed manual Tacoma with all weather mats. The driver's mat always creeps up and is prone to get stuck of you floor the accelerator. It freaked me out the first couple of times that it happened. Both times I had floored the accelerator and it got hung on the approximately 3/4 inch floor mat. When I shifted gears, the tachometer pegged out. It sounded horrible. I think that there is some sort of governor that shuts it off as soon as it redlines, but it comes back on immediately and if you are in neutral it revs right back up again. It is very unsettling. It took me a second to figure out what happened, and I reached down an pulled the floor mat back. This happened twice before I developed the habit of constantly checking the floor mat and repositioning it. There seems to be a special hole in the carpet made for putting some sort of anchor for a floor mat, but the anchor was never actually implemented with those floor mats. I like Toyota's products, but those mats are an epic fail. Until this news came out, I always assumed that this only affected the Tacoma, and perhaps only my configuration. Aside from that problem, the driver's mat has worn through in less than two years.
I can see a lot of users panicking and know knowing what to do. If you have an automatic, it is just going to accelerate unless you drop into neutral or shut off the engine. In my case, I caught the problem between gears and only had to worry about blowing the engine.
Not that there might not be other types of problems on Toyotas out there, but we can stop spreading the FUD that the floormat theory is a cover up for a more serious wide spread mechanical or electronic problem. It is real and it is bad enough.
I drive a 6 speed manual Tacoma with all weather mats. The driver's mat always creeps up and is prone to get stuck of you floor the accelerator. It freaked me out the first couple of times that it happened. Both times I had floored the accelerator and it got hung on the approximately 3/4 inch floor mat. When I shifted gears, the tachometer pegged out. It sounded horrible. I think that there is some sort of governor that shuts it off as soon as it redlines, but it comes back on immediately and if you are in neutral it revs right back up again. It is very unsettling. It took me a second to figure out what happened, and I reached down an pulled the floor mat back. This happened twice before I developed the habit of constantly checking the floor mat and repositioning it. There seems to be a special hole in the carpet made for putting some sort of anchor for a floor mat, but the anchor was never actually implemented with those floor mats. I like Toyota's products, but those mats are an epic fail. Until this news came out, I always assumed that this only affected the Tacoma, and perhaps only my configuration. Aside from that problem, the driver's mat has worn through in less than two years.
I can see a lot of users panicking and know knowing what to do. If you have an automatic, it is just going to accelerate unless you drop into neutral or shut off the engine. In my case, I caught the problem between gears and only had to worry about blowing the engine.
Not that there might not be other types of problems on Toyotas out there, but we can stop spreading the FUD that the floormat theory is a cover up for a more serious wide spread mechanical or electronic problem. It is real and it is bad enough.
