General

“It just kept speeding up”

Toyota driver’s 90-mile-an-hour terror ride

A terrified Prius driver was forced to use a police vehicle to help stop his runaway car after the accelerator stuck and the car exceeded 90 miles an hour on a San Diego freeway. The problem began for driver James Sikes when he tried to overtake another car: “As it was going, I was trying the brakes … it wasn’t stopping, it wasn’t doing anything and it just kept speeding up,” he told the Times of London. He called the police for help, and a patrol car soon caught up with him and pulled alongside. Using a loudspeaker, police officers told Sikes to push the brake pedal to the floor and apply the emergency brake at the same time and then head toward a steep gradient. “Between those three things, they got it to slow down,” he said. In a statement, Toyota said that it had dispatched a field technical specialist to investigate the incident which comes on the heels of the recall of nearly nine million vehicles worldwide in recent month because of acceleration problems in many models and braking issues in the Prius.

Times Online

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