Prius Owners Blame Wild Rides on Cruise Control

That is so scary. I remember having my brakes fail on me once. Thankfully I was able to pop the clutch and bring myself to a stop.
But to just keep accelerating? Scary, scary. Interesting how he chose to put his car into neutral in order to bring it to a stop, as most of the automotive tips I've read said to do.

I supposed I'm old fashioned, but I don't really like cruise control, or automatic windows, or automatic transmissions for that matter.

I hope they get to the root of this quickly.

And yet another section from today's CNN article....

Owners: It's not the floor mat

Barbara Walton never uses the cruise control any more, and she stays in the right lane just in case she needs to pull over quickly.

She and her husband always bragged about their Prius. But ever since the October incident, she worries, "If that happens again ... what will I do?"

The dealership that fixed the car blamed the problem on floor mats. "Initially, we thought Toyota would be pretty receptive," her husband said. "But they were pretty poo-poo about it. They wanted to say it was the floor mat and driver's error."

Herb Kuehn said he got a similar runaround. He said the dealer initially told him they replicated the cruise-control problem. "That's great news," he responded, "because I don't want to be called an idiot."

The dealer later said its employee who ran the test was not qualified to make that assessment. Kuehn said he was then told the problem was with the floor mat -- "which is complete, utter nonsense."

Nearly five years later, he's put more than 100,000 miles on his hybrid. The problem has not resurfaced.

"With a good conscience," he said, "I cannot sell this car to anybody nor can I put this car back at the dealer because if something happened to somebody, I couldn't forgive myself."

Toyota's Lyons said the automaker plans to meet with Wozniak, the Apple co-founder, about his complaints about his 2010 model.

He had a possible explanation for Wozniak: The cruise control in the 2010 Prius has a new feature called "adaptive cruise" that allows the driver to increase speeds at 5 mph intervals.

"Those of us who don't read the owner's manual, myself included," Lyons said, "didn't realize that."

Another part of that same CNN article reads:

Grover Walton repeatedly slammed on the brakes of his 2008 Toyota Prius on a road trip to visit his granddaughters in South Carolina last October. The car lurched back and forth, and gained speed.

"I can't get the cruise control off," he said to his wife, who was in the back seat.

Barbara Walton looked up from playing Scrabble on her laptop. She figured her husband's lousy driving was to blame.

Yet the hybrid kept zipping along the wet four-lane highway in tight traffic. "I was just praying he could get the car stopped," she told CNN iReport.

Waltons' ask: Are we driving a death trap?

Grover Walton rode the brakes and looked for the best place to pull over. He turned onto a dirt road and popped the car into neutral.

When the car stopped, the two front brakes "had a red glow to them," he said.

"My wife was panicking. She didn't know if she should take the stuff out of the car or what."

The incident began, he said, when he hit the "resume" button on his cruise control, thinking he'd speed back up to around 63 mph. The car got up to 75 mph.

Herb Kuehn of Battle Creek, Michigan, said the same thing happened to him in 2005 on a two-lane highway. He said he tried to resume cruise control at 58 mph.

"Instead, it just fully accelerated and kept going," Kuehn said.

He frantically pushed the power button. It didn't respond. The car wouldn't shift into neutral. His last hope: mashing on the brakes as hard as he could while speeding at 76 mph.

The car came to a stop on the shoulder of the road. An overwhelming battery smell wafted through the inside of the car, he said.