Woman In Runaway Toyota Crashes Into Church

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It's been a rough week for Toyota drivers. Across the U.S., there have been no less than three reported bouts with unintended acceleration for the popular car maker, each of which fortunately ended in non-life-threatening injuries.

The most recent incident is perhaps the strangest. A woman in New Britain, Connecticut crashed her 2007 Toyota Camry into her church after she claims the accelerator pedal stuck. After her planned trip to the church, she had scheduled an appointment at her dealer to fix her car under a recent recall.

"It was just like in the movies," said the unidentified woman in a report on The New Britain Herald. "I was hitting everything."

The woman, a 76-year-old parishoner of St. George's Greek Orthodox Church, pulled up to the side of the church to drop a few items off for donation.  The vehicle raced and the woman dodged traffic before leaping over the church lawn, taking out both railings on the church steps and traveling down a flight of steps before eventually coming to a stop.

"It's a miracle," the church priest said after looking at the damage.

The woman had her 15-year-old grandson with her in the car. Both walked away without injury.

The same week as the crash, the woman reported receiving her recall notice from Toyota. Her 2007 Camry was included in both the sticking accelerator pedal recall and the floor mat recall.

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Tragedy On Wheels: Why Returning Vets Are In Frequent Car Crashes

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You are here: Cars > Articles > Tragedy On Wheels: Why Returning Vets Are In Frequent Car Crashes Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for military personnel in their first year home from war (triplezero, Flickr).

Updated on 10/13/2011 to include comments from Stanton's mother, Mary Larkin:

Timothy Stanton was 12 years old when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened. It was then he decided he would join the armed forces as soon as he was of age.

After serving with the Army Reserve in Iraq as a military policeman, specialist first class, he was rotated home. He was itching to get back almost from the start of his leave, hoping this time to go to Afghanistan, according to the York Dispatch, a newspaper near his home.

And although his parents may have feared he'd die in battle, his life instead ended last week while driving down a farm-lined road in rural Maryland. According to police, he was speeding and crossed the center line, striking the driver's side of a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck.

He died later at a local hospital from the injuries sustained in the crash. He was an organ donor, and his organs went to save nine different people that day, his family says.

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for military personnel in their first year home from the war, according to Karen Cutright, a program manager for the Veterans Administration who runs clinics for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. More veterans die from car accidents than from suicide, a different kind of tragedy that has gotten more headlines.

Government officials are worried about the number of young veterans getting into fatal car accidents after they return home from the battlefield. The ones dying most often tend to be young, unmarried males. They tend to come from the infantry ranks, or on gun crews or in seamanship roles.

Stanton's mother, Mary Larkin, told AOL Autos she had no idea her son was at a higher risk for fatal car accidents. Stanton's platoon had been the first responders at the bombing of a children's soccer game in Iraq, and he carried the images of that with him when he got home.

"There should be intensive therapy for our boys when they come home, after living and seeing the horrors that they have," Larkin said.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are 75% more likely to die in car accidents than the general population. Historically, veterans have had increased fatalities following their service. Vietnam vets were twice as likely to die in crashes than non-veterans, and Gulf War veterans had a 30% to 50% greater risk of dying in crashes.

"It troubles me to tell you that once you get them home safely, they are coming home to risk of death and injury on our roadways," said Ronald Medford, deputy administration for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a speech last summer.

Why they are risky drivers

Medford said NHTSA and the Department of Veterans Affairs were disturbed to discover that a lot of the deaths were due to some risky behavior by the driver – speeding, alcohol, not wearing seat belts, or not wearing motorcycle helmets.

"The bottom line is, these men and women are taught to drive in Iraq and Afghanistan like madmen," said Chuck DeWeese, assistant commissioner of the New York State Governor's Traffic Safety Committee in Albany, N.Y.

While at war, soldiers are trained to look for anything that could be a bomb laying at the side of the road. They could be hidden in animal carcasses or garbage bags. Merging cars could be filled with bombs ready to blow up a tank.

A 2009 Army study showed that while deployed, 50% of soldiers said they were anxious when other cars approached quickly, 23% had driven through stop signs, and 20% were anxious during normal driving.

"When they come back, driving is hard," said DeWeese. "They think they're invincible. They've gone through combat, they think they can live through anything."

Aggressive driving in young soldiers is just one cause of dangerous driving among veterans, Cutright said. Post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries could also result in erratic driving, as can medication and self-medicating (using alcohol and illegal drugs) to cope with symptoms. And there is no check to see if the vets should be driving their own car when they get back. Their license is, of course, still valid.

Brain injuries go undetected

A Marine captain from Florida says his traumatic brain injury is to blame for a fatal DUI crash he caused in April 2010. Scott Sciple plowed into another car head-on while driving the wrong way down a Tampa, Fla., highway. The other driver died.

Sciple had earned three Purple Hearts and a Bronze star for heroism for acts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He suffered severe head trauma and nearly died from blood loss. But when he got back to the U.S., he kept driving. He didn't realize many of the mistakes he was making behind the wheel, because he'd often black out.

In a call to his father after the crash, he said he wished he'd died in combat.

"I don't know why I wasn't killed any of the times I was wounded," Sam Sciple quoted his son as saying. "I wish I had been."

Cutright said that when individuals who suffer from traumatic brain injury return home, they may feel as if their driving is normal, but they don't realize that changes have occurred in their brain.

"These changes make it much more difficult to take the information needed to operate a motor vehicle safely," she said.

The Veterans Administration paired up with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Defense to start the Safe Driving Initiative, to increase awareness of car crashes among veterans and to encourage them to continue wearing seat belts and to slow down. And they have been using simulators to re-train drivers on how to drive when they return home. The simulators are particularly helpful with brain injury patients, to identify where help is needed.

And the administration is working to make mental health providers more aware of driving issues with veterans.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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Smarter Vehicles Coming Soon That Talk and Avoid Crashes

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Ford's intelligent vehicle technology safety system (YouTube).

The auto industry is moving closer to deploying technology into vehicles that could go a long way to making vehicle crashes, at least serious ones, mostly a thing of the past. That's right. The industry that fought against making seat belts standard, is marching toward creating the ultimate safe car without the hammer of regulation coming down on it.

Automotive technology has advanced so rapidly in the last decade that, every time something new comes along, it seems like "the future" becomes a lot less distant.

And many of these technologies were once regarded as so futuristic that they seemed like something out of science fiction.

One of those formerly-"science-fiction" technologies presently in development does indeed seem like something we would have seen in "Blade Runner."

In this case, we're talking about an advanced "intelligent vehicle" safety system that would essentially allow vehicles to "talk" to each other. Car makers have been working on the system for about decade, but engineers say that they could be introduced into production models as early as 2015. Although, it's also possible that it could be more like 2020.

Still, it's a fascinating advance, and one that holds great promise for other related technologies that would benefit drivers immeasurably.

In the last few months, Ford and General Motors have held public demonstrations of these intelligent-vehicle systems in action.

In late January, Ford conducted a demonstration in Washington for journalists and Department of Transportation staffers. And GM's Electronic Networked Vehicle concepts made their North American public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, also in January, after spending six months being big attractions at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

And the development of this technology is a team effort, with several carmakers joining forces to shepherd it along. Presently, Ford, GM, Honda, Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, VW/Audi and Hyundai-Kia are members of a consortium that has set up shop in suburban Detroit, sharing offices, labs and a few garages for their testing. The consortium – dubbed Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnerships (CAMP) -- is funded in part by the Department of Transportation.

As part of the CAMP project, each of the eight carmakers in the consortium will build eight new vehicles equipped with this technology. And another 2,000 vehicles on the road will be retrofitted with the system as part of a test program that will also be partly funded by the DOT.

The intelligent vehicles will essentially use advanced WiFi signals and GPS systems that will send out multiple messages per second to "warn" other drivers – or, the vehicles themselves – of a potential crash. The messages transmit data about the vehicle's location, speed, brakes, steering and other key data that would help the vehicles avoid a collision.

In these intelligent vehicles, the first line of warning would alert the driver. But if the driver does not respond, the system would actually "take over" and apply brakes, or adjust the vehicle's direction.

Primarily, the intelligent-vehicle technology will focus on avoiding collisions by preventing a vehicle from changing lanes, coming up too fast behind a stalled vehicle, or entering an intersection if the light has turned red – or if another driver has run a red light or stop sign.

When the carmakers first began working on the system, the Federal Communications Commission allocated "a specific advanced radio-frequency spectrum for the system to use" explains Mike Shulman, technical leader for Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. "That's a big deal, because spectrum is very valuable.

"When we started, our thinking was, 'Let's take a look at this and understand how it would work," says Shulman. "At first, we sent out small packets of data to see how it would be received at the other end, and were very encouraged by the results, so we began to build up more advanced applications."

The way it works, says Shulman, is that one intelligent-vehicle system sends out info to other vehicles – and even to traffic-signal systems – that say "here's where I am, here's where I'm going, here's how fast I'm going. And, at the same time, your vehicle is receiving similar messages from other vehicles all around you."

Currently, many vehicles are equipped with crash-avoidance technologies that rely on radar systems that are either situated in the front or back of the vehicle.

But the intelligent-vehicle technology has an advantage over radar, says Shulman, in that "it provides 360-degree coverage – it delivers much more information than radar, which is better at measuring distance and velocity. Plus, the cost is relatively low, because it's built off of existing WiFi and GPS technologies."

The system will also detect conditions in problematic situations, like along a curvy road, when a driver cannot visibly detect an oncoming car, or communicate to other drivers that there is black ice on the road.

Working in conjunction with other carmakers is a key, says John Capp, GM's director of safety innovation and active safety – and chairman of the CAMP consortium.

"Obviously, there are many different cars out on the roads, made by different manufacturers, so for this to work, we have to develop it together, to make sure that a General Motors vehicle can communicate with a Ford, or a Toyota can communicate with a Honda, and so on," says Camp.

When this technology first makes it into production models, "we'll have a situation where some models will have it, and some won't," says Camp. "So, at the beginning, it's going to be more of an alert-and-warning system – getting information to the driver so he can take whatever action he needs to in order to avoid a crash.

"Then, as it's introduced into more and more vehicles, the system will become more involved in electronically controlling the vehicle's steering, braking, and speed."

In an effort to throw a spotlight on the new technology, the carmakers will hold driving clinics this summer, to give consumers a "hands-on' experience with the vehicles.

"We're looking forward to that," says Camp. "We're eager to get people into these intelligent vehicles, so everyone can see them operate in a real-world situation, on real roads – and so that drivers can see how valuable this kind of safety technology can be."

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