Toyota Is Recalling More Than 800,000 Cars Because of Spiders
Shutterstock/Chris Godfrey PhotographyToyota has announced that it is recalling 870,000 of its vehicles, among them Camrys, Venzas, Avalons, and hybrids with owners spread across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and 16 other countries. Airbags, it seems, have been spontaneously deploying on some of those vehicles across makes and model years—a state of affairs that can range from the merely annoying to the legitimately life-threatening. Power steering, even more ominously, may also be affected. As may cars' warning lights.
The difficulty stems, Toyota believes, from a problem with a part included in the cars' elaborate air-conditioning systems. Water from the cars' condensers has been leaking onto the airbags' control modules, which seems in turn to cause the bags to deploy independently of the typical triggers.
The condenser, however, isn't the only cause of the airbags' spontaneous inflation. The other one? Spiders. Yes, spiders. Which is not an auto-industry euphemism. Arachnids have been weaving their webs inside the cars' condensers—and the webs, in turn, have done what nature has designed them to do: trip things up. Bugs in cars, it seems, make for buggy cars.
The eight-legged problem is not widespread; the recall is, as recalls often are, a matter of better-safe-than-sorry. "So far, Toyota is aware of three airbag deployments as a result of this and 35 cases of warning lights coming on," Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight told CNN. And yet the factor that seems to be common among those incidents is the spiders. In the cases Toyota has investigated so far, CNN notes, "the only consistent cause of the blockages" has been the webs.
In other words: Toyota owners, this Halloween season, are finding themselves the unwitting and unwilling stars of an incredibly nerdy horror movie. And they're not the first to be playing that role. In 2011, Mazda recalled more than 50,000 of its Mazda6 sedans after the company realized that the vent lines for the model's gas tank could be compromised by, yep, spider webs. Which is all to say, this October, that if you're scared of spiders ... you're probably totally justified.
...and we're gonna get..... no life during the summer. :) (We are almost done with the Chapel, in fact, if all goes well, most of it goes up tonight. But I have not been documenting it here. So I am going to retrospectively show you through the chapel build.) After a few years of planning, we finally decided to sell the abbey and build a chapel. The plan is that this will be easier to put together than the abbey has been. The abbey took an entire weekend, a scissor lift and an army of people to set up. This new chapel should go up in a few hours. This is the SketchUp plan. Front view from SketchUP Here is the real chapel that we modeled it after. Ardgowan Chapel in Scotland Yeah, we decided to phone it in this year :D
Harold the Gravedigger squinted through the pre-dawn mist. A low, guttural groan echoed through the Davis Graveyard, sending a shiver down his spine. Not the usual mournful sighs of the restless dead, no. This was a sound more…sugary. More…sprinkled. Harold gripped his shovel tighter. The rumors had begun a week ago – whispers of a giant, sentient donut rolling through the cemetery at night, leaving a trail of sticky frosting and disembodied sprinkles in its wake. Tonight, he'd finally catch the culprit red-handed (or, should he say, red-glazed?). As the groan grew louder, a monstrous shape lumbered out of the fog. It was a donut, alright, but colossal. Its glazed surface shimmered under the moonlight, studded with malevolent chocolate chips and a single, menacing gumball eye. A chorus of disembodied moans rose from the disturbed graves as the donut flattened several headstones with an indifferent squish. Harold, adrenaline coursing through him, charged. "Hey, sprinkle-brained...
we meet again. We are starting over. Completely. No, not the whole yard.....just the church (Westerman Abbey) - I say "just" the church like it is just a small prop in the yard. This is big. Very, very big. I know I am as stunned as all of you.....actually typing it out for the blog is a very scary thing to do. It is more real now. I told you all, so I have to do it. At the moment, we are still in the planning stages. I think our next step is to build the scale model and see what supplies we are going to need. Oh, you have your hand up, do you have a question? "Why I am getting rid of probably one of the largest props in any home haunt?" The answer is in the question. It is bit cumbersome to put up. We had an accident taking it down one year and this year while taking it down the 14' pieces of lumber we damaged (just years of wear and being out in the rain) - the only safe way to put it back up is to rebuild the frame.....and if I have ...
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