Toyota is trying its hardest to fix this accelerator pedal, floormat, and electronic drama that the media has been feeding on for the past few months.

 

Toyota hired engineering firm Exponent and had their engineers run tests on their vehicles, and simulate what Professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University claimed was the cause of the apparent "unintended acceleration."

 

The professor reengineered and rewired the circuit to do what he wanted, and of course he did so in a way that would get him on ABC News. "No automaker can or should be expected to design detection strategies for artificially created events in the absence of any evidence that such an event can occur in the real world," said Kristen Tabar, general manager of electronics systems, Toyota Technical Center.

 

Professor Gilbert's actions on the vehicle's electrical system involved the following manipulations in a specific sequence.

 

1. The protective insulation on two separate wires that carry the accelerator pedal position signals to the Engine Control Module must be individually cut or breached. Next, these wires are connected to each other through a 200 Ohm resistor. This by itself did not cause an increase in engine speed.

2.  To cause an increase in engine speed, it is necessary to cut the insulation on a third wire, the 5-volt power supply to the accelerator pedal, and force a low resistance connection between the power supply and the secondary signal wire.

 

The resulting increase in engine speed is a result of the artificial and sudden application of the 5-volt power supply to this signal line with the rewired circuit. When subjected to similar unrealistic reengineering and rewiring, the competitive vehicles evaluated by Exponent and Toyota achieved substantially similar results with varying levels of resistances.

 

The engineers at Exponent then did the same exact thing to other vehicles, such as the BMW shown in the video below. The results were very similar to the Toyota.

 

theCD's take: The real question is where did the professor get his degree from, or why are the people at ABC so absent minded. Or maybe they knew it wasn't logical for this sort of "lab experiment" to occur in the real world but wanted to get the spotlight on them.

 

Either way, we're glad to see Toyota fighting the media and publicity monsters.

 

Source: Toyota