After nearly a year of investigation into the cause of “runaway Toyotas” (in which sudden acceleration in Toyotas caused several high-profile crashes in early 2010) the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last week concluded that its investigators (and Toyota engineers) were right all along.
In the weeks after the problems came to light, Toyota was lambasted. Its executives were called before Congress to apologize and explain why their cars were a public menace. The company recalled over 11 million vehicles, and Toyota engineers blamed floor mats and sticky gas pedals for the sudden acceleration.
Many critics and politicians ridiculed that explanation as a lame cover-up designed to hide faulty electronics systems and demanded independent investigations. Surely the problem was not something so simple and mundane as floor mats and sticky pedals. The issue was deemed so serious that NASA and the National Academy of Sciences were called in to analyze the data.
In August 2010 the NHTSA reported to Congress that in 35 of 58 accidents they studied, the vehicles’ data recorder did not indicate that brakes had been applied; drivers were depressing the gas pedal when they thought they were hitting the brakes. In a panic, the drivers kept stomping on the gas. In other cases, shifting floor mats became wedged over the gas pedal.
According to The New York Times,“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report concluded that the sudden acceleration was caused by mechanical problems in some Toyota models — sticking accelerator pedals and floor mat interference — that it had previously identified as causes.”
According to transportation secretary Ray LaHood, “The verdict is in. There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas. Period.... America’s traffic safety organization was right all along... just about every member of Congress didn’t believe that we had found the problem, which was floor mats and the sticky pedals.”
Though sticky gas pedals and loose floor mats contributed to the problem, the root cause of the Toyota crashes was driver error. If no electronic flaws caused sudden unintended accelerations independent of the driver, then the only way that the cars could speed up is if the driver was hitting the gas instead of the brake — an event diplomatically termed “pedal misapplications”. The problem wasn’t faulty electronics, nor a cover-up.
Tags: Cars, Computer Simulation, Computer Software, Computers, Death and Dying
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