Toyota disputes critic who blames electronics

none of this would have been necessary if toyota had addressed the issues from the start. this is what you get when you hide stuff.

Sounds like a dangerous approach to take. When acedemics start to feud over theoretical experiments the truth in practice often gets overlooked.

Toyota this Toyota that, let,s give em a break!!!!!!!

I wanna hear the dispute about an unintended acceleration. please put it in public.

Apparently same issue in Japan happens, but police coerce drivers to admit they mistakenly pushed accelerator according to NYTimes article.

electronics problem will cost them billions. of course they are saying that the electronics's are fine. GM went bankrupt making cars better. Toyota got rich hiding problems.

I wonder if Gilbert has ulterior motives for coming to such conclusions?

this is what you get when you hide stuff.

this is what you get when your country's car industry is in the gutter and they need a boost

This is what happens when have a third party building and also doing your quality assurance, time to bring QA back into Toyota's lap.

coercion, denial, delay and dissuade. Toyota has certainly learned and improved upon the lessons of corporate America well.

Toyota THIS IS A REALLY STUPID STUPID STUPID IDEA!!!

Instead of trying to debunk every yahoo who has an opinion may I suggest you-TOYOTA just admit the problem, if you even know, & then fix it.

You get into trying to debunk all the talking heads & you will screw yrself!

Toyota must have a lot of amakudari types on their payrolls idiots!

It is going to be painful and costly when they find out that it really was a software problem. As another poster posted on this site elsewhere, I can't see how they can discount a software problem because a complex piece of software is sufficiently complex that there is little predicting how it responds under all combinations of inputs.

The Japanese are good at making things that they can see, but bad with systems that are linguistic constructions and invisible. The reverse is true of Westerners. Toyota should team up with Microsoft.

I wonder if Gilbert has ulterior motives for coming to such conclusions?

It's called "Look at ME - Look at ME... Aren't I smart..."

What he "discovered" was that if you "short circuit" a Toyota Engine Management Control Module by introducing extraneous voltage from "outside the system" that you can trick it into not reporting an error code..."

His discovery - in of itself - does noting to prove the cause or supply a plausible culprit for unintended acceleration...

Simply put - his findings showed ONLY that - - - - under conditions that could not be experienced under normal operation of a Toyota vehicle without an outside source of "electronic sabotage" ( for lack of better terminology ) - - -- the ECM would not register a fault code or failure in the system...

He extrapolates from his findings that "If you can trick the ECM into failing to produce a fault code - you CAN NOT rule out that the phenomena isn't really happening as a result of a system malfunction"...

You can make all the analogies you wish about this but it still proves nothing AFAIC and if you read Toyota's response as above you can see that they feel the same way - intentionally ZAPPING the ECM is a moot point - unless you are suggesting that in ALL REPORTED CASES in the US the cars were zapped in someway by a flux capacitor or a lighting bolt or something which just happened to mask the problem at the very instance of UI by not producing a fault code... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Even if Toyota could reproduce this phenomena that Gilbert discovered ( which other independent industry experts so far have said that they can't BTW ) it still does nothing to identify or call into question the cause of the problem...

Addendum...

I should state that I do believe that this problem IS happening - somehow or someway...

But I also believe that in the high litigation environment that is the USA there are a LOT of people who are finding this as a convenient culprit to blame for their own shortcomings...

As example - about 10 years ago the Public Transport Authority in a major city in the US staged a fake bus accident and then asked the public that for ANYONE who was on the bus to come forward and report any injuries that had sustained - - if memory serves correct they had something like 500 people show up with a full range of maladies including broken bones and psychological damages...

We already now have the "Toyota Defense" being used or sited by Litigation Attorneys...

The real cause is the loose nut behind the wheel.

If the soft ware is at fault, wouldn't it be at fault all the time?

They really should consider looking somewhere else for the cause, be it electronics or the engine itself. If it's not the gas pedal or the floor mat, what is it? It could still be the driver, but not necessarily stepping on the wrong pedal. By experience in software development, the developer will almost always know how to use the program correctly, but the (uninformed) user will almost always do something that will cause the program to malfunction.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35713831/ns/business-autos

Toyota must now undertake proving the negative because of its initial secretiveness.

The event planned Monday is part of a broad campaign [...] to discredit critics, repair its damaged reputation and begin restoring trust in its vehicles.

"Discredit" is a small minded approach to addressing real world problems. This case gets more and more like Mitsubishi FUSO.

Interesting link you got there, stirfry. But unfortunately without any value, because this article comes from AP, an American news agency whose journalists have the reputation to fabricate information. It also seems that AP doesn't really know what "copyright" means..;) By the way, one of the writers of this article is Curt Anderson. Isn't he an American politician.........somewhere in the North-East of the US?

Besides, stirfry. Your link to MSNBC, again an American news channel, contains a lot of biased advertisements against Toyota. Shameful!!

Gilbert is grandstanding but the proper approach to an academic is to try to repeat the experiment with input from (in this case) Gilbert and see what happens. Toyota might learn something or Gilbert will look foolish. Trotting out another academic to refute the first will degenerate into a pissing contest. The lawyers and congresscritters and newspapers will love that and the spin will keep Toyota in the bad press for another week. And won't do diddly to solve the problem.

I think Toyota should fire the current lot of p/r wonks and get some new ones.

You have to look at "what as changed" and "what is different" between test conditions and actual field conditions in variable and extreme situations such as the reports of sudden acceleration caused or allowed by the fly by wire throttle control. The persistent but infrequent reports indicate that possibly Toyota engineers have missed something in their testing.

Anybody know anything about how microprocessors control cars?

If you have both brake by wire and accelerate by wire, the microprocessor gives the effective brake and accelerate signals to the fuel injectors and wheels, not the driver. Once you know the code matrix of the micro-processor, you can work backward from any possible output state to some set of inputs that will produce it. In theory, a cruise control gone haywire could shut off the brakes, inject fuel and override manual control. If transmission control is integrated, it could deny gear shifting too. You could could have to kill power to stop the accleration before engine failure. The professor claims to have produced runaway accleration signals, with brakes overrriden, from a bench test of a microprocessor in the lab, with some set of inputs. Toyota claims that the particular combination of inputs is impossible coming from the sensors, and that every controller, not just theirs, can be overridden in the lab this way. Both could be right. What we do not have, which we need, is an incidence of "sudden acceleration" under controlled test conditions, so that we cn find out how it actually happens in operation. Also note that complete drive by wire systems are very new, and that there were runaways of Toyotas built earlier caused by floor mats and pedal linkages.

Toyota used to have a "stop the line" policy on any discovered defect, anywhere. They gave up being "the best" to become "the biggest." They may never get it back.

In all my wildest dreams I never imagined Toyota could handle things this badly...There really is no end in sight, is there??

Fredster: Before you go jumping to conclusions I suggest you follow the story first. Gilbert was officially commissioned by Safety Research and Strategies to conduct the study on behalf of undisclosed clients. Professor Gilbert was very accurate in his findings. I will prove it sometime soon that Exponent Inc. were the ones that had nothing. What the world needs to know is that Toyota continues to tighten the noose around its own neck every time Toyota 'proves' its innocence. I said a month ago that every auto maker using the same part from the same supplier faces the same problem. These recalls for the silliest reasons should be raising suspicion. The strange thing is Toyota never mentions the supplier - Toyota stock tanks while the supplier's is gaining every day. I've watched it since October last year.

unscrejects at 11:07 AM JST - 12th March. Professor Gilbert was very accurate in his findings

Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research, and a consulting firm, Exponent Inc., rejected the professor's findings.

Toyota's assembled experts said the professor's experiments could not be recreated on the actual road. For example, they said, Gilbert had shaved away insulation on wiring and connected wires that would not normally touch each other.

"There is no evidence that I've seen to indicate that this situation is happening at all in the real world," Gerdes said. He added that the professor's work "could result in misguided policy and unwarranted fear."

Souce: www.tri-cityherald.com/2010/03/08/930671/toyota-disputes-critic-who-blames.html

**sfjp330: Exponent were used by Toyota to say Toyota's nonsense about Professor Gilbert. I know for a fact what is causing the sudden acceleration and I challenge Toyota and Exponent to prove that I don't know. Professor Gilbert demonstrated that electrical surges cause a serious malfunction - that was all he was supposed to prove because Toyota said no such malfunction could occur during a power surge. Heck sfjp330, I have ten years experience in this specific technology alone. And the makers say it is safe from electrical surges. What did exponent argue? He shaved the wires. Of course he did, to duplicate what has happened in the market. Are you forgetting that during these current recalls Toyota claimed that wires were prone to premature chaffing from friction caused by contamination build-up?** What was the December recall attributed to? Wires worn bare by rubbing against other parts of the vehicle. And your claim of no evidence that it is happening anywhere else in the world is total bunk. The UK has it, France has reported it. Venezuela demanded Toyota explain two months before the US even figured out that Toyota was in serious trouble. How long have you been following this story?

unscrejects at 01:25 PM JST - 4th MarchTrust me folks I have first-hand experience with it. I know exactly what is wrong.

Ok expert, Explain exactly what is went wrong with this San Diego accident of ES350.

unscrejects at 11:11 PM JST - 12th March Gilbert demonstrated that electrical surges cause a serious malfunction - that was all he was supposed to prove because Toyota said no such malfunction could occur during a power surge.

Then explain why same results that happened in Gilbert's test of Toyota was duplicated to Ford Fusion. Does Ford Fusion have same problem as Toyota?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100311/ap_on_en_tv/us_toyota_recall_abc

Does Ford Fusion have same problem as Toyota?

It can't. It's made in Mexico...

sfjp330: "Ok expert, Explain exactly what is went wrong with this San Diego accident of ES350" Don't quite follow you - must sudden unintended typos eh? Explain? I can in explain it in one of two ways - the other I cannot unless paid for it. The one that I can tell you is that the vehicle took control of itself. How it did that is my secret. Please sfjp330 trust me on this one. We may be indisagreement here but when I do explain for a fee I'll treat you to a night out on the town. The Sikes Prius had a similar incident but he was one of the lucky few. What the phenomenon does is that it leaves virtually no evidence of the incident - Toyota know this and so they're saying Mr. Sikes lied. Toyota are the liars. Regardless of how hard he pushed on the brakes nothing would happen with the actual brakes themselves. That is the curse of the car. Toyota have begun to use this con on NHTSA and Darrel Issa. When the fact is exposed I don't want to be a Toyota executive.