The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has finally acknowledged it is out of its league when it comes to automotive electronics. On March 30th, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that it had asked NASA and the National Academy of Sciences to help it “get to the bottom of unintended acceleration.” Had it done so decades earlier, thousands of unnecessary deaths and serious injuries could have been prevented. In my forthcoming book, I will show how the government made the fatal mistake of looking for the root cause of runaway cars by inspecting and testing individual electronic components. Had Newton looked for gravity inside the storied apple that inspired a revelation in physics, he would still be looking. But Newton induced the existence of an invisible force by the effects it produced on matter. Had the government simply studied effects on vehicle behavior caused by these electronic malfunctions affecting throttle and braking control, the root cause would have been obvious.

In his recent article for National Review, entitled “Exorcising Toyota’s Demons,” the Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson sarcastically quipped:

“You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers.”

While I appreciate the sarcasm, let’s take one step back:

“You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for Toyota drivers.”

Those “gremlins” Olson is talking about must be American. Maybe they lost some gremlin-relatives in the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Olson mentions later in his article, Toyota has a much higher rate of sudden acceleration complaints than other automakers. He tries to explain that fact away by saying that the media coverage causes more people to report their incidents. But that fails to account for the fact that Toyota has had more complaints for years, and this issue has only garnered national media attention over the past six to nine months.

It would be foolish to conclude from this that Toyota somehow attracts drivers who are prone to flooring the gas pedal instead of the brake. That very theory is foolish. People routinely step on the wrong pedal. I’ve done it myself. But I recognized my mistake immediately and corrected it. To suggest that someone like Mark Saylor, a trained highway patrolman, would keep the gas pedal to the floor for well over a minute, call 911 while trying to stop the car, with three other people in the car, is simply offensive. Not surprisingly, his brakes were found to be melted from trying to stop the car. There is no question that Mark Saylor was on the brakes, and that his car malfunctioned. But if it happens to a grandma or grandpa….. they must have been standing on the gas instead of the brake (note sarcasm).

Why don’t the brakes stop these runaway cars? It’s simple: once you pump the brake even twice, you fully deplete the vacuum-assist and are left to brake the car manually, making it impossible to stop a car at wide open throttle. If you don’t believe me, see Consumer Reports’ test performed on a Toyota Venza on their website. After two pumps of the brake, the driver reports that stopping the car is “hopeless.” But why are drivers pumping the brake, you ask? Well, if the car takes off and the first application of the brake doesn’t slow the car as quickly as expected (because it’s fighting the engine), the natural instinct is to try, try again.

Finally, I can’t conclude this post without vindicating the elderly. Olson cites a report that elderly people were involved in a disproportionate number of fatal sudden acceleration accidents relative to their number of general auto fatalities. I think we all know that elderly folks tend to drive more slowly than young whippersnappers, and this accounts for their relatively low rate of general auto fatalities. They’re more careful drivers, generally speaking. But when confronted with a runaway car, elderly drivers are at far more risk than a younger driver. Younger drivers are stronger and can react more quickly. But even more importantly, elderly drivers are more likely to pump the brakes. A lot of drivers under 40 have never driven a car without anti-lock brakes (ABS). By contrast, elderly drivers were taught in driving school, many moons ago, to pump the brakes.

I’d like to begin this post by saying that I am not a conspiracy theorist. But how a 1989 Wall Street Journal article on the Audi 5000 story got to be the #1 search result for the Google search term “sudden acceleration” is very suspicious. My tech-savvy colleagues tell me that search engines, such as Google, can be manipulated by skilled software programmers. There are search engine optimization (SEO) companies that specialize in getting websites noticed (for a fee). Indeed, I have been informed that we here at ToyotaTruth.com have enlisted the help of such a company to ensure our website appears near the top of the list when people search Google or other sites for terms relative to our content. After a confusing explanation of how this all works, which I will not share with you here, I am convinced that Toyota’s minions are behind this article’s unusually rapid rise in the Google search results. Oh, and did I mention that this article doesn’t show up on the first page of results for Yahoo!, Ask, or Bing?

As background, the WSJ article, entitled “Manufacturing the Audi Scare,” was written in 1989 by Peter Huber of the notoriously conservative Manhattan Institute. The link is, in fact, to the article on the Manhattan Institute’s own website, and is labeled “Civil Justice Memo 18.” Out of curiosity, I checked out some other “Civil Justice Memos.” Civil Justice Memo 17 is an article questioning punitive damages. And how about CJM 19? It’s an article about some lawyers indicted for faking personal injury claims (never mind that the vast majority of lawyers are ethical). And CJM 20??? Another article on the “problem” of punitive damages. Suffice it to say, the other Civil Justice Memos are equally as conservative as these. But alas, this is not about the Manhattan Institute. This is about Toyota’s PR campaign to deflect any criticism of their electronics.

The implication for this article’s prominent position on Google is that folks searching for sudden acceleration are going to get their first impression of sudden acceleration from Huber’s article, which lambasts CBS News for allegedly cooking up the Audi 5000 issue. This closely parallels Exponent, Inc.’s attack on ABC News and Dr. David Gilbert of Southern Illinois for allegedly misleading the public on Toyota’s sudden acceleration troubles. This blog has spent considerable time defending Dr. Gilbert, and I encourage anyone reading this post to also read our posts on these other issues. The point is that Toyota is spending millions to distract the general public from the real issue: their electronics are faulty.

In my opinion, Dr Gilbert’s testimony describes very clearly his reasoning processes and how he applied his diagnostic skills and discovered, unexpectedly, when testing the robustness of the Electronic Throttle Control against imposed faults, that it had some significant vulnerabilities. In essence, Dr Gilbert has shown that the supposedly fail-safe approach to the design of electronic throttles by Toyota and other manufacturers, who follow basically the same approach, is seriously flawed. This of course is something that Toyota dare not admit.

In fact, NHTSA in their report on the 2007 Lexus ES 350 found that if they exposed either the accelerator pedal sensors or the throttle sensors to a magnetic field (unspecified in the report) they could bring about a speed change of about 1000 RPM without triggering a fault code. However, they totally missed the significance of their own observations. The point is that if both sensors are subject to a similar disturbance of some kind that pushes both sensor voltages either up or down, the difference between voltages remains the same. Consequently the disturbances will not be detected by the fault detection software. What the designers have failed to take account of is the possibility that with two near identical sensor circuits with the Hall sensors on the same chip the circuits are not truly independent – so if one is subject to a disturbance so may well be the other. And the fault detection software will not notice this. When you bear in mind that the two sensor circuits, including signal amplifiers is contained in a chip about 4mm square the possibility of interaction between sensors under some conditions is highly likely.

In my opinion, Dr Gilbert presents  his thinking processes, experiments and findings in a very succinct manner so that competent engineers and technicians can understand what he has done and can repeat and verify his experimental results for themselves. He is making a very useful contribution to getting to the root causes of sudden acceleration and I think that you will find others usefully able to build on his work. It has certainly stimulated me to think and I am sure that this will be true for other investigative engineers too. The sound quality of his work, to accepted industrial norms, is well illustrated by the fact that Exponent were able to reproduce his results more or less overnight.

However, instead of accepting with good grace, as they should, that the Toyota ECT fault detection strategy had been weighed in the balance and found seriously wanting, Toyota and Exponent have decided to shoot the messenger of bad tidings in  an attempt to shut him up and divert attention from any suggestion that their ECT could conceivably have any undetectable failure modes. This of itself is very indicative. Why are they so determined to try to rubbish Dr Gilbert?

On February 23, 2010 Dr David Gilbert testified to the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce on the results of his preliminary fault finding investigations. He spoke in his capacity as a technical educator involved with automotive diagnostics and trouble shooting for almost 30 years. In his written testimony he points out that he has “the unique perspective in my employment, to research and study multiple vehicles and electronic throttle designs”.

Dr Gilbert, following established automotive diagnostic procedures, discovered that an induced double fault affecting the two accelerator pedal sensors equally will not necessarily trigger a diagnostic code and may therefore result in a sudden acceleration. He reported his findings to Congress and demonstrated an induced sudden acceleration in front of the TV cameras.

In the process of reviewing Dr Gilbert’s work for Toyota, Exponent used the same protocol and successfully reproduced his results. Moreover, it found that five other vehicles built by five different manufacturers behaved in the same way. In my opinion this is a joint result of considerable significance. It suggests that the fault detection strategies followed by these particular manufacturers for the electronic throttle are significantly flawed, something which has only now come to light, about eight to nine years from the introduction of electronic throttles by Toyota. Dr Gilbert and Exponent are to be congratulated for advancing the state of the art in this respect and bringing to light something which has remained hidden up till now.

Exponent belittles Dr Gilbert in its report and finds fault with him on every possible occasion It insinuates that he falls short in his methodology, according to rules that seem to be of Exponent’s own making. Exponent suggests that Dr Gilbert’s findings have no “real world” significance, ergo they can be discounted as irrelevant to the ongoing debate about the causes of sudden acceleration. Regrettably, Exponent’s attitude of scarcely disguised hostility to Dr Gilbert comes through very clearly. In my view, far from undermining Dr Gilbert’s credibility, Exponent by the general negative and unconstructive tenor of its report, runs a risk of undermining its own.

Toyota has spent millions of dollars to hire Exponent, Inc. to defend their brand or, more accurately, discredit anyone who criticizes their engineering. Their first victim is Professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University, who demonstrated on ABC News and testified to Congress that a short circuit could cause a sudden acceleration that would not produce a fault code by the car’s onboard computer. Exponent answered Professor Gilbert’s findings with a one-hour press conference broadcast on the web that included some demonstrations of their own. Their main contention is that short circuit sudden accelerations do not “occur in the real world.” And they’re absolutely right. The real cause of sudden acceleration is electromagnetic interference (EMI) inside the controls that, unlike a short circuit, cannot be found after the event.

Professor Gilbert’s demonstration was just that: a demonstration. And it confirmed a critically important aspect of these dangerous failures: regardless of the specific cause, they bypass the control logic, including any electronically controlled safety redundancies, which was Professor Gilbert’s main point. Exponent’s focus on short circuits was merely a distraction, and overlooks the most important truth about sudden accelerations. If the cause isn’t mechanical or driver error, the only remaining possibility is an electronic malfunction. Everything else is commentary.

After much prodding from my younger and more tech-savvy staff, I have finally caved and agreed to write a blog. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that my understanding of blogs is fuzzy, at best. Suffice it to say, I am not involved in the technical side of things.

It’s been 15 years since I first heard of the phenomenon known as sudden acceleration. Since then, this subject has been the focus of my work. Over that period, the subject has gotten media attention here and there. I appeared on NBC’s Dateline investigation of sudden accelerations involving Ford cars and trucks, and on the BBC’s Dispatches program, also regarding Ford sudden accelerations. But last August, an accident in San Diego changed the sudden acceleration landscape forever.

Mark Saylor, a California Highway Patrolman, was driving a Lexus ES, accompanied by his wife, Cleofe, daughter, Mahala, and brother-in-law, Chris Lastrella. The Toyota-made vehicle accelerated out of control, eventually reaching over 100mph, before crashing, killing all four passengers.

This was the crash that put Toyota and its runaway cars on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and launched the recall of more than eight million of the company’s vehicles. The focus of the recall? Smoke-and-mirror “fixes”, such as floor mats and pedals, that had nothing to do with the real problem. It was not, however, by a long shot the beginning of Toyota’s sudden acceleration problems, just the one that hit the headlines. Nor, by an even longer shot, was it the beginning of sudden acceleration problem itself. Toyota is just the most recent offender, following the playbooks of the German and American car manufacturers step-by-step through a sophisticated cover-up of what they have all known about sudden acceleration issues for many, many years.