Toyota USA company president Jim Lentz today announced a fix for the unintended acceleration problems plaguing Toyota cars including Camry, Prius and Lexus. The company will reinforce the pedal assembly, thereby eliminating what it termed “friction that sometimes causes the sudden acceleration to occur.” Toyota will fix more than two million vehicles with sticking gas pedals and nearly five-and-a-half million with "defective" floor mats.
For cost reasons, among other things, carmakers do not employ full drive-by-wire systems in the same way as, say, Boeing uses fly-by-wire to control virtually every aspect of its new 787 airliner. Still, as in all modern vehicles Toyota does use an electronic throttle system to control the speed of its cars. Given that, rather than focusing on a mechanical fix I was wondering why Toyota engineers didn’t go directly to a software solution, establishing a brake override so that depressing the brake pedal temporarily disables the throttle—whether the accelerator is jammed in the wrong position or not.
Thoughts?
