To add to the prior post, the article below was also sent out by ASQ (American Society for Quality) Friends don't let friends drive toadas You stand a good chance of ending up incinerated. It was sickening to hear about a bright outgoing 20 year old girl being incinerated so badly that it took two weeks just to identify the remains, simply because she was driving a new toada.

Experts Say Recalls May Not Solve Problem
CNN.com

February 10, 2010

In his hectic, noisy laboratory at the University of Maryland, Michael Pecht is wary when it comes to assessing whether Toyota's suggested repair of sticky gas pedals will have any real impact. "They are in a bit of a quandary," said Pecht, a professor at Maryland's Clark School of Engineering. "If they announce that electronics is a problem, they are probably going to be in a lot of trouble, because nobody's going to drive the car. So at this stage, they don't want to announce there is any electronic problem." But according to Pecht, who is an expert in failure analysis and has written a book on sudden acceleration in automobiles, complicated electronics-not a mechanical issue with the gas pedal-lie at the heart of Toyota's problems. And three other independent safety analysts contacted by CNN also conclude that neither floor mats nor stuck gas pedals are an overwhelming issue. "From what people have told me about their sudden acceleration incidents, most of them have got nothing to do with the sticking pedal at all," said Antony Anderson, an electronics consultant in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. Anderson said electronic throttle controls, which largely have replaced mechanical accelerators, can malfunction in ways he compared to an occasionally disobedient child. "We've all had that type of experience, and I'm afraid that is the sort of experience that can happen with any piece of electronics, with an electronic throttle," he said. Sean Kane, who runs a company called Safety Research Strategies in Rehoboth, MA, said, "Toyota's explanations do not account for the share of unintended acceleration complaints that we have examined." Toyota officials dispute any assertion the complicated array of electronics in its cars has an impact on the acceleration issues that have dominated headlines in the past weeks. "After many years of exhaustive testing by us and by other organizations, we have found no evidence of an electronic problem in our electronic throttle control systems that could have led to unwanted acceleration," said John Hanson, Toyota's spokesman on quality-control issues. But experts such as Anderson say the tests conducted by Toyota are not adequate. "Those tests do not reproduce what actually happens in everyday life," he said. "They are testing for certain conditions, for certain standards, but they test, for example, signals one at a time. They don't do a whole lot of signals altogether. Whereas in a car, you've got a great cacophony of electromagnetic interference going on all the time, and you really can't rely on testing of a single frequency at one time." As for the U.S. government's testing of Toyota's problems, the man in charge of the Center For Auto Safety, Clarence Ditlow, said a 2007 test on a Lexus-a Toyota brand-by the National Highway Safety and Traffic Administration to find possible electronic interference was amateurish. "They didn't do any real testing," he said. "For all I know, they just took a garage door opener, pointed it at the engine compartment and snapped it, and that's electronic interference to see whether or not anything happened. They closed the hood, and off they went. No problem." Efforts to contact the NHTSA in snow-bound Washington were unsuccessful. But Toyota spokesman Hanson said, "It's very easy to look from outside and say, 'There is no problem with the pedal.' But this is the problem, and we are fixing it." He said the company invited further testing and pointed out that NHTSA officials announced a "fresh look" into the whole area of electromagnetic testing, not just Toyota.

End quoted article, now back to my opinion:
For at least 20 years, Toyota in the USA has been so arrogant: Dealers charging over sticker if you wanted one; ridiculous prices for a used one; salesmen to stop talking to you if you as a technical question and don't just follow the sheeple and say"oh! I've gotta have one!" etc. In a way, I am glad to see them get their comeuppance.

The heart of the matter is the same as the airbus: fly by wire systems malfunction, and people die un-necessarily. When I first heard about the recall, I was not too concerned. Now that the evidence is being brought to light, it shows arrogance on the part of toada in avoiding even a serious investigation into the problem. It also shows the ineptness of federal bureaucracy. This article is particularly disturbing because it indicates the recall is window dressing and does nothing to address the root cause.

In light of this evidence, I think we should insist that vehicles be refitted with hardware throttle linkages. And keep on driving our old MBs with mechanical throttle linkages.

In honor of Herr Doktor Booth:
Loren Faeth, CQE, ASQ Senior member
(owns no fly by wire veeee-hicles)
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