[jyl]

I have some experience with this sort of stuff, from my previous career. E.g. I worked on the Audi cases.

Here is my educated guess. I suspect that Toyota engineers have been trying for years to replicate any unintended acceleration events, but have not been able to find anything to fix.

Some of you guys are engineers - what do you do with a condition that is claimed to happen in a few hundred products, out of millions of products made, and even then only supposedly happens once in the thousands of times that product is used? You get samples of the products, test them over and over, bombard them with cellphone signals and whatever else you can think of, drive them for days and weeks, have machines repeatedly press and release the pedals, etc. What do you do if you can't recreate the problem? Do you recall millions of cars - and do what, since you don't know what is wrong and haven't even been able to find that anything is wrong?

The above is just my educated guess. But this seems a lot like Audi in the 1980s. The media printed the same hysterical stories about killer cars, hundreds of owners claimed their cars had run away, plaintiffs' lawyers announced that the electronics were seizing control of the throttle, Audi nearly went out of business in the US. It was all bullcrap. There was nothing wrong with those cars. And inadvertent acceleration claims continued to be made, against many different makes of cars. Ford has a bunch of those complaints too, for example.

I'm going to wait for some actual evidence. The floormat issue, yeah I can believe that. The "electronic gremlins took control of the throttle" is a lot more doubtful, to me.

The braking issue is pretty straightforward, from everything I have read. When braking hard over sharp stutter bumps, the tires momentarily lose traction as the wheels bounce. The ABS detects the sudden change in rotational speed and momentarily backs off the brakes, then reapplies them, just like ABS always works. The drivers think something is wrong, never stopping to think about how ABS works or what it would be like to brake hard over stutter bumps without ABS. So, the solution is to ease off on the ABS software and let the wheels get closer to lockup. Maybe the drivers will now complain that their wheels locked up under braking, but at least they won't be able to say the brakes weren't being applied. On the regenerative-to-friction brake transition, I suppose the software can be tweaked there too. Is a 1/10 sec (my est) transition actually responsible for accidents? Isn't it likely that the driver was going to hit the car in front of him anyway? People hit things all the time, and then look for reasons why it wasn't their fault.