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$1M Prize For Finding Cause of Unintended Acceleration
phantomfive writes "Edmunds Auto has announced that it will be offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can find the cause of unintended acceleration. As Wikipedia notes, this is a problem that has plagued not only Toyota, but also Audi and other manufacturers. Consumer Reports has some suggestions all automakers can implement to solve this problem, including requiring brakes to be strong enough to stop the car even when the accelerator is floored."
That's what i'd be putting my money on for 99% of the cases of short unexplained bursts of acceleration. The longer ones (eg where the driver has enough time to call the police) might actually be faults with the car, but incidents of that are so rare compared to other deaths on the road that it's hardly worth spending time on.
I've done the opposite before - I put my foot on what I thought was the accelerator but was actually the brake. The car didn't go faster so I pressed harder and nearly planted my face on the steering wheel! I can easily understand how the more unfortunate case would happen for a few seconds (which is plenty enough time to have disasterous results).
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
I would be more interested in seeing the wiring diagram. My guess is that there is no redundancy in the throttle position system and it's not closed loop. There should be 4 throttle position switches, 2 in the gas pedal and 2 on the throttle body. The ECU should do a consistency check between the 2 signals coming from the pedal and a check between the 2 signals coming from the throttle body. If it detects two different signals coming from the pedal, or two different signals coming from the throttle body, it should go into limp mode.
This is how all VAG (Volkswagen Audi Group) cars are designed.
From what I have read, the Toyotas work on the honor system. The ECU trusts the signal coming from the pedal with no way of knowing if the signal was generated by a short circuit, interference, etc.
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