Rewiring Toyota's Truth

clipped from www.popularmechanics.com The question is: What would make an engineering professor stick his neck out so far? We can't answer that, but we do know that Gilbert was paid $1800 for his engineering study by Sean Kane, a safety consultant. Kane's for-profit firm Safety Research & Strategies Inc. works with lawyers who are currently suing Toyota over the sudden acceleration issue. He blames Toyota for making the fail-safes and redundancies in the accelerator system too easy to circumvent, arguing that Toyota should have engineered the system to be more robust. My take on it is this: You can engineer around any safety system if you try hard enough. I had a car come to my repair shop years ago with the throttle stuck open partway. The cause was easy to find—the driver had used a coat hanger to hold the carburetor throttle blades partway open, because the throttle cable had snapped and he had no way to drive the vehicle with the engine at idle. Sort of the same thing as Gilbert's demonstration.