Toyota: no flaw in real-world safety systems

• Source: Xinhua
• [14:52 March 09 2010]
• Comments

Toyota Motor Corp said that it had found no flaw with its throttle controls in response to an auto engineering expert's criticism, according to media reports Tuesday.

Toyota called a news conference to refute the conclusions from a study by David Gilbert at Southern Illinois University who claimed that Toyota's electronic safety systems could be rewired to allow the car to unintentionally accelerate.

Toyota said an outside review of Gilbert's study by Chris Gerdes, a Stanford University expert and engineering consulting company Exponent, found that the researchers had essentially rewired the car's electronics to create the problem -- something that could not happen in real life.

The carmaker said that some cases of sudden unintended acceleration still occurring in vehicles that had been repaired might have been the result of fixes being done incorrectly. It was confident that the repairs were effective, when done properly.

More than 60 cases were reported last week in the United States of the unintended acceleration in repaired vehicles.