Page 176 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

that he added a virtual second accelerator pedal to the system,
one that exactly mimicked the vehicle’s actual accelerator.
According to Bertel Schmitt, an industry expert who has
spent his entire career in the automotive industry, who blogs at
The Truth about Cars, and who has written extensively about sud-
den acceleration claims, the vehicle “had no reason to set a fault
code. Gilbert fully simulated the behavior of the actual pedal.”
Schmitt had actually predicted what method Gilbert used just
based on the brief video from the ABC broadcast; he believes that
anyone who is reasonably familiar with automotive electronics
would know that Gilbert’s approach would work. All that was re-
quired was a bit of tinkering to get the exact voltages for the two
pedal sensors right. Indeed, Exponent was able to replicate Gil-
bert’s approach and cause sudden acceleration without a fault in
vehicles by Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Subaru, and Chrysler (all
of which use an electronic throttle control [ETC] design similar
to Toyota’s). While Gilbert’s claim that his device wouldn’t work
in other brands of vehicles was technically true, it’s almost laugh-
able. To make it work required only matching the specific volt-
ages that each brand used in its ETC. According to Edmunds.
com CEO Jeremy Anwyl, all Gilbert’s demonstration actually
showed was, “[ETC] is an electronic system. If you rewire the
thing, you can get it to do almost anything.”
The same day that Toyota was releasing its report on Gilbert’s
rewiring experiment, there was live coverage of a supposed runaway
Prius on a San Diego freeway. Live video shot from helicopters
showed James Sikes driving his Prius at 80 to 90 mph while a po-
lice officer drove alongside him, barking instructions over a loud-
speaker, eventually convincing him to use the emergency brake
to slow the car and turn off the ignition. Within 24 hours, how-
ever, bloggers were able to show that the driver’s story was

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