"Electronics Don't Rewire Themselves"

Mike Allen in Popular Mechanics critically reviews the claim by Southern Illinois professor Dave Gilbert that "all electronic throttles are inherently dangerous". Bottom line:

One pertinent factoid: Not a single case of sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) has been attributed to bad wiring. None. Toyota has been harvesting parts from vehicles with documented SUA issues as part of the recall, and they're checking them all. None of them have shown any sign of corrosion or shorted wiring. Toyota also illustrated that Gilbert's modification works on cars from many different manufacturers. During a webcast explaining the modifications, Toyota had a half-dozen cars built by a half-dozen companies that were rewired in the same manner. All of them produced the same result as that Avalon. 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.

(Link via Instapundit.)