Feds Find No Defect in Toyota Electronics

Toyota won a major victory today as U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said federal investigators had found no evidence the automaker's electronic throttle system played a part in incidents of unintended acceleration.

"There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas," LaHood said in a statement issued to news organizations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched the study ten months ago and called on NASA engineers to help determine whether cases of unintended acceleration in Toyota and Lexus models were caused by any cause other than sticky gas pedals and floor mats that trapped the gas pedals.

“We enlisted the best and brightest engineers to study Toyota’s electronics system, and the verdict is in. There is no electronic-based cause for unintended, high-speed acceleration in Toyotas.” LaHood said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The finding is a major victory for Toyota, which has recalled more than 18 million vehicles since 2009. Five million of those recalls were to fix floor mat problems and four million were to fix gas pedals that were prone to stick.

Toyota faces hundreds of lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of accidents blamed on unintended acceleration. It has already paid $48 million in fines in three separate cases and faces potential liabilities of $10 billion or more in the cases that are still pending.

Human error

While the report exonerated Toyota's electronic throttle system, it did not directly examine the prevalence of pedals that became trapped in place by floor mats or pedals that stuck in the open position.

However, the report said that most of the incidents NASA and DOT engineers examined occurred at low speed and appeared to be caused by driver error, with the driver inadvertently stepping on the gas rather than the brake, or in some bases depressing both pedals at once.

The few high-speed incidents that have been documented were likely caused by the floor mat jamming the accelerator pedal into the wide-open position, investigators said.