This is definitely a witch hunt. The same thing happened in my ford truck when I misplaced the mat after cleaning it. I simply turned the car off put the clutch in and coasted to a stop at the edge of the highway and fixed the mat. From the reports this sounds like the exact situation for the Toyota cars. From my perspective nothing is wrong with the cars and the whole thing is way overblown.
Many of the Toyota problems had nothing to do with the mats--they are drive by wire and the computer was slammed on the gas without the pedal being depressed. Depending on when this occurs it could be deadly even with an expert driver.
Please forward your proof of this to Toyota and the congressional committee to which Toyota swore this was not the case.
It's tempting to blame drive by wire, since electronics is black magic to most people. Keep in mind that most passenger jets in the sky are fly by wire, these days.
For you to point blank claim this to be true, when it's been flatly denied several times, seems a bit over the top, don't you think?
Complaints of out of control acceleration increased several times over after moving to DbW and some recent complaints have noted that no floor mats were in the vehicle (which makes it hard to blame on floor mats):
Toyota is claiming it's not the DbW system, but they also thought they had this issue fixed a long time ago. It's a hard thing to prove unless you see it yourself (unlike a broken cable like we used to have before DbW).
Complaints of out of control acceleration increased several times over after moving to DbW
Complaints of out of control acceleration increased after 2000. I guess it's the millennium bug. In other words: correlation is not causation. Moreover, no numbers are presented to actually support this correlation. What about 1996-1999? 100 cases would be totally plausible.
Even Woz thinks is the DbW software
With the rather important difference that it doesn't actually cause any problems, because he can just brake and make the acceleration stop.
Really? I think it was an article here (maybe, maybe not, I'm pretty hung over today) that mentioned that the problem was that the primary and backup pedal position sensors' wires could short and max out.
You usually design so that a single point of failure can't hurt you. If one position sensor (they use pots, since they're practically indestructable and not vulnerable to ESD, power transients, etc) fails, you sense the problem with the other sensor. They're not "primary and backup", they're both equally important.
You postulate that both sensors short out at the exact same instant, since any other scenario would power down the vehicle. They did it within milliseconds of each other, and they did it at some intermediate, yet believable level. (They didn't "peg at maximum", as that would also alert the software there was a problem. Instead they pegged, identically, at some believable value.
