This Toyota recall issue concerning Prius accelerators has become much more than a simple and minor defect. I believe that this matter will permanently damage the Toyota brand and it could continue to get worse for the company, because Toyota may be misdiagnosing the true cause of the problem. Toyota believes that the problem is the result of a defect in the "fly-by-wire" / "drive-by-wire" electronic throttle control system. However, the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak does not believe it is a hardware issue. No, Wozniak believes that Toyota's problems are caused by a software failure.
Wozniak was speaking at Discovery Forum 2010 when he went off topic for a few minutes and spoke about problems with his 2010 Toyota Prius.
"I don't get upset and teed off at things in life, except computers that don't work right," was his segue into the Toyota comments. Then he said he had been trying to get through to Toyota and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) for three months but could not get anyone to explore an alleged software-related acceleration problem--as described below.
"Toyota has this accelerator problem we've all heard about," Wozniak said. "Well, I have many models of Prius that got recalled, but I have a new model that didn't get recalled. This new model has an accelerator that goes wild, but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again--safely."
"This is software. It's not a bad accelerator pedal. It's very scary, but luckily for me, I can hit the brakes," he said.
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