Toyota: No flaw with safety system

Toyota has taken its strongest step yet to silence critics who blame faulty electronics for runaway cars and trucks.

Meeting with reporters, Toyota addressed the work of David Gilbert, an automotive technology professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, whose work has been the basis of doubts about Toyota's mechanical fixes.

Gilbert told a congressional hearing on February 23rd, that he recreated sudden acceleration in a Toyota Tundra by short-circuiting the electronics behind the gas pedal - without triggering any trouble codes in the truck's computer. The trouble codes send the car's computer into a fail-safe mode that allows the brake to override the gas.

But, Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research, and a consulting firm, Exponent Inc. rejects the professor's findings. He says the experiments were carried out under conditions that would never happen on the road.

The automaker maintains its assertion that simpler mechanical flaws, not electronics, were to blame.