The out of control Prius in San Diego whose driver was rescued through a combination of quick thinking, emergency responders and a steep hill, has been all over the news. In fact, it seems like hardly a day has gone recently by that the Toyota recall of 8.5 million vehicles and counting due to unintended acceleration and brake failure, or the fall out there of, hasn’t made headline news. So it’s hardly surprising that the U.S. government is thinking about taking steps to make sure these kind of tragic defaults can’t happen any more.
“We are looking at the possibility of recommending the brake override system to all manufacturers of automobiles,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood said in his testimony in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that is probing the recent Toyota recalls.
What is a “brake override system” exactly? The system being considered at the moment would allow a driver to override the accelerator and switch a car’s engine to idle if both the gas and brake pedals are being pressed at the same time. According to Sam Abuelsamid of Autoblog.com, “essentially there is a form of logic in the engine’s computer. What it does is it looks for the driver applying the brake pedal. If the throttle is open and the brake pedal is being pressed, the throttle is disabled.”
While it’s clear that this kind of an emergency system is warranted in suspect Toyotas, do all cars really need this kind of a system to be required, and should the federal government really have oversight of this kind on vehicle manufacture? According to Abuelsamid, “What happened to Toyota could happen to anyone. Some automakers have already taken the actions to prevent this problem, but the next issue could and likely will pop up anywhere. The increasing dependence on electronics and software will make it some ways more difficult to reproduce and diagnose problems.”
