I’m afraid I have to agree with The Woz. The ‘sticky pedals’ thing is nonsense.
Woz seemed to make it clear on CNN last night that this is a differenet issue.
He was talking about the Active Cruise (radar following) on the Prius, not the pedal issue common to the other vehicles. He said he didn’t regard this issue as life threatening, but it’s worry me enough not to use the feature.
A software problem is a likely culprit since many of the high profile cases that I have heard about don’t fit the “sticky accelerator” story. The cars speed up without warning, and the brakes don’t override the accelerator.
If I were a Betting Man I'd offer to wager that what is happening is: the Toy is getting a bad reading from one of its sensors. The computer program is written assuming that the input from the sensor is valid. This is a mistake that green programmers tend to make -- and then they fail to supply the needed validity checking and error recovery code
This could be the cruise control system -- or the idle control motor that is yanking the throttle open but with these things going to full power, as reports seem to indicate -- I'd bet they have a bad sensor reading that is not questioned by the computer program. The obvious thing to do-- if you think you are getting a bad sensor reading --- release the cruise control
Personally though I suspect the idle control motor more -- as this happened to one Toy while the driver was trying to back out of his driveway. He probably didn't have the cruise on -- but that doesn't mean a computer glitch wouldn't affect things though