Toyota DOES have serious issues, and they ARE dealing with them.
http://www.autoweek.com/article/20100112/CARNEWS/100119974
Once this modification is in place, there will never again be a runaway Toyota in the news, unless it truly is a fake report.
Thanks for the link to the story. I have two observations:
1. The modification that Ford is talking about will idle the engine if the controller notices hard or perhaps prolonged application of the brake in the presence of high throttle
(Goodbye power-packing at the start line, I suppose).
They should be able to accomplish this in firmware which can be downloaded to the engine control unit. If they have to install anything mechanical, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
2. The spokeslady in the video clip said that Ford have given carte blanche to an outside testing organization to uncover any problems. So far, she maintains that no electronic (including software, one assumes) malfunctions have been discovered.
This may seem to be at odds with the recall and retrofit, but not exactly. It adds a layer of fail-safe, with the significant exception that if there really is an intermittent computer lockup, and the fail-safe is in the firmware, the fail-safe may itself fail.
I’m pretty sure they will be putting further realtime selfchecks into the firmware, as well as attempting to catch anomalous accelerator events and record them in EEPROM, just as they do with airbag deployments. These can be read back by a standard diagnostic readout device.