I just read this article on Jalopnik about the guy who claimed unintended acceleration on his prius just recently.
Funny, I was just talking to Nadine about this. With all the bad press about Toyota lately, it’s so easy for people to cry wolf and take advantage of both the media sensationalism and Toyota who is fighting to fix their image. It’s easy because how do you prove unintended acceleration occurred?? It really sounds like you can’t. I think the only one who was able to prove a problem with his car is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak because he could successfully repeat the problem over and over.
I feel for Toyota because I deal with this type of situation all the time at work. When somebody reports a problem to me, the first thing I ask for is the error message and how he/she did it. Then I attempt to repeat it by doing what they did… if I cannot, I do my darnedest to figure out another way to repeat it. If I cannot, I look through the code and try to find any possible thing that may cause it… and if I cannot, I have reason to believe that it was something besides my programming that is at fault, or the person may be just crying wolf.
How do you fix a problem that you can’t recreate? You can take your best try at it and just change things that you think might help, but that is just like stabbing in the dark.
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