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Posted: 9:51 p.m. Wednesday, May 19, 2010
By Jamie Dupree
Congress takes another look today at the problems with "sudden acceleration" of Toyota vehicles, but the answer that will be presented by one of the automaker's executives might not satisfy lawmakers on a House committee.
Earlier this year, Toyota officials blamed sticky gas pedals, wrongly positioned floor mats and more on cases where a Toyota vehicle seemed to suddenly accelerate and go out of control.
Today, a top American executive from the Japanese automaker will tell a House panel that after several months of investigation, the Toyota answer has not changed.
James Lentz will admit that Toyota's communication with their customers isn't very good when it comes to explaining the features of a Toyota vehicle that might be misinterpreted as a "sudden" and uncontrollable acceleration.
So what are the top causes according to Toyota?
+ misplaced floor mats
+ sticky gas pedals
+ driver's wrongly interpreting a natural increase in engine speed
+ double or triple stacked floor mats
What isn't to blame is the internal electronics that run the throttle, something that many lawmakers were convinced was at fault.
"Significantly, none of these investigations have found that our Electronic Throttle Control System with intelligence, or ETCS-i, was the cause," Lentz says in his prepared remarks.
It will be interesting to see how members of Congress react, because when Lentz laid the blame on the floor mats and the sticky gas pedal last time, he got an earful.
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