Tests fail to duplicate acceleration problem in Prius

[tk-421]

Here's a thing that bugs me about Toyota:

[...]the staffer wrote in the memo: "After about two hours of driving he was unsuccessful. Every time the technician placed the gas pedal to the floor and the brake pedal to the floor the engine shut off and the car immediately started to slow down."

They seem to be dead-on sure that it's a mechanical problem, and yet they have failed to replicate results consistently enough. So how can they be so confident about it?

Shouldn't they continue to look into the electronic side of things as well, just to be on the safe side? Or just to shut the naysayers up?

If what Mr. Sykes says isn't true, they should make a much bigger effort to prove him wrong. They should bore us with explanations as to why it is impossible. They should make a campaign for driver safety and print an extra few pages on the user's manual.

Instead, we get a two-hour test, a signed piece of paper, and $400 worth of mods (MSRP: $2500) for Mr. Sykes to enjoy, along with his bonus random death threat calls to his house. And people keep dying over this, and Toyota keeps getting terrible publicity over it, and they deserve every bit of it, just on the basis on how it has been handled.