It's time to pick sides

Toyota is performing a full-court media press questioning the credibility of James Sikes who claims his Prius sped out of control down the California interstate last week.

Neither engineers from Toyota nor NHTSA were able to make the car repeat its behavior nor were they able to find evidence of a malfunction. What they did say was that Sikes repeatedly and rapidly pressed the accelerator and the brake peddles. They also said there's not evidence that the pedal had any friction that would have caused it to stick.

So basically Toyota is saying Sikes lied and drove down the highway at speeds of up to 94 miles per hour for some personal gain. The fact that Sikes has a somewhat checkered past is making it easier for them. And that may be true.

It also may be true that the sudden, unintended acceleration problem is not mechanical, but a problem with the car's electronic circuitry; a computer glitch that happens at random. This would be Toyota's worst nightmare.

The Prius, like most cars, doesn't have an accelerator cable connecting the peddle to a throttle mechanism. It's essentially a computer control input that sends an electronic signal to the car's brain which tells it how fast the driver wants to go and the computer adjusts the fuel/air mixture accordingly.

If there were a problem with the circuitry it would explain Sikes' rapid application of the pedals, trying to get them working again.

So what happened on Interstate 8 last Monday?

Who really knows? All I know is that Toyota is not going away without a fight. If you believe them, they appear to be the victim of incompetent drivers and opportunistic lawyers. If you don't believe them, then they look like another intransigent bureaucracy attempting to cover their collective ass.

At this point, based on Toyota's previous behavior and the slow trickle of information that's been coming out about unintended acceleration of Toyota vehicles for over a decade, I'm leaning toward the latter.