NASA played a key role in the long running Department of Transportation investigation into Toyota’s runaway car mystery.
The sudden acceleration issue forced the Japanese automaker to recall 11 million Toyota and Lexus automobiles and pay nearly $50 million in fines.
In a report released Tuesday, experts from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center concluded that Toyota electronics and 280,000 lines of software associated with the Electronic Control System were not to blame for reports of accidents and some deaths caused by sudden high speed accelerations of Toyota automobiles.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded instead that a pair of previously addressed mechanical issues may have been involved, a sticky accelerator and interference from floor mats.
The National Research Council, a government think tank, plans additional studies that will examine the design and placement of automobile accelerator and brake pedals as well as ignition and brake override systems.
“We enlisted the best and brightest engineers to study Toyota’s electronic systems, and the verdict is in,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared on Tuesday. “There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high speed acceleration in Toyotas.”
The space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center contributed to the probe as well by demonstrating that Toyota electronics were not vulnerable to electromagnetic interference.
The NASA Engineering and Safety Center, which was established as an independent safety organization in the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia accident, concluded that an electronic cause for the sudden high speed accelerations would require an unlikely simultaneous failure of two separate electronics sensors, said Michael Kirsch, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center team leader.
The NESC, which is located at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., has participated in more than 400 technical investigations, not all of them associated with the space program.
Last year, NESC engineers were among those from NASA who assisted the trapped Chilean miners.
The NASA squad helped to design a capsule to pull the trapped miners from a cavern nearly a half mile under ground.