Earlier this morning, Toyota held a webcast to demonstrate that the research conducted by David W. Gilbert, a professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, created a situation that they said is unrealistic in the real world.

Independent and Toyota engineers duplicated the demonstration referenced by Gilbert  in his Congressional testimony. The point of the presentation was to show that the sequence and nature of manipulated faults in the Gilbert demonstration are completely unrealistic under real-world conditions and can easily be reproduced on a wide range of vehicles made by other manufacturers.

“Any circuit”¦can be reengineered and rewired to produce anything that you want it to do,” said Shukri Souri, an engineer for Exponent.

In his testimony to Congress, Gilbert said that it took him just 3½ hours to create a test in a Toyota vehicle that caused it to accelerate suddenly without recording an error by the computer.

You can check out Glibert’s interview with ABC News here.

- By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Free Press