NASA, NAS To Probe Unintended Vehicle Acceleration.

NASA, NAS To Probe Unintended Vehicle Acceleration.

NBC Nightly News (3/30, story 2, 2:20, Williams) reported that given the lingering mystery as to the cause of unintended acceleration in Toyotas, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced yesterday that the federal government is "stepping in." LaHood: "We couldn't find it at DOT. Toyota couldn't find it, so we are going to hire the experts we think will help us figure out if electronics are inhibiting the safety of these automobiles." NBC added, "Experts who are not generally associated with auto mechanics, the National Academy of Sciences and the space agency NASA." NASA's involvement "makes complete sense" to industry insiders.

        Michael O'Brien wrote at The Hill's (3/30) "Blog Briefing Room" that LaHood "announced 'major investigations' Tuesday into the causes of unintended vehicle acceleration." LaHood "commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to investigate the causes of the problem across the entire auto industry," and he asked the NHTSA to work with NASA as it looks into the unintended acceleration of Toyotas. The news "seemed to be taken favorably by the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which circulated news of LaHood's investigation to reporters."

        Toyota Recall Could Be Linked To Cosmic Ray Radiation. LiveScience (3/26, Chow) reported that "as ongoing inquiries attempt to locate the source of the problem and figure out a fix" to unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles, "investigators might find it useful to examine a far-out culprit: cosmic ray radiation from deep in the cosmos, which has been known to plague vulnerable data and memory chips in electronics." Scientists now say "cosmic rays could be at least partially to blame for Toyota's mechanical defects. ... Electronic chips record, store and process information in the form of 'bits.' High-energy particles that pass through these chips can alter or 'flip' a bit, resulting in a Single Event Upset (SEU)." The "risks are especially high for circuits that are 'field programmable,' explained Lloyd W. Massengill, director of engineering at the Vanderbilt Institute for Space and Defense Electronics at Vanderbilt University."