Toyota held a press conference today at its Torrance headquarters to establish why an experiment discussed during a Congressional inquiry does little to implicate its cars in unintended acceleration accidents.

The issue at hand was an experiment conducted by Professor David Gilbert from Southern Illinois University. He testified to Congress that he had devised an experiment that produced an intentional short in Toyota's electronic throttle control system that would induce full throttle acceleration. More importantly, the experiment could be conducted without tripping any fault codes in the car's electronic control unit.

Well, according to Toyota, Professor Gilbert's experiment has no real world relevance. Its experts, as well as engineers Toyota hired to look into the situation, contend that the experiment involves far too many steps for it to simply happen by chance. Toyota also notes that the experiment produces the same result on virtually any car with an electronic throttle pedal, whether it's prefabricated by Toyota or not. Click through for a video of their demonstration.
 
 

As you can see, this BMW 3 Series suffered the same fate as Toyota's Avalon, the car used in Gilbert's original test. A Subaru and a Ford reacted similarly under the same conditions. Actually, this wasn't all that surprising after the Toyota officials explained how it was done.

Here's the most simplified explanation we can muster. There are two redundant wires that send throttle input signals to the engine control computer. They run to the computer separately, but Professor Gilbert first linked them with a 200 ohm resistor.

He then introduced a outside signal by splicing a hot wire, adding a switch and connecting it to the throttle control wires. When he flipped the switch, a signal was sent through the throttle control wires even though the pedal wasn't depressed. That's what's happening in the video above when the engineer makes the final connection.

Now, none of this addresses the possibility that there's a problem with Toyota's software, but it does show how overly simplified the whole issue has become. There are no doubt still plenty of members of Congress who remember the testimony but won't ever see why it's irrelevant. Plenty more to come on this story for sure.