When Steve Wozniak speaks, a lot of people tend to listen. And when the Woz talks about software, people tend to listen harder. Yesterday Steve Wozniak was speaking at the Discovery Forum 2010, but he decided to veer off topic during his presentation to talk about problems with his 2010 Prius:
"I don't get upset and teed off at things in life, except computers that don't work right," was his segue into the Toyota comments. Then he said he had been trying to get through to Toyota and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) for three months but could not get anyone to explore an alleged software-related acceleration problem--as described below.
"Toyota has this accelerator problem we've all heard about," Wozniak said. "Well, I have many models of Prius that got recalled, but I have a new model that didn't get recalled. This new model has an accelerator that goes wild but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again--safely."
"This is software. It's not a bad accelerator pedal. It's very scary, but luckily for me I can hit the brakes," he said.
There has been LOTS of discussion on various forms of sudden acceleration in the 2010 Prius, but this is the first I'm hearing about it while in cruise control. It should be interesting to see the fallout from Wozniak's comment in the coming days.
Via Cnet
Photo from Digibarn
