Recall may not fix runaway Toyotas

Michael Pecht, a professor at Maryland's Clark School of Engineering, is wary when it comes to assessing whether Toyota's suggested repair of sticky gas pedals will have any real impact.

Mr. Pecht has written a book on sudden acceleration in automobiles. He is an expert in failure analysis and believes it is not a mechanical issue with the gas pedal causing Toyota's problems.

The runaway Toyota Prius avove landed in a creek bed

Three other independent safety analysts contacted by CNN also conclude that neither floor mats nor stuck gas pedals are an overwhelming issue.

"From what people have told me about their sudden acceleration incidents, most of them have have got nothing to do with the sticking pedal at all," said Antony Anderson, an electronics consultant in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.

Anderson said electronic throttle controls, which largely have replaced mechanical accelerators, can malfunction in ways he compared to an occasionally disobedient child.

And then there is Sean Kane, who runs a company called Safety Research Strategies in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, who said, "Toyota's explanations do not account for the share of unintended acceleration complaints that we have examined."

Toyota officials dispute any assertion that the complicated array of electronics in its cars has an impact on the acceleration issues that have dominated headlines in the past weeks.

But, as professor Pecht said, “they are in a bit of a quandary.

If they announce that electronics is a problem, they are probably going to be in a lot of trouble, because nobody's going to drive the car. So at this stage, they don't want to announce there is any electronic problem."

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