Most media articles about technical matters are junk. This isn’t just true of technology; lawyers have the exact same complaint regarding media reporting of court decisions; they have a way of generating paragraph after paragraph of mind-numbing verbiage without even stating exactly what the decision was, and what the arguments were.
So leave it to – one more time – Popular Mechanics to do this right. Recall that shortly after 9/11, PM was the only media outlet to publish a thorough, detailed debunking of the Van Jones truther conspiracy theories. This is the kind of actual, you know, information that helps separate fact from fiction.
Specifically, the sensors are a magnetic Hall-effect type, and there are two separate sensors within the assembly housing that the computer checks against each other. What they didn’t say, but would make sense is that the sensors are mounted with opposing polarity so that a stray magnetic field (if some idiot dropped a magnet) would flag an error. So their conclusions are:
– Cell phones can’t have anything to do with it.
– Magnets can’t cause a problem without flagging an error in the computer.
– The thing that that auto shop “professor” did was extremely artificial, and virtually impossible in real life.
– The most likely problem, as the author suggests, is the loose nut behind the wheel.
I think most engineers would agree.
As for who stands to gain by sensationalizing all of this, once again, it’s hard to know where ignorance stops and malice starts.
Tags: Toyota
