My dear Gnu.....I don't have an answer for you but here's an idea..........

Back when.........Engineers used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways they could keep idiots from damaging the wonderful crap they had designed. And it was a problem! Seriously. The fact that most people couldn't tell an alternator from a carburetor on the best day they ever had precluded anything like reading a gauge so along came "Idiot Lights." Even they didn't do the job as it was not uncommon for someone to come in and tell me their "HOT" light had come on so they drove on until they came to someplace who could help. By this point I realize the car on the hook parked in front of the shop probably would require MAJOR repairs at the very least.

So computers and electronics came along and they solved many problems and created others. One thing they could do was maintain adjustments to various devices or the engine, steering, suspension, braking, and transmission, as unit wholes......and moreover all those ECM's could be linked. What has this do to do with it? Maybe nothing in this case as I haven't talked to a Toyota wrench or found an authoratative source, but my suspicion is that what we have here is either "failure to communicate" or too much communication.

See, the engineers have finally got what they wanted! They have the means in place to keep some asshole driver from fucking up their car! No.....We won't let you throw it into neutral at high speed/high RPM or whatever. Every system has a built in fail safe factor and then all the ECM's get togehter and talk it over.   They then decide what's best to do for whatever, whenever, however.

What the engineers may have failed to figure in was the possiblility of the car destroying itself by running into a brick wall because the various fail safe sytems locked out the driver who was a helpless passenger.

I think there are a lot of possibilities here as well as the human factor/group think sort of thing. We'll see how it goes down the road, so to speak................

Spaw