Anybody following the Toyota unintended acceleration lawsuits?

"There's a lot more that can fail besides some pot getting dirty. Of course in reality, no one can find out, because Toyota is not gonna release the schematic diagrams anytime soon."

I was just using the "dirty pot" scenario as a possible example, so I think you're setting up a straw man by focusing on that example.

You may rest assured that the schematics of Toyota's throttle control system were made available to to the Plaintiff's attorneys during discovery. The plaintiffs have retained expert software engineers as witnesses, and the plaintiff's attorneys have deposed the Toyota engineers who designed the software, so they definitely understand exactly how it works. If they didn't, they couldn't support their burden of proof and the judge would probably grant a directed verdict in favor of the defense.

A schematic diagram is not likely to be of much help to a jury because they probably wouldn't understand it. A good trial lawyer only introduces evidence that is going to be helpful to the jury, not evidence that is going to confuse the jury. Besides, we're talking about microcode, not a schematic.

Both parties will most definitely have an expert witness or witnesses testify about how the throttle position circuit works, explaining it in layman's language. Toyota's experts will testify about all the failure modes that they think are possible, and why each one should be ruled out. Then the plaintiff's experts will have the opportunity on rebuttal to prove that there were other possible failure modes, and which failure mode likely caused the alleged U.A.