No Cause for SUA Fears, says third party report.
Remember the Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) issue that plagued Mitsubishi Motors Philippine Corporation (MMPC) and its best-selling Montero Sport around this time last year? The controversy, if you recall, alleged that the vehicle would accelerate like mad on its own, along with being uncontrollable, leading to numerous injuries and damage to property.
A year later, MMPC has released findings on a third-party investigation done by UK-based independent automotive engineering firm Horiba Mira Ltd. The investigation, which was conducted from June to September 2016, shed the spotlight on the 2010-2015 Mitsubishi Montero Sport,. The said vehicle model, as many claim, had a tendency to suddenly accelerate on its own.
Horiba Mira, however, found out that there is no cause for such allegations. The group subjected one of the suspected vehicles to various tests, particularly Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) and Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) screenings. In the end, the said vehicle was found to have “no adverse behavior”. Moreover, Horiba Mira also noted that if there had been a case of SUA, it was mainly due to pedal misapplication by the driver—wherein the driver had mistaken the accelerator pedal for the brakes.
According to Horiba Mira, “The investigation has found only one plausible root cause for sudden unintended acceleration, and inability to stop the Mitsubishi Montero Sport vehicle. Our hypothesis is that these incidents were caused by the driver mistakenly applying the accelerator, believing that they were pressing the brake pedal.
Other root cause hypotheses have been excluded because they would require simultaneous, but temporary, malfunction of both the engine control and the vehicle braking system without fault conditions being logged by any vehicle systems and DTCs (Diagnostic Trouble Code) being recorded. Since these are independent systems, the possibility of simultaneous failure is extremely low.
There are other potential causes for undemanded acceleration that have not been ruled out by the investigation, but none of these would affect the braking system. If such a failure occurred, the driver would still have the opportunity to control the vehicle using the brakes or by disengaging the transmission.
A suite of EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) screening tests were performed on a vehicle that had previously been involved in a SUA claim. The results showed that the vehicle is extremely resilient at very high-test levels of EMI (Electromagnetic Interference). … No adverse behaviour was observed during testing with levels corresponding to EU regulations and ISO standards."
Hopefully, the report should finally put to rest all allegations of SUA.
