Toyota “sticking pedals” recall is a smokescreen

EurIng Keith Armstrong: Now that lead has been removed from solder, which is now mainly tin (with a little silver and copper added) all sorts of new possibilities arise for short-circuits and open-circuits, and intermittent shorts and opens, mainly on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and mainly associated with small-footprint integrated circuits (ICs), especially ball-grid arrays (BGAs).

Its really just another cause of intermittent or fixed short-or-open circuits in electronic PCBs and modules - but one that would not have been any problem until a few years ago, and so could have caught Toyota by surprise.

John Barnes

Bibliography: "People can be killed or injured, and their homes and offices/ businesses burned down, when lead-free/ RoHS-compliant electronics self destruct by the new failure modes listed above. There is a lot of discussion right now about whether the sudden unexpected acceleration (SUA) problems with 8 models of Toyota vehicles-- which has forced the recall of over 6 million vehicles in the US-- and 8.5 million vehicles worldwide-- is due to tin whiskers."