Staff Writer
Shortly after a Toyota Prius was stopped recently after reaching speeds of up to 94 miles-per-hour on a California freeway, CNN was looking for an expert to explain how the incident could be caused by a stuck accelerator.
They found that expert at the Jacksonville office of CED Investigative Technologies, which provides forensic engineering analysis for vehicular and product liability cases.
Bio-mechanical Engineer Grant Bevill was contacted by CNN to appear on it’s “Rick’s List” program, hosted by Rick Sanchez. Bevill had previously appeared on Court TV, now truTV, as an expert in a car rollover case, and CNN and truTV are both owned by Time Warner, so they had his contact information on file.
“They contacted me the day after the incident in California happened,” said Bevill, who earned master’s and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. “They wanted me to be involved in a discussion, in general, about what could happen with unintended acceleration.”
Bevill works with the company’s “Vehicle Crash Group” and has experience investigating issues of unintended acceleration.
CED’s engineers have been involved in investigating accelerator issues when they were controlled by a mechanical cable. Newer vehicles use a technology called “throttle by wire,” and it uses electronics in the accelerator pedal to send certain voltages to the electronics on the engine to set the speed.
Bevill was brought up-to-speed on the interview process March 9. He would go to a local studio and appear live on Rick’s List.
“It was unlike anything I had imagined,” said Bevill, of his nearly five minutes of fame. “The set looks like an office to people out in TV land, but there are all these lights shining at you that you can’t see past. The host is in New York or somewhere, and all you have to react to is this audio feed. They tell you to stare at this red light in the back of the room, so it looks like you are talking to the host.”
It wasn’t just the glare and warm lights that made Bevill a little uncomfortable.
“The line of questioning went against everything we are trained to do as forensic engineers. They wanted definite answers rather than speculation, and I offered as much opinion as I could without offering something that was unsupportable, getting out of the realm of speculation,” said Bevill.
“This incident happened the day before on the other side of the country, and I wasn’t able to examine the equipment involved or investigate. I know what (CNN) wanted, but I wasn’t able to provide that because there wasn’t enough information available for me to give anything other than speculation,” he said.
Bevill has been working for CED for two years, and one of the reasons he was hired was his ability to explain complex engineering information in lay terms.
“We look for engineers that can talk to the layman, when they go to trial they have to explain things in terms that the layman can understand,” said Peter McCawley, CED Director of Business Development-Southern Region. “One of the other things our engineers do on a regular basis is go into law offices for continuing legal education seminars and other groups for seminars, so they are used to talking in front of people and explaining things so everyone can understand the material.”
CED was initially formed as a group of United States Naval Academy professors and has grown to more than 30 employees and six locations nationwide, consisting of Baltimore/Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago, Jacksonville, New York/Stamford and Palm Beach.
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