NeilBlanchard -
(100% speculation on my part, but ...)
I don't know about drive-by-wire, but now I am betting 100
Quatloos that this will lead to a factory in China making substandard sensors to save a yuan. This would explain the problem *not* being caught during testing. The long term test would use the "up to spec" sensor, but the factory would install the faulty sensor.
This implies to me that a 2009 Pontiac Vibe + automatic tranny (aka Toyota Matrix) will also suffer from this problem.
CarloSW2