On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 12:40:56 -0800, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:

wrote:
On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 10:55:11 -0800, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:

wrote:


I saw one exec claim that there were something like 8 confirmed
defective parts (pedal pivots dragging or sticking) out of 2
million.

The Toyota brand has killed or injured more people in the last
decade wih this defect than every other maunfacturer combined.

That seems highly unlikely. Got any cites?

NPR here in LA had an hour on this last week.

SHAPIRO: What, specifically, is the committee looking at here?

LANGFITT: Well, they're asking for lots of documents. And what they've said,
is they want to know when Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration first learned about these potential safety problems and what
they did to investigate and try to resolve them. Now the committee said this
in a statement, I'm kind of quoting here, our government figures show nearly
twice as many people died in Toyotas from sudden acceleration problems in
the last decade than in cars from all other automakers combined. So thats
another thing theyre really very interested in, is the number and the volume
and how many of those are Toyotas.

http://www.npr.mobi/templates/story/...ryId=123098947.

Well, there you go. The guy said he was "kind of quoting", and I can't
find anything to back up his recollection. The link I posted shows
that before the most recent round of publicity, Toyota was at 41% of
the U.A. (unintended acceleration) complaints, which is more than
double their market share. Except that obviously the complaint stats
are based on relatively small numbers of mostly unverifiable and
highly subjective owner reports, which appear to be instantly and
hugely affected by negative news stories. In fact, the number jumped
to 48% in just a few months after reports about the cop who forgot
that his shifter had a neutral position, and that one ought to know
how to shut off a vehicle before starting it up. Death rates could be
different from complaint rates, but at least one other article I
remember reading claimed that there weren't any official unintended
acceleration death numbers for any manufacturer other than Toyota. Yet
this article http://www.just-auto.com/article.aspx?id=101983 says: "It
reported the NHTSA said its records show that a total of 15 people
died in crashes related to possible sudden acceleration in Toyota
vehicles from the 2002 model year and newer, compared with 11 such
deaths in vehicles made by all other automakers". Notice the qualifier
"possible", which reflects the fact that in a lot of these cases,
especially those of potential electronic or software anomalies, it
might be impossible for anyone to know for sure which accidents were
truly due to U.A. It would only take a few erroneous anecdotal
accident reports to skew the figures.

Anyway, thanks to all the hysteria, six months down the road Toyota's
complaint numbers will be substantially worse even though the cars
haven't really changed a bit. Death numbers will probably increase as
well because drivers will have a handy and socially plausible
scapegoat. and cops will be more likely to take their word for it.
Drivers of all makes will consider it more acceptable than ever to
skip learning how to stop their car in an emergency. And five years
from now when the dust settles but we're still paying off about a
billion spent on addressing the hysteria, we could well be looking
back at the whole thing as the automotive equivalent of Y2K.

Now, just for fun, let's say that there are 30 million Toyotas built
in the last decade and still on the road in the US, and for the sake
of argument only, that 20 owners really did die in them from U.A. That
would mean that if one drove a Toyota for a decade, his odds of being
killed in it due to U.A. are 1 in 1.5 million, or about half as likely
as dying from dog bite. http://funny2.com/odds.htm Therefore, if the
US share of Toyota's costs is 1 billion, and we think that's a good
investment, then we ought to be spending 2 billion to prevent dog
bites. :-)

Wayne