On Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:26:29 -0600, Jim Yanik
wrote:

Hell Toupee wrote in :

Harry K wrote:
On Mar 1, 11:31 pm, mm wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2010 14:53:59 -0800 (PST), wrote:

I don't know, but in the case of the Lexus that killed 4 people in CA,
the car was going out of control long enough for a passenger to call
911 and be on the call long enough to tell what was happening. The
driver was a CA Highway Patrol officer, who you would think would have
enough sense and understanding of what to do so with that amount of
time you would think he would have tried all the obvious things.
At the time, I thought it was the driver's fault, but I don't think so
anymore.

I _know_ it was the driver's fault. There is no debate about that.
He was just plain stupid.

More the fault of the car dealership that gave him that loaner car
even after the previous customer who'd used it reported the sudden
acceleration problem to them. They loaned it out again anyway.

I didn't know about that.

It's common to have failures that are not readily repeatable by service
techs. You can't fix when you cannot diagnose,because the reported problem
did not occur when checking it out.

If a a problem was reported by the previous driver, none of what you
say is an excuse for lending it out. It might be an excuse for
returning it to the owner, but not for lending it out without
notifying the borrower about the problem that they couldn't find or
fix.

and isn't the operator responsible for learning about the engine shut-off
procedure from the Operators Manual? Even if it's a loaner?

Maybe, maybe not. Probably not.

What do you claim was in the manual that he didn't know? If there
were something really novel, the dealership should have explained it.
If it wasn't really novel, then he would have been able to turn off
the car.