Toyota recall hearings

[Razgovory]

Well, I suppose I could just trust the opinions of people I like and completely disregard opinions that I happen to disagree with.  But really, what expert opinions does anyone on languish have?  You hear things like "I was in the army", "I'm a computer programmer", and "you aren't me.  You don't know what I'm thinking".  None of those give you any real ground to have an opinion on anything.  It's just as good as "I was in a car club in college".

Gully certainly seems to know insurance well. Most of us probably qualify as an expert in something or other---at least those in skilled professions.

Oh I suppose we could do that.  We could all have our our specialties.  Dguller could be insurance, JR could be economic lawyering, Barrister could be Crown persecuting, Siege could be war crimes, and Grumbler be Napoleonic wars.  Since you know, he knew all the participants.

[Ed Anger]

ba-zing.

[KRonn]

Maybe some questions on the guy who had the runaway Prius this week? Was it faked? Though there have been some other reports of similar issues on Prius.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,589090,00.html

Man at Wheel of 'Out-of-Control' Prius Has Troubled Financial Past

he man who became the face of the Toyota gas pedal scandal this week has a troubled financial past that is leading some to question whether he was wholly truthful in his story.

On Monday, James Sikes called 911 to report that he was behind the wheel of an out-of-control Toyota Prius going 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. Twenty-three minutes later, a California Highway Patrol officer helped guide him to a stop, a rescue that was captured on videotape.

Since then, it's been learned that:

— Sikes filed for bankruptcy in San Diego in 2008. According to documents, he was more than $700,000 in debt and roughly five months behind in payments on his Prius;

— In 2001, Sikes filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff's Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a digital video camera and equipment and $24,000 in cash;

— Sikes has hired a law firm, though it has indicated he has no plans to sue Toyota;

— Sikes won $55,000 on television's "The Big Spin" in 2006, Fox40.com reports, and the real estate agent has boasted of celebrity clients such as Constance Ramos of "Extreme Home Makeover."

While authorities say they don't doubt Sikes' account, several bloggers and a man who bought a home from Sikes in 2007 question whether the 61-year-old entrepreneur may have concocted the incident for publicity or for monetary gain.

A man who bought a house in the San Diego area from Sikes in 2007 told FoxNews.com he immediately questioned the circumstances surrounding Monday's incident.

"Immediately I thought this guy has an angle here," the man said on Friday. "But I don't know what the angle is here."

The man, who asked not to be identified, said the home he purchased from Sikes had undisclosed problems that eventually cost him $20,000. He tried to sue in civil court, but Sikes had filed for bankruptcy during the process.

"It got to the point where it wasn't worth me paying legal fees to go after a guy who was broke," he said. "I ate the 20,000 bucks."

The man said Sikes came off as a dishonest businessman who was difficult to work with during the transaction.

"It didn't surprise me," he said of Sikes' recent troubles with his Prius. "I thought this guy is trying to pull a scam here."

Toyota executives, who have talked extensively with Sikes, have said they're "mystified" by Sikes' account.

"It's tough for us to say if we're skeptical," Don Esmond, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales, said Thursday. "I'm mystified in how it could happen with the brake override system."

Esmond said all Priuses are equipped with a computer system that cuts power to the wheels if the brake and gas pedals are depressed at the same time — something Sikes was doing.

Sikes' reputation apparently precedes him in Northern California, as well.

"I've been warned that he used to do business here," Jim Pernetti of AAA California Document Services told Fox40.com, "and that I should be very wary of anything with him."

Sikes called 911 on Monday to report that his gas pedal was stuck and his blue 2008 Prius was speeding at 94 mph down a freeway near San Diego. A CHP officer helped bring the car to a stop, but not before two calls to police dispatchers that spanned 23 minutes.

Asked why he didn't simply put his car in neutral, Sikes said: "You had to be there. I might go into reverse. I didn't know if the care would flip. I had no idea how it would react."

Sikes, who did not return several calls and e-mail messages, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the incident was no hoax.

"I've had things happen in my life, but I'm not making up this story," he told the newspaper.

Roughly 8.5 million vehicles worldwide have been recalled by Toyota, including more than 6 million in the United States, due to acceleration and braking problems in several models. Regulators have linked at least 52 deaths to crashes allegedly caused by accelerator problems.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has sent experts to a New York City suburb where a 56-year-old woman said her 2005 Prius sped up on its own as she was leaving a driveway.

[DGuller]

That would explain his refusal to shift to neutral (which, it turns out, the 911 dispatcher did ask him to do repeatedly).

[Berkut]

That would explain his refusal to shift to neutral (which, it turns out, the 911 dispatcher did ask him to do repeatedly).

Yeah, you had to be there. If you were there, then you would understand why he didn't take the simple action he was instructed to take that would have ended the problem quickly, even though he was told exactly what to do.

And perhaps if we were there, we would understand why the car didn't stop as it was designed to do when he pressed on the brake and gas pedal at the same time - I suspect it might have been because he wasn't stepping on the brake and gas pedal at the same time.

Scam.

[OttoVonBismarck]

This is a media frenzy with very, very little substance to back it up.

Here's a story:

A mother and her 14-year-old daughter were returning from a shopping trip and were turning onto an exit ramp from an Interstate highway.  Both were secured in their seat belts, and the vehicle's cruise control was engaged.  As the driver stepped on the brake to slow down, the cruise control actuator cable stuck in the open throttle position and would not allow the engine to return to idle.  Instead of responding to the driver's frantic braking, car left the road at a high rate of speed and crashed into a rock embankment.  The mother received severe, permanent injuries and her daughter was killed.

I've only changed a few parts of that story, the parts I removed were references to the vehicle make and model.

The car was a Lincoln Town Car, made by Ford Motor Company.

This passage is from the Wall Street Journal:

Toyota is getting a lot of attention for sudden unintended acceleration, but Ford Motor Co. has been the subject of more complaints with federal regulators in the recent past. From 2004 to 2009, based on NHTSA data, Ford had 2,806 complaints, compared with Toyota's 2,515. General Motors Co. had 1,192. A study by Edmunds.com, an independent market-research Web site, found that based on the number of vehicles on the road, Toyota ranked 17th in recalls, with Land Rover, recently acquired by India's Tata Motors Ltd., having the most..

Now, what might seem important is that Ford has had more reported cases of SUA (sudden unintended acceleration) than any other automaker, what is actually important is that even they only had 2,806 complaints over 6 years.  Back during the Audi fiasco of the 1980s, the NHTSA released a report on SUA and found that it was mostly attributable to simple driver error.  In a moment of panic, drivers can convince themselves of a lot of things (like, for example, that they are pushing their brake with all their strength and not their gas pedal.)

Let's assume that every single one of these SUA complaints is attributable to a mechanical defect.  Well, both Ford and Toyota pump out well in excess of one million cars per year (15,503,271 in American sales by Ford from 2004-2009, and you can assume close numbers from Toyota), and out of all those cars we're talking 2806 complaints for Ford and 2515 for Toyota.  Less than 2 ten thousandths of a percent of the American sales of these companies.

Let's go back to the story of the mother and daughter, in which the daughter was tragically killed.  Why aren't similar stories about Ford hitting the front pages of all the newspapers? Basically it is because for a variety of reasons Ford isn't the current victim of the "media frenzy."  Throughout the years, news programs like 60 Minutes have made it their bread and butter to expose "problems" and "frauds" committed on the American people.  Sometimes it's good stuff, but sometimes they make vast mountains out of very tiny molehills, and often times they do it without putting it in context.  Usually these things are like a snowball, something gets them on the front page (I don't know what, that's probably worthy of academic study as to why some things become a media frenzy but identical issues don't) and then all of a sudden all those stories that only make the local news start to make the national news.  The story snow balls, once Toyota had to issue the recall it was guaranteed that the snowball would turn into an avalanche, as every person in America who had any problem at all with a Toyota car was suddenly going to end up on the national news. There is also of course the profit motivation, we have to assume that a non-negative number of people are now going to be intentionally claiming their Toyota has gone amok just so they can get money out of a class action lawsuit.

Finally, we can't expect perfect cars, period.  Cars are too complicated and they will always have faults that increase danger to passengers, sometimes faults that kill passengers. In my opinion, if you get into a car you should essentially accept that risk. It's the same thing with a train or an airplane, mechanical faults can happen. Faults in the system happen, be they mechanical or electrical, and it's hard for me to put the blame on the company that designed the conveyance. As long as the design is sound, as long as there are no signs that the company knew of a problem and refused to do anything about it because it was cheaper to sit on their hands, I think we mostly have to treat automobile mess ups as a price to pay for the convenience of a personal conveyance.

It is hypocritical of us to demand personal conveyance such as a car, which is intrinsically more dangerous than more "natural" forms of transportation (like walking, but then again walking has many environmental dangers associated with it), and then bitch and moan when 2 ten thousandths of a percent of the cars have a problem that causes SUA.

[DGuller]

Agreed (partially because I made the same point a couple of pages back).  It's also cases like the Audi scam that makes you appreciate just how crooked programs like 60 Minutes can be.  I don't know why VW/Audi didn't sue them for what was later admitted to be a deliberate smear.

[MadImmortalMan]

If Congress doesn't begin to back off at this point, I think we're going to have to assume the show trials hearings are being done for reasons of misguided economic nationalism and not public safety.

[DGuller]

If Congress doesn't begin to back off at this point, I think we're going to have to assume the show trials hearings are being done for reasons of misguided economic nationalism and not public safety.

For some time I've been wondering about what gave US Congress the right to publicly berate a foreign national running a foreign company.  That seems like a diplomatic insult to me at the very least.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'd like to know more about the Transportation Secretary's conversation with Toyota in which he apparently insisted they had to issue a recall.  From what I can tell, the basis of the demanded recall was all the reports of SUA made against Toyota. If more such reports had been made against Ford, then why wasn't Ford also essentially ordered to issue a recall ala Toyota?

I truly hope Congress isn't trying to torpedo Toyota just because it is Japanese owned.  Not because of any strenuous loyalty towards Toyota, but because it makes no sense from an economic perspective. Toyota has created thousands and thousands of jobs here in the United States, admittedly (and wonderfully) these aren't UAW jobs, maybe that is why Democrats are going after Toyota. With GM and Chrysler laying off so many people it's very bad politics indeed to go after one of the remaining major auto manufacturers that employs a large number of people in America.

[The Brain]

Most of us probably qualify as an expert in something or other---at least those in skilled professions.

What the fuck are you insinuating?

[DontSayBanana]

What the fuck are you insinuating?

That your taste in livestock is impeccable.

[Admiral Yi]

Agreed (partially because I made the same point a couple of pages back).  It's also cases like the Audi scam that makes you appreciate just how crooked programs like 60 Minutes can be.  I don't know why VW/Audi didn't sue them for what was later admitted to be a deliberate smear.

What was the Audi scam?

[DGuller]

Agreed (partially because I made the same point a couple of pages back).  It's also cases like the Audi scam that makes you appreciate just how crooked programs like 60 Minutes can be.  I don't know why VW/Audi didn't sue them for what was later admitted to be a deliberate smear.

What was the Audi scam?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_100#Reported_sudden_unintended_acceleration

[Razgovory]

Agreed (partially because I made the same point a couple of pages back).  It's also cases like the Audi scam that makes you appreciate just how crooked programs like 60 Minutes can be.  I don't know why VW/Audi didn't sue them for what was later admitted to be a deliberate smear.

What was the Audi scam?

I swear one of these days you are going to ask us "What was the Apollo program".