Unintended Acceleration Articles/Facts

I think this article helps put things in context on SUA incidents:

Watchdog Paid to Dig into Acceleration Woes - WSJ.com

The italics are mine. Has anyone else noticed that at least until the past few weeks, the number of Toyota SUA complaints was dropping?

 

And of course, ABC's RIGGED Camry was a HOAX. Performing the same wiring manipulations caused ANY car they tried it on to accelerate out of control.

The Mechanics of ABC News' Unintended Toyota Acceleration Hoax - Toyota Recall - Jalopnik

 

Car Driving Safety Statistics and Unintended Acceleration - Popular Mechanics

Popular mechanics puts it into perspective. 32 people die in TEN YEARS. About three per year. Compared to about 370,000 people finding other ways to die in car wrecks over the same period. Distracted driving killed about 60,000 over ten years.

More people die from fatal 'mobility scooter' accidents than from 'runaway' Toyotas.

 

There's this link:

NPR Vehicle Acceleration Complaints Database : NPR

From this thread:

http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-ii-...tsa-data-acceleration-complaints-npr-org.html

Pretty good info.

- D

 

Let's have a moment of silence for all the clowns in the clown car.

 

Careful, that analysis is for all complaints. A subsequent edmunds analysis showed that Toyota had the most unintended acceleration complaints:

Toyota Leads in NHTSA Unintended Acceleration Complaints, Edmunds.com Analysis Shows

 

Local paper has a graphic that I can't easily cut and paste, so I'll type from NHTSA

Manufacturers involved in deaths attributed to sudden acceleration since 1980

Toyota 51
Ford 20
Chrysler 12
GM 9
Nissan 4
Honda 4
Daimler 4
Kia 2
VW 1
Subaru 1
Mitsubishi 1
BMW 1

Total 110

If you sift the figures to dealths since 2001 Toyota looks much worse. Agree with the sentiment about perspective, but there has definitely been something going on at toyota with unintended acceleration. I do agree with the current remedy of a brake override and open investigation of reports, but we should not sugar coat the past.

 

Check again Evan. The article I posted is dated February 22 and looks specifically at UA. It's not by market share, but the delta is so large that I'm certain Toyota would still be in the lead even if it were broken down that way.

The one you posted was for all complaints filed to the NHTSA, not just UA.

In fact, the article I posted references the one you posted:

 

That one only counted the number of complaints without weighted basis. The one Evan posted is weighted per car sold. It shows there are cars from 16 others manufacturers that has higher percentage of SUA than Toyota.

Quote from Feb 22nd article:

 

929 Toyota vs. 300 Ford. Does Toyota has 3x the market share than Ford?

 

Again, the earlier article is for all complaints filed to the NHTSA, broken down by market share. The second article is specific to unintended acceleration, but uses raw numbers (not broken down by market share.

Absolutely not. According to the Feb 10 article, Ford has 17.6% of the market share to Toyota's 13.5%.

 

The age of the reported driver has to be considered as well. I would think Toyota drivers are older.

 

Note that many of these cases were attributed to driver error. Whether that attribution is correct will never be known. It could be that people who buy Toyotas are more likely to have incidents of pedal error. NB: I am not making that argument.

 

I do not disagree that the majority of the UA reports are likely the result of driver error, which is clearly influence by driver age. I just believe in the accuracy of how things are presented and the Feb 10 Edmunds analysis was not specific to the issue of UA.

Looking at UA by market share, I come up with Toyota Motor Corp. by far in the lead with 83.9 reported incidents per market share percentage as compared to Ford at 22.0, Chrysler at 13.1, Honda at 12.0, Nissan at 10.5, and GMC at 6.2. So UA complaint data is not favorable to Toyota.

Of course there are mitigating factors, which should and have been explained. I'm not sure if its enough to offset that large of a disparity however. Can it be shown that Toyota's are disproportionately driven by an older population than other brands?

In general I do think that incidents of UA are very small in comparison to all of the other hazards associated with driving and that much ado is being made of very little (I won't say nothing because people have died). However, I don't think that's a compelling argument for Toyota to make.