2010 prius brake failure causing accident

If one spends years on various automotive discussion forums, this hit and run smear posting is very easy to spot. A new member that registers and posts on the same day to never come back. The negative post describes common issues with a given car but exaggerates them for a dramatic story or combines several different issues into one story. Since the story is made up, there lots of flaws in it, but OP never comes back to clarify or answer questions.

Interestingly, some forums are very high yield for this (RAV4world.com comes to mind) while some are totally spared (Coroland.com would be an example), which makes no sense as one would expect more catastrophic failures in corolla, being more common.

Being new to PriusChat, I don't know frequency of this here.

One more thing, the posters could be originating from overseas (say Korea) and may be at the high levels of management at their marketing divisions, so media exposure is not an issue.

 

You're putting way too much thought into this.
It's not coming from the CEO or a Boardroom. It can be some low level hack assistant manager at a small dealership who will do anything to up their brand and tear down the competition. As we've seen before these things can go viral when the right media outlet picks up on it. Just sit down at a computer, google the competitions web pages and forums and start hacking away. Most gets blown off, but sometimes you hit the jackpot, indirectly moving more customers into your store.
It happens in every industry, not just automobiles. one well placed anonymous rumor can cost a company (or political candidate for that mater) millions.

 

If you look at a consumer rating site like Kudzu.com, it seems to me that some auto dealerships are posting their own positive reviews. Clues would be the sudden flurry of reviews that occur on the same day, the praise of individual staff members by name (and the correct spelling of unusual names) and the number of "reviewers" for which this is their one and only review. It is also odd how some dealerships have ridiculous numbers of reviews as compared to others in the area.

I wonder if the same thing happens at the product level. The postings don't have to be by the corporation. I would be more likely to suspect salespeople at the dealerships posting positive reviews for their own product and negative for the competitors trying to pull business their own way.

 

You were the one who said "Please see my above comment on being naive in the ways of big dollar advertising." Now it's just some rogue low-level hack doing it on his own?

I can tell you one thing for sure, if someone in the marketing department at a major automotive company was caught implementing an internet sabotage campaign they would be fired, sued, and who knows what else. It's not part of the marketing program of major corporations. It's just too risky.

 

Sure, on a grass roots level people get sponsored for things like wheels, tires, body kits. As a sponsor you ask them to be vocal about the products, promote them on forums, magazines etc.

But no marketing manager at a medium to large size company would get approval to orchestrate a smear campaign. To make it official there would be too many pieces of evidence floating around. One leak and you're sunk.

 

I didn't say it would be someone from the marketing department, or have the marketing department approval. And it doesn't have to even be someone in the car industry. It may even be some guy who has had his car repossessed by Toyota Financial and wants to hurt the company any way he can.
Large companies and corporations are constantly fighting anonymous damaging rumors.
They can be very hard to trace down on the internet.

 

Well that's a completely different scenario compared to what you said previously.

 

Well that's a completely different scenario compared to what you said previously.

Really? It was only you who brought up the idea of top management doing the rumors.

Some person stops by here and his first post is a "Neighbor" had a crash directly caused by defective brakes and he's furious. Add in the lack of details or follow up posts and it smells like a rat.

A rumor can destroy sales and cause the companies stock to nosedive.
Rebuilding credibility is time consuming and costly. It is naive to think it doesn't happen.

The Rumor:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack!
The Damage:
As soon as word hit the internet that Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with a failing heart, this happened to Apple stock:

​

In the first hour of trading the stock lost 10% of its value ($4.8 billion dollars), spurred by panicked investors who apparently believe that Apple Computer Inc. is made up entirely of Steve Jobs working alone in his garage.
How It Got Started:
A teenager and a keyboard.
Authorities say the whole thing was just some random 18-year-old posting the rumor to CNN's iReport website, which boasts at the top of its page, "... The stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post."

​

 

In most cases, as I said, I give the benefit of the doubt to even a 1st time poster with a negative issue.

My suspicion grows if that poster never replies again

Usually sincere or insincere will reveal with enough communication. I really would never accuse someone of being a troll, but I'd assume you wouldn't sincerely post here asking a question if you did not want discourse and information exchange.

Some perfectly reasonable questions were asked of the OP in regards to the situation and the OP went silent. Proof that the OP is a troll? Of course not. But I have to be that much more suspicious.

As far as damage a thread like this could possibly do? If anyone sincerely looking for information on The Prius, stumbled upon this thread and did not dig any deeper than simply reading the headline or the first post? Well slap me silly and call me Sikes, but I think they would be getting what they deserve.

 

Use your head. The rest here are seeing this for what it is.

It is possible. Just very unlikely. There is as yet nothing to give the OP legitimacy in what they claim, hence the troll accusations. I've been on the net for a long time and if it looks like a duck and quacks like one it's probably a troll.

That is why such trolling doesn't happen at the beck and call of a company. It just happens because that's what people like to do on the internet. No need to look for a reason.

We don't know enough either way. OP has not returned and those of us who've spent more than 15 minutes on the internet are pretty darn sure he's a troll. Maybe not, probably.

Certainly a little poor information can devastate a company, though. Look at Toyota last year its sales hit severely over what subsequently amounted to very little in the way of large scale, REAL problems with stuck accelerators. And I understand when Audi had the same problem in the 80's due to an incident with driver error it also brutalized sales for a time. The availability heuristic is irrational but powerful.

 

Yep, lots of similar examples in [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing]Astroturfing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] and Troll (Internet) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Here's another:

"As reported on April 8, 1999, investors became victims of trolling via an online financial discussion regarding PairGain, a telephone equipment company based in California. Trolls operating in the stock’s Yahoo Finance chat room posted a fabricated Bloomberg News article stating that an Israeli telecom company could potentially acquire PairGain. As a result, PairGain’s stock jumped by 31%. However, the stock promptly crashed after the reports were identified as false.[25]"

 

Exactly what I was thinking!

Craig

 

You said "big advertising dollars." Clearly you were implying that the Trolls are funded by large corporations. I showed why that is a fallacy. You agreed and stated the Trolls might be low-level employees or disgruntled customers. Completely different scenario than your original statement.

 

The Steve Jobs heart attack and PairGain stock scandals are both perfect examples of why trolling is dangerous. In both cases the people responsible were found by the SEC. One was arrested, the other was questioned and released.

PairGain:

"Gary Dale Hoke, 25, was arrested by the FBI at his home Wednesday in North Carolina for allegedly disseminating false information about the company, whose stock is publicly traded, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles."

Arrest made in PairGain stock scam | Networking | ZDNet UK

Apple:

"Manipulating the value of a stock for your personal gain is a crime with some hefty penalties, so the SEC tried to trace the story and see if it’s originator had any financial reasons for starting the rumor. It turns out he didn’t.

The story made it’s way to CNN’s iReport.com, which is where it really started to hit the mainstream news, but it’s origin was a tad less respectable: an 18 year-old kid posting on 4Chan as a prank."

Steve Jobs Heart Attack Rumor Started On 4Chan By A Teenager

So be careful when trolling.

 

The dangers of the internets. I've often come upon a story somebody posts somewhere and when I google it for confirmation it comes up many more times from different sources but a quick inspection indicates they are all just verbatim of the first. Saying something a thousand times doesn't make it more true, but it does on the interwebs!

 

Any perceived implying is totally on your part. I agreed to nothing of the sort.
You seem to be the type that must have the last word and you may have it, I am done responding to you.
Kindest Regards,
Bo

 

The other problem is that because threads like this garner a flurry of attention, posts, traffic, and responses, they rank highly on the search engines, and often come up on the first page of Google when people search for possible problems/risks on cars they are thinking of buying. Surely some unsuspecting average joe could easily get scared off from buying a Prius reading a couple of first posts like this one.

 

Seriously, I think this whole thread should be deleted. It's just bad press for the Prius. Some newbie comes here, makes a statement about brake failure, and they're gone, 1 post only.

You who are considering a Prius, there is nothing wrong with the car. Untold thousands are driving 3rd Gen Prius right now with major brake problems. If a problem is widespread, Toyota will fix it quickly anyway, hey, they are Toyota, nearly the largest car mfr. in the world.

No worries.

 

I don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying. However what happened to Toyota last year was A LOT more than just "a little poor information".

What happened to Toyota last year was the tangible halt of production and one of the largest recalls in automotive history. It was the real tangible modification of millions of pedals.

What happened to Toyota last year was a MASSIVE Tsunami of Poor information, in the form of huge campaigns of fear inducing sensational reports embraced by most of mainstream media.

The well spring for these realities IMO did not come from Trolls on the internet...but from REAL recalls and some unfortunately very high profile tragedies.

Certainly trolling in a place like Prius Chat...isn't good. But do I fear it? Or assign it much potency as far as potential damage? Not really. IMO Prius Chat has such an active and vital group of supporters and community that any claim that is spurious or "trollish" very quickly is revealed as such.

Sure the uninitiated could search and stumble upon such a thread and be misguided. But if you stumble upon Prius Chat and let your decision be guided by 1 or 2 posts...or single threads? Then my guess is you weren't really ready to purchase a Prius anyway...if you are serious about the purchase you will dig deeper.

Anyway, my approach is always to start by giving the benefit of the doubt concerning sincerity. If someone is a troll, either their reactions...or lack of reaction will quickly and obviously reveal them as such.

 

I typically take the same approach.

This thread is now two days old. At least in this case, Thai still won the thread, IMO