The Real Risk of Toyotas

There are entire lobbies on each of these things. In many cities you lose constitutional rights to see a lawyer without having fluids drawn if you are suspected of drugs or alcohol. Every place has strong speeding laws, and many jail time for reckless driving. Huge outcry n cell phones and laws against talking or texting while driving. If you haven't heard the outcry, you haven't listened, and haven't taken a driving test or education test lately. If you injure someone while driving with a small amount of alcohol there are mandatory sentences and fines. If you block safety measures and many people die, there are many defenders saying look over there they were doing the best they can.

 

Lawsuits should be the last recourse - nothing wrong with that.

Tom

 

For a while Toyota had forgotten the meaning of 'KaiZen' and 'Prius'.
Now things going right gradually. I hope so !

 

Originally Posted by burritos
NPR Vehicle Acceleration Complaints Database : NPR

Yeah, it is a really interesting site. One of the issues it raises is the psychological effect of hearing things on the news. Audi/Volkswagen is always high--can we attribute that to the Audi issue many years ago that maybe sensitized folks with these cars to the problem, and made them more likely to report? I don't know, but I wouldn't rule it out.

The bad news for Toyota is that its higher than average numbers start about 2002, long before the issue reached the public consciousness as to Toyota. So, up to the time this entered the news, we might hypothesize that the Toyota reports are just as likely to be real vs driver error as a random non-Audi/Volkswagen manufacturer; and we might hypothesize that the reporting rate for incidents would be similar for toyota and a random non-Audi manufacturer.


On another part of this subject:
Austingreen raises a real important point about wanting regulators to regulate, so we didn't have to have so many lawsuits as a last resort.
I agree with him mostly. However, we know that a very large number of people don't agree with either of us, at least in the US. Basically, since Reagan's first election, most US politicians (including Clinton--the file on Obama is still open) have moved away from the modern European style of governance--the Europeans rely very heavily on regulation, and very little on lawsuits to guarantee safety and other consumer protections. Anyway, US voters seemed to be happy with this for nearly thirty years--we will see where we go now.

 

I scanned but didn't plot the data from the 1990s but the trends were interesting. The 90's data strongly shows Toyota to be quite good compared to GM, Ford and Chyrsler.

Bob Wilson

 

Because the deaths occurred as a result of an individual doing something fatally stupid? Now if Toyota had been the cause of the deaths, they probably would be thrown out of the country. But they weren't and they have not.

 

I couldn't help but note that your instacure for Toyota conspirators failed to reconcile more aspirin user deaths perportionally than Toyota users.

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You really need to let go of your obsession with aspirin. It is making you seem... to be suffering from OCD.

 

The aspirin deaths have been known for a much longer time than the conspiracy theory website which this information has been taken from has been up.

The stomach problems associated with aspirin have been known and publicized for decades. It is why acetimenophen(sp?) (Tylenol) rose to prominence and pretty much replaced aspirin in hospitals. However, it has its own issues--liver damage can be caused by what I understand are relatively small overdoses.

Doctors and scientists continue to study the risks and benefits of things like low dose aspirin regimens for heart attacks.

And yeah, there was a bunch of outrage when the risks of aspirin were discovered, as I recall. (I'm not quite old as the hills, but maybe old as the first layer of topsoil.)
Problem is, aspirin does a whole lot of good things for which the substitutes all have their own problems. It saves a lot lives and alleviates a lot of pain--some of which Tylenol wouldn't.

BTW IMHO it is useful to compare non-auto brouhahas over safety and engineering on an auto-themed website, when the comparison might be useful.

 

Heck, OCD, ADD, you name it doctor ... I got it. But thank you kgall for partly pointing out somewhat esoterically, that it's all about cost/risk/benefit. Costs will go up for cars because we now require a lower incidence per 100,000 for ECU/computer issues.

Consider NHTA unintended acceleration data pertaining to both GM & Toyota. Over the years manufacturer numbers for unintended acceleration go up and down and up. GM's are presently going down. Others including Toyota are on the rise. Over the years (when other manufacturers unintended acceleration incidence were higher), where was the outrage? Where were the conspiracy theorists? Where were the "criminal implications" for other manufacturers then? And as for the other manufacturers now, where are the consumer advocates that should be raising a stink for the whole lot? Is it that Toyota's higher numbers make it worthy now? What's the magic number or percentage per 100,000 incidences that causes the pooh to hit the conspiracy fan?

.

 

Toyota has a few issues and working on address them. I don't believe there's a real risk for Toyota.

I've never seen some much attention on one manufacturer then Toyota. GM and others have recalls, but not this much media attention.

 

The moral and ethical question for Toyota is said to be when they knew there was a problem vs. when they started fixing the problem. Is it when the first complaint comes in from a 69 year old woman on antidepressants and arthritis medication accelerates into a building? Is it 2 or 20 or what figure? If it is one, where the problem cannot be replicated, how do you fix it as some have suggested? Just stop selling any vehicles? I am not ethics guru but realistically, what is a manufacturer of any product supposed to do? No vehicle or medicationis 100% safe. And how do you deal with a situation where a dealer sticks in the wrong size floor mat? How do you deal with the fact that almost any medication can cause liver damage?

Having 80% of the world's lawyers and a nation consumed with "zero tolerance" nut cases is part of the problem. Manufacturers don't want to admit they have a problem because they get sued either way. Journalism by press release from trial lawyers is another part of the problem.

 

I'm not expecting the rate of unintended acceleration to be zero. However, it should be embarrassing to Toyota that its US customers are currently reporting one of the highest rates, and that this has continued for eight years.

Remember, we are talking about Toyota, which is supposed to be the safe buy. A highly reliable appliance, maybe not the most exciting (Prius excluded.) A car that you would feel comfortable recommending to your grandmother or buying as a first car for your teenager.

Some European auto manufacturers have already implemented a version of a brake override system already. Toyota could have done so as well.

The beauty of that system is that you don't have to identify and fix every possible little glitch that the powertrain control system might experience, as long as the override works reliably...

 

robbyr2 and others,

"80% of the worlds lawyers"--a common misconception about the US. India alone with their 400,000+ lawyers would mean that the US (somewhat over a million) does not have 80% of the worlds lawyers. Though it is true we are way above average per capita even for developed economies.
However, it should also be pointed out that much of what is "lawyer's work" in the US is non-lawyer's work elsewhere in the world. For example, in Japan, a very small percentage (I believe under 10%) of law graduates pass the equivalent of a US bar exam. Most of the rest do stuff that lawyers would do in the US (advising corporations, working on contracts, working on gov't regulations), but they aren't called the same thing as the people licensed to go to court.

"Journalism by press release"--huge problem, getting worse since the internet age has cut reporter's staffs at real newspapers and even the TV networks. But I sure don't blame it all on the trial (i.e., plaintiff's) lawyers--everyone who can afford it or knows how to do it is in on the game--check out all the Toyota press releases we put up and comment on in the Prius and Hybrid News section.

It is true, as austingreen mentioned in an earlier post in this thread, and I picked up on, that we use lawsuits as a last resort because we don't regulate safety to the same degree as some other societies, particularly in Europe. This has led to a number of problems in the legal system, including the fact that verdicts can be highly unstable and unpredictable. Another problem is that the expense of bringing a suit means that many middle-sized complaints (above small claims, less than millions--e.g., an unintended accelleration accident that totalled the car but didn't hurt anyone badly) can't be brought at a reasonable cost, so that there are lots of folks who have been wronged but go without justice.

One thing this means is that lawsuits are a very blunt instrument for insuring safety. It's blunt, for example, because it makes people look for things where a defect and damage can be proved in the individual case, which may not be the most dangerous things.

hill,
thanks for gently calling my style "somewhat esoteric[]". My wife says I'm "obtuse."

 

I won't argue the point about whether Toyota should be embarrassed about the number of complaints other than they might just be the "victims" of unrealistic expectations for building idiot-proof cars.

Does anyone know if Audi has this brake override system? I did see they are under investigation by NHTSA as we speak. And we have already heard reports of unintended acceleration in reverse in Prius' that have the override... and we know it must be true because it was in the newspaper. Again, not to say that it shouldn't be required in Toyotas (although I think it should be required in Honda, GM etc. vehicles as well [and especially Audis!]). Just don't expect the number of complaints to drop any time soon.

Of course I didn't believe in exploding Pintos entirely... since I ran into one in my last accident in 1975, and it didn't explode. My 68 Pontiac destroyed the back end of that Pinto. I had to adjust the bumper...

 

I was unable to find the number or duties of advocates in India and have noted the difference between barristers and solicitors (I enjoyed the learning) in Canada, the UK, etc. but I did note that there are over 200,000 members of the bar in Calif. We Americans are known as the most litigous nation on earth. That may indeed come for our preference for lawsuits over regulations. Not smart by that's just my opinion.

 

Pat's point (hindsight being 20/20 and all) is spot on. The big red button ~ E/stop ~ kill switch may be required in all manufacturer's autos very soon, because it won't be enough to have 8 out of 100K cars, or even 1 out of 100K cars take off. It's such an irony that over 40K die in booze related deaths each year ... yet we focus on the much smaller fixes that effect less than 1% of the alcohol victims. There's an expression, 1,000's of years old: "they strain out the gnats, while they swallow the camels".

 

Yes they do. This may be a reason vw/audi has a lower fatality rate for unintended acceleration than toyota but a higher incidence of reports. I was surprised by the high numbers of reports in bob wilson's chart's.

 

I have data for fatalities per 100k Prius miles but nothing for "vw/audi." The NHTSA reports are just that, reports and not necessarily associated with accidents, much less fatalities.

This chart came from the NPR data:


I then used the per vehicle, NHTSA report counts and Wiki vehicle sales to make this chart:


Neither of these are fatality rates and should not be misrepresented as anything but NHTSA reports per manufacturer and for Toyota models.

Bob Wilson