If you listen beyond the media hysteria and Congressional flagellation of Toyota, you might just hear an intriguing buzz from folks involved in "sudden acceleration" cases of the past, many of which turned out to be bogus.
Theodore Frank, a lawyer familiar with "sudden acceleration" cases against GM in the '90s and Audi in the '80s, warns against the potent mixture of media hysteria, class-action lawyer avarice, and a mysterious electronic malfunction no one is able to put a finger on:
But one shouldn’t believe the hype. We went through this a generation ago with the Audi 5000 and other autos accused of sudden acceleration, and, again, mysterious unknowable car components were supposedly at fault...
Back then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spent millions studying the issue. They found that sudden acceleration was several times more likely among elderly drivers than young drivers, and much more frequent among the very short or someone who had just gotten into a vehicle.
Electromagnetic rays don’t discriminate by age and height, which suggests very much that human factors were at play: in other words, pedal misapplication. A driver would step on the wrong pedal, panic when the car did not perform as expected, continue to mistake the accelerator for the brake, and press down on the accelerator even harder.
We're seeing that patter again today.
Richard Scmidt, writing in the New York Times, also has experience studying "sudden acceleration":
I looked into more than 150 cases of unintended acceleration in the 1980s, many of which became the subject of lawsuits against automakers. In those days, Audi, like Toyota today, received by far the most complaints. (I testified in court for Audi on many occasions. I have not worked for Toyota on unintended acceleration, though I did consult for the company seven years ago on another matter.)
In these cases, the problem typically happened when the driver first got into the car and started it. After turning on the ignition, the driver would intend to press lightly on the brake pedal while shifting from park to drive (or reverse), and suddenly the car would leap forward (or backward). Drivers said that continued pressing on the brake would not stop the car; it would keep going until it crashed. Drivers believed that something had gone wrong in the acceleration system, and that the brakes had failed.
But when engineers examined these vehicles post-crash, they found nothing that could account for what the drivers had reported.
If the "smart pedal" solution proposed by President Obama becomes a requirement for all car manufacturers, it will only work in those cases in which there really is a mechanical or electronic malfunction, and no operator error. Schmidt is of the mind that that won't do much good except revealing just how many of these incidents really are operator error.Frank notes the ages of drivers in Toyota crashes, for which we have that information:
18, 21, 22*, 32, 34, 44, 45, 47, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71**, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89.
*Passenger victim was 22 and “friend” of driver.
**Passenger victim was 71 and married to husband-driver for 46 years.
The median age is 60.5; the majority of drivers are 60 or older; a third are older than 70. And I left out the case of a driver who was the son of a 94-year-old victim rather than guesstimate his age to be 65. That looks suspiciously like the makeup of Audi sudden acceleration cases, and a lot like driver error to me. Color me skeptical. Very very skeptical.
And, Michael Fumento documents the number of crashes and fatalities compared with Toyota's overall safety record, and the saftey records of other manufacturers:
Sudden acceleration in Toyotas over the last decade has been linked with -- which doesn't mean "caused" -- 52 deaths, according to NHTSA. It was just 19 before the current publicity. A Los Angeles Times investigation brought it up to 56, including those culled from lawsuits. Whatever the count and cause, that's too many. But it's also out of 20 million Toyotas sold, and out of the 420,000 Americans NHTSA says died in motor vehicle accidents that decade.
And although Toyota had almost 17% of total U.S. car sales in 2008, it accounted for merely 8% of total claims for deaths and injuries in the first quarter of that year, according to NHTSA. Edmunds.com found that while Toyota was third in U.S. car sales from 2001 through 2010, it was 17th in NHTSA complaints. Thus, even if every sudden-acceleration complaint proved valid, Toyotas are among the safest cars made.
Fumento also notes that, in the case of Audis, the media was at fault for sensationalizing to the point of deceit:
In 1986, Kristi Bradosky, while driving an Audi 5000, ran over and killed her young son. "60 Minutes" aired a misleading segment depicting a runaway Audi -- without disclosing that the car had been re-engineered to respond that way. Nor did it mention that Bradosky had told police that her foot had slipped off the brake onto the accelerator.
The rest of the media piled on, and a tsunami of Audi acceleration complaints linked to accidents swamped NHTSA.
ABC News has now admitted that a part of the video it used to illustrate the unintended acceleration of a Toyota model in a recent report was faked. The video, outlining a tactic used by professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University to cause an unintended acceleration in a Toyota product, was not an actual shot of the car’s tachometer during the sudden acceleration, but a clip of the tachometer sweeping across the screen while the car was in park. Sure, it makes for great TV, with the rpms rising suddenly, but it’s not accurate. As such, it has called into question the validity of the entire ABC News story, which could have far greater consequences.
