Page 113 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

by Tom Vanderbilt, exhaustively details how difficult it is for
drivers to gain an accurate perception of their own limitations
and errors. Micheline Maynard, a reporter who covered the auto
industry for the New York Times for a decade, notes that no ev-
idence will ever convince some people: “There will always be
people who think it’s the electronics.” Indeed, in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the release of the NASA report absolving Toyota
electronics, several of the individuals who had made vociferous
claims that Toyota’s electronics were at fault simply dug in their
heels and insisted that their judgment and insight were superior
to those of all of the engineers at NHTSA, NASA, Toyota, and
every other automaker using ETC.
Why do people insist on blaming electronics? Well, we all
have had experience with faulty electronics or computers that do
not do what we want them to do in our daily lives. Those who
are attempting to make a case for the vulnerability of vehicle elec-
tronics often cite a statistic that there are more lines of software
code in a vehicle today than there were in the Apollo 11 space-
craft that took men to the moon. The statistic is true, but this
use of it mostly reveals how little those who quote it understand
modern computers and electronics design—there are also more
lines of code in an iPhone or a BlackBerry than there were in the
Apollo 11 spacecraft. Jeremy Anwyl also points out that blaming
electronics is a fertile field for plaintiffs’ lawyers. “It’s very hard to
prove a negative. You can never say that it could never happen.
How do you prove something like that? You can’t. . . . From a trial
lawyer’s perspective, it’s not a bad bet. Even though there’s no
clear proof, it’s hard to prove that it didn’t happen, and it’s not a
bad bet to take that to court and see if you can win.” That’s exactly
what happened in the wake of Toyota’s floor mat recall—the me-
dia, abetted by plaintiffs’ lawyers and their consultants working

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