Page 116 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

many different types of problems into the same broad category. In
this case, the category the NHTSA uses is called “Speed Control.”
In other words, any complaint that involved a vehicle going faster
or slower than the driver intended is lumped into the same category.
All of these issues aside, given that the NHTSA database did
include thousands of complaints about Toyota and acceleration
issues (2,290 between 2000 and 2009, according to a count by
National Public Radio*), it’s worth taking a deeper look to see if
there was plausible evidence to suspect a problem in Toyota ve-
hicles. The complaints themselves make compelling and fright-
ening reading, and they certainly sound convincing.
In the summer of 2010, Edmunds.com launched an in-depth
study of the NHTSA complaint database. It found that 1 in 10 rec-
ords were duplicates. To get a more accurate picture from the data,
Edmunds.com devoted staff time to going through the complaints
one by one. The firm reclassified each complaint into a more spe-
cific category and eliminated duplicates and clearly preposterous
claims. What Edmunds.com found was that Toyota did have more
complaints about sudden acceleration than other manufacturers,
but that the true figures were much smaller than a casual look at the
database would suggest. From January 2009 until August 2009,
Toyota averaged just under 14 complaints of sudden acceleration
a month; in comparison, Ford had an average of 7 complaints. To
put those figures into perspective, consider that Toyota alone had
roughly 16 million vehicles using ETC on the road in the United
States during those months. The monthly complaint rate is a lit-
tle less than 1 in a million. The NASA report estimates the rate of
UA complaints at 1 in 1.4 billion miles driven.

* The National Public Radio Vehicle Acceleration Complaints Database is avail-
able at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124235858.

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