Page 121 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

pulled the parking brake without effect. Those reports would re-
quire four separate systems, one of them entirely mechanical (the
parking brake), to fail simultaneously.
Thus, the evidence available in the fall of 2009, 18 months
before the NASA investigation was completed, was overwhelm-
ingly against vehicle electronics as a cause of sudden acceleration.
Yet that did not stop wild, unfounded speculation from carrying
the day (or the need to eventually spend $1.5 million of taxpayer
monies to prove the speculation incorrect).

A Complete Lack of Evidence

None of these reasons to doubt the claims of runaway vehicles with
electronic systems run amok—not the problems with the NHTSA
database, not the lack of any forensic evidence of sudden acceleration
caused by electronics, not the thorough research by NHTSA into
sudden acceleration in the past, and not the unlikelihood of most
SUA complaints—was reported in the mainstream media (though
blogs and more specialized automotive Web sites did make these
same observations). The most visible media stories about “sudden
unintended acceleration” focused only on the raw number of com-
plaints from the NHTSA database filed under “speed control,”
including the deaths from accidents blamed on those incidents
(regardless of what police investigations of those accidents found
or whether they were cases in which plaintiffs were suing Toyota).
With the public skeptical of the floor mat explanation and always
willing to suspect electronics, the media stories convinced more and
more people that there was something seriously wrong with Toyota
vehicles—something that Toyota was hiding, whether the company
knew the real cause or not. The nature of the reporting also ramped
up the pressure on the NHTSA, which was accused of being soft
on Toyota. For instance, one of the Los Angeles Times stories was

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