Page 260 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

what our brains tell them to. Schmidt points out that even the
most highly trained and skilled basketball players can make only
9 out of 10 free throws. That may sound impressive on a bas-
ketball court, but consider the idea that 1 out of every 10 times
someone pushes the gas pedal in his vehicle, he gets it at least
somewhat wrong. More prosaically, just think of all the times
you’ve accidentally put your car in motion thinking that you were
in reverse while the car was actually in drive, or vice versa. We all
do it. We all make mistakes. Vehicle electronics have saved thou-
sands of lives by correcting for some human error, but short of re-
moving people from vehicles, some errors will persist—and they
will cause far more accidents than all vehicle defects combined.
Given the modest benefits of the recall crisis, and the costs to
Toyota and to society, it’s impossible not to ask what the media
could have done to actually make drivers safer rather than crying
wolf. Micheline Maynard, who recently left the New York Times
after covering the auto industry for a decade, including the recall
crisis, notes that the Times is one of the few media outlets that
continues to have both robust news reporting and reporters fo-
cused on reviewing cars. She says that meant that, unlike in most
media, every story she worked on was reviewed by someone who
truly understood how cars work today—a difference that is evi-
dent in her coverage of the crisis. Jeremy Anwyl told us that the
lack of a “discussion rooted in facts” is why Edmunds launched
a contest, with $1 million to be paid out to anyone who could
prove that there are problems with vehicle electronic systems, in
an attempt to clear up, once and for all, whether there are actual
vulnerabilities in electronic throttle controls (ETCs) and vehicle
electronics. “We felt that in the Toyota situation, the core issues
were getting lost in the media coverage,” Anwyl said. “There are
a lot of incentives for the media to push the boundaries of a story.

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