Page 262 - Toyota Under Fire

LESSONS

in court with no defense attorneys. The outcome is al-
most preordained. If only to resolve the rabid focus on
Toyota’s problems, it’s past time to turn this over to the
engineers. Innuendo, emotion, and speculation are not
how one resolves an issue such as this.

David Champion points out that even if all of the incidents
that the media uncovered and managed to somehow blame on
SUA and vehicle electronics were real, they would have accounted
for a little more than 100 deaths over 10 years. Every preventable
death is a tragedy, but over that same period, roughly 400,000
people died in accidents on American highways. “There are over
6,000 teens killed every year, but we don’t have any congressional
hearings . . . to find out what we can do for teens. Alcohol-related
deaths due to driving are around 10,000 [a year], but we don’t
have congressional hearings looking at shift interlocks to keep the
worst offenders off the road.” A recent study found that one of
the most common causes of accidents, accounting for 17 percent
of road deaths, is sleepiness of drivers.* Champion believes that
the funds spent on the NASA investigation of SUA and vehicle
electronics could have done much more good for the public if
they had focused on the issues that we know cause thousands of
deaths a year.
Indeed, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood admitted at
the February 2011 press conference where the NHTSA presented
the results of the NASA/NHTSA investigations ofToyota’s elec-
tronics that the only reason for the study was to convince mem-
bers of Congress. The NHTSA was fully confident that there

* Larry Copeland, “Study: Sleepiness a Factor in 17% of Road Deaths,” USA
Today, November 8, 2010.

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