TRDFantasy

I predicted this might happen, and it's happening now.

Various news reports out there are mentioning that Toyota's historic incentives and deals for March has forced ALL major competition to increase it's incentives. GM and Ford have increased their incentives, and even Honda has been forced to increase incentives during this month.

I predicted that Toyota could easily sway the entire market in the US and spark a price war, and that is sort of what is happening. None of the competition would dare go head-to-head with Toyota in a price war, which is why they've simply raised incentives somewhat.

This whole witch hunt will now backfire as the increased spotlight on Toyota will also let people know of the big sales increase that they will achieve, increasing customer confidence in Toyota.

4TehNguyen

iTrader: (1)

this is a good strategy, let the free market vindicate them, which they will. I want to see the look on Government Motors and LaHood's face when Toyota's sales are huge this month.

tex2670

Oh my. Even MORE media hype:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...L20100325#post

Of course, no mention of the fact that the warning NOT to place all weather mats on top of other mats is printed right on the mats themselves, and would apply to all car makers.

jruhi4

If there's one publication that strikes me as levelheaded and even pro-Toyota when it comes to recall issues, it's WardsAuto.com. Several of their previous stories appear sprinkled throughout this thread. Drew Winter, for instance, just wrote one titled Science, Common Sense Beginning to Prevail in Toyota Controversy. Here's the intro, and I'll spare you the rest, since it repeats ad nauseam what we all know:

Here's the full story:
http://wardsauto.com/commentary/scie...oversy_100325/


Even though it has little to do with the Toyota recall directly, another WardsAuto.com article reminds us that overblown accusations and questionable ABC News practices are nothing new:

My Somewhat Begrudging Apology To Ford Pinto
by Steve Finlay

I never thought I’d apologize to the Ford Pinto, but I guess I owe it one.

I had a Pinto in the 1970s. Actually, my wife bought it a few months before we got married. The car became sort of a wedding dowry. So did the remaining 80% of the outstanding auto loan.

During a relatively brief ownership, the Pinto’s repair costs exceeded the original price of the car. It wasn’t a question of if it would fail, but when. And where. Sometimes, it simply wouldn’t start in the driveway. Other times, it would conk out at a busy intersection.

It ranks as the worst car I ever had. That was back when some auto makers made quality something like Job 100, certainly not Job 1.

Despite my bad Pinto experience, I suppose an apology is in order because of a recent blog I wrote. It centered on Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problems. But in discussing those, I invoked the memory of exploding Pintos.

The widespread allegation was that, due to a design flaw, Pinto fuel tanks could readily blow up in rear-end collisions, setting the car and its occupants afire.

People started calling the Pinto “the barbecue that seats four.” And the lawsuits spread like wild fire.

Responding to my blog, a Ford (“I would very much prefer to keep my name out of print”) manager contacted me to set the record straight.

He says exploding Pintos were a myth that an investigation debunked nearly 20 years ago. He cites Gary Schwartz’ 1991 Rutgers Law Review paper that cut through the wild claims and examined what really happened.

Schwartz methodically determined the actual number of Pinto deaths was not in the thousands, but 27.

In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 averaged 405.

Yes, there were cases such as a Pinto exploding while parked on the shoulder of the road and hit from behind by a speeding pickup truck. But fiery rear-end collisions comprised only 0.6% of all fatalities back then, and the Pinto had a lower death rate in that category than the average compact or subcompact, Schwartz said after crunching the numbers. Nor was there anything about the Pinto’s rear-end design that made it particularly unsafe.

Not content to portray the Pinto as an incendiary device, ABC’s 20/20 decided to really heat things up in a 1978 broadcast containing “startling new developments.” ABC breathlessly reported that, not just Pintos, but fullsize Fords could blow up if hit from behind.

20/20 thereupon aired a video, shot by UCLA researchers, showing a Ford sedan getting rear-ended and bursting into flames. A couple of problems with that video:

One, it was shot 10 years earlier.

Two, the UCLA researchers had openly said in a published report that they intentionally rigged the vehicle with an explosive.

That’s because the test was to determine how a crash fire affected the car’s interior, not to show how easily Fords became fire *****. They said they had to use an accelerant because crash fires on their own are so rare. They had tried to induce a vehicle fire in a crash without using an igniter, but failed.

ABC failed to mention any of that when correspondent Sylvia Chase reported on “Ford’s secret rear-end crash tests.”

I guess we could forgive ABC for that botched reporting job. After all, it was 32 years ago. But a few weeks ago, ABC, in another one of its rigged auto exposes, showed video of a Toyota apparently accelerating on its own.

Turns out, the “runaway” vehicle had help from an associate professor. He built a gizmo with an on-off switch to provide acceleration on demand. Well, at least ABC didn’t show the Toyota slamming into a wall and bursting into flames.

In my blog, I also mentioned that Ford’s woes got worse in the 1970s with the supposed uncovering of an internal memo by a Ford attorney who allegedly calculated it would cost less to pay off wrongful-death suits than to redesign the Pinto.

It became known as the “Ford Pinto memo.” But Schwartz looked into that, too. He reported the memo did not pertain to Pintos or any Ford products. Instead, it had to do with American vehicles in general.

It dealt with rollovers, not rear-end crashes. It did not address tort liability at all, let alone advocate it as a cheaper alternative to a redesign. It put a value to human life because federal regulators themselves did so.

The memo was meant for regulators’ eyes only. But it was off to the races after Mother Jones magazine got a hold of a copy and reported what wasn’t the case.

The exploding-Pinto myth lives on. It make you wonder what people will recollect in 2040 about Toyota’s sudden-accelerations, which more and more are looking like driver error and, in some cases, driver shams.

So I guess I owe the Pinto an apology. But it’s going to be half-hearted, because my Pinto gave me so much grief, even though, as the Ford manager notes, “it was a cheap car, built long ago and lots of things have changed, almost all for the better.”

So here goes: If I said anything that offended you, Pinto, I’m sorry. And thanks for not blowing up on me.

http://blog.wardsauto.com/sfinlay/

jruhi4

Is the tide finally turning in the whole Toyota recall drama reporting? I just found another good read:

Exorcising Toyota’s Demons
By Walter Olson - National Review

Reviewing the history of tort-bar opportunism and media malfeasance should dispel the Great Toyota Panic of 2010.

You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers. The Los Angeles Times has compiled a list of 56 fatal incidents over 19 years purportedly involving unintended Toyota acceleration, and according to my Overlawyered co-blogger Ted Frank — in a Thursday analysis refined and extended the next day by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic — the age of the driver can be publicly ascertained in a little more than half the instances. That median age turns out to be 60 — that is to say, half the drivers were that old or older. By contrast, only 16 percent of general auto fatalities in 2008 occurred with a driver 60 or older behind the wheel. Whatever is causing Avalons, Highlanders, and Tundras to misbehave is largely bypassing drivers in their twenties and thirties and instead homing in on drivers old enough to remember the Eisenhower era.

For those who’ve been setting up the Japanese automaker as the latest symbol of heartless capitalism, it’s been a bewildering few days. On Wednesday the media jumped hard for the story of a man who frantically called 911 while his Prius ran away on a San Diego freeway (outstandingly gullible CBS News coverage here). Before long observers had begun poking holes in the story, and colorful details on the man’s earlier doings have been emerging all weekend. On Thursday, meanwhile, the New York Times — whose news columns had helped set the tone for the panic with accusatory coverage — ran what was actually a surprisingly good op-ed advancing the possibility that most of the Toyota cases will turn out to be the result of . . . driver error.

Driver error? You could have spent hours watching the stacked congressional hearings, or the breathless, America-in-crisis coverage on NBC, with no inkling that hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake was any sort of major factor. Certainly the impresarios of the Great Toyota Panic v the members of Congress and their staffs, the TV producers, and above all the consumer advocates with their close trial-lawyer ties — were not at all keen to explore that topic.

Through weeks of Toyota-flaying coverage, these voices — united in Demanding That Action Be Taken even if no one could quite say what was wrong with the cars — seldom acknowledged that unintended acceleration in automobiles is a subject with a long history. Each year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives complaints of this sort from owners of all brands of cars; big makers other than Toyota get a goodly share. The volume of complaints ebbs and flows from year to year for reasons that seem to have less to do with cars’ technical features than with media coverage and mass psychology; thus a scare over a given model that grips one country may never reach a second country in which an identical model is sold.

By far the most famous episode of sudden-acceleration panic is the 1986 Audi episode, which took years to fizzle out: Regulators in the United States, Japan, and Canada pronounced that they could find no explanation for the accidents other than “pedal misapplication” or, more bluntly, driver error. The parallels with the Toyota affair — starting, but not ending, with the tendency of acceleration incidents to hit older drivers — are numerous and continue to multiply.

With Audi, as with Toyota, the anecdotes seemed compelling. Attractive families, who spoke well and obviously believed in their cause, had lost loved ones to horrendous accidents. No one, least of all the miserable execs from the automaker, wanted to go on camera to contradict them, even though (as it turned out) their cases often failed to convince juries when things eventually got to court.

With Audi, as with Toyota, massive publicity fed on itself. As the scare went national, the number of reported acceleration incidents soared, partly because newly wary customers began reporting incidents they might otherwise not have bothered to report, partly because families (and lawyers) seized on the acceleration theory to explain older crashes. In both cases, newly filed reports on older accidents ensured that the overall numbers would leap almost overnight in a newsworthy way, thus keeping the cycle going.

With Audi, as with Toyota, the panic was met with far more skepticism in the specialized enthusiast and engineering press — places like Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, and their online equivalents — than in the general press and on Capitol Hill. Not that seasoned automotive writers necessarily were in a rush to dismiss the reports; there’s always a first time with emerging hazards, and problems like misplaced floor mats or sticky pedals might indeed need to be checked out. But the general feeling was that familiar old causes of accidents should be well explored before positing exotic new ones.

And that brought up, in both episodes, the question of why brakes had failed to overcome the car’s forward motion. In all American cars, now as well as then, brakes firmly applied will readily overpower an accelerator at full throttle. In theory a driver might burn out the brakes by hesitant or inconsistent efforts to fight the surge, but seldom if ever were brakes actually found to be burned out in this way after accidents.

With Audi, as with Toyota, the scare targeted vehicles with some of the lowest fatality rates on the road — indeed, vehicles that might often be chosen precisely for their safety by risk-averse buyers. So rare are sudden-acceleration events that the purported risk — even as it touched off a nationwide media frenzy — was smaller than many other risks drivers accept as routine, such as that of choosing a slightly longer commute to work. Indeed, so minute was the supposed risk that if rattled owners at the height of the panic decided to leave a suspect Audi or Toyota undriven in the garage, in favor of using their family’s second vehicle, they were very likely increasing their risk — since that second vehicle was unlikely to be as safe overall as the demon Audi/Toyota.

With Audis, and in other acceleration scares affecting GM and other companies, we know that older drivers are not the only group disproportionately likely to be involved in a runaway. Others include drivers who are short in stature, who are unfamiliar with the vehicle (parking-lot attendants, new buyers), and who are taking off from a stopped position or backing up. Publicly available reports do not yet indicate whether the Toyota crashes fit all of these patterns; McArdle does note, however, that the L.A. Times compilation of fatal accidents seems to contain a striking number of drivers who were immigrants.

Why doesn’t the mainstream press — okay, in particular the networks and liberal newspapers — do a better job of covering these issues? One reason is that — this is unchanged since the 1970s — both are willing to take their lead on coverage from the same trial-lawyer-linked consumer groups that help Henry Waxman to orchestrate his hearings. Indeed, some of the very same figures who pushed Audi’s supposed guilt 25 years ago, such as Clarence Ditlow of the Ralph Nader–founded Center for Auto Safety, have been showcased both in the press and on Capitol Hill in recent weeks, usually with scant mention of their long records of inaccurate pro-litigation advocacy.

That isn’t the only way in which the networks have failed their viewers. The widely recalled low point of the Audi controversy came when CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a grossly unfair hatchet job on the automaker, complete with a bogus simulation rigged up by an expert witness working with lawyers suing Audi. This time around, it was the turn of ABC’s Brian Ross, who used, yes, an expert witness hired by litigators suing Toyota to rig up a supposed simulation of electronic failure. (Toyota promptly showed that you could get the same silly, artificial result by hooking up other automakers’ vehicles in the same way.) Matt Hardigree of Jalopnik called the results “ridiculous” and a “hoax,” while Gawker — noticing some stealthily falsified footage of tachometer results — headlined its coverage “How ABC News’ Brian Ross Staged His Toyota Death Ride” and “ABC News’ Toyota Test Fiasco.”

Alas, this is nothing new. Back in 1993, I wrote a piece for National Review (“It didn’t start with Dateline NBC”) exploring how the famous hidden-incendiary-device scandal that publicly disgraced NBC News was part of a long tradition of less-than-honest network coverage. Ten years later, I reported (in my 2003 book The Rule of Lawyers) that not only did the networks seem to have learned nothing from the Dateline NBC fiasco, they had actually gone back to using some of the same expert witnesses, consumer groups, and staging techniques that had gotten them in trouble in the first place.

These days, online critics — like Gawker and Jalopnik, Ted Frank and Megan McArdle, Michael Fumento and NRO’s Henry Payne — can correct the networks’ misreporting within hours, rather than days or months. Whether or not that comes as any comfort to beleaguered Toyota, it’s a definite improvement for the rest of us.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/h...le.htm?id=6032

spwolf

whole article is completly idiotic, and honestly, it has been written by someone who clearly is way over their heads.

they try to say that TSB's are secret, and that drivers simply did not know not to put several floormats on top of each other? ;-).

Maybe Toyota should have an TSB about braking by pressing your brake pedal with your foot, so they can make it out so Toyota has "put out an warning about possible braking issues with cars, where you have to use feet and not mind in order to brake"

;-)

spwolf

lol... dear god.

p.s. They didnt ask themselves this: Toyota issued 37 TSB's out of 5,000 received by NHTSA, despite having >15% market share.

jruhi4

The makes-you-wanna-puke courtroom drama starts to take shape:

Toyota legal battleground begins to take shape
Automotive News

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) -- Lawyers suing Toyota across the United States over cars alleged to have raced out of control lobbied a special judicial panel to merge the scores of cases and assign them to one or two courthouses for pretrial proceedings.

Consolidating cases is the first major step for the U.S. legal system in confronting a torrent of personal injury claims, consumer-fraud class actions and other civil litigation in federal courts stemming from unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.

Toyota Motor Corp. faces a potential liability estimated by some lawyers at more than $10 billion as it struggles to contain an auto safety crisis that has tarnished its once-sterling public image and dented its sales.

Complaints of runaway vehicles and other safety issues have led to the recall of more than 8.5 million Toyota vehicles worldwide, most for repairs of ill-fitting floor mats and sticking gas pedals the automaker blames for surging engines.

Many of the lawsuits suggest the problem is rooted in an as-yet unidentified electronic glitch, which the Japanese automaker has vehemently denied.

Unintended acceleration alone has been linked to more than 50 crash deaths and dozens of injuries in Toyota and its luxury Lexus vehicles under investigation over the past decade.

‘Like cigarettes in jail'
Thursday's hearing in San Diego also presented an early chance for some of the country's top trial lawyers to briefly take center stage in a courtroom packed with their peers as they jockeyed for a key role in legal battles that lie ahead.

A half-hour before the proceedings began, attorneys were still huddled in negotiations in a corner of the room to decide who and how many among them would get two minutes to address the five-judge panel.

"These seconds, these minutes, they're like cigarettes in jail," joked Mark Lanier, a Houston attorney who was one of the lawyers selected to make a pitch. "The California lawyers are fighting with each other for their two minutes."

Kentucky lawyer Stanley Chesley, who argued for transferring all the cases to his home state, site of Toyota's largest manufacturing plant outside Japan, likened the legal scrum to "a cattle call."

With legal action swiftly mounting, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multi-district Litigation was called upon Thursday to combine the federal cases and select one or two judges from around the country to preside over all of them.

No decision is expected for at least two weeks. But Toyota's own attorney and most of the 23 trial lawyers who made presentations urged sending the cases to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles -- the venue closest to the headquarters for Toyota's U.S. sales arm.

A handful argued instead for sending the cases to Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina and other states.

The majority, including Toyota's lawyer, also said they preferred assigning all the cases to a single judge, rather than splitting the personal injury claims from cases brought on behalf of consumers for diminished resale value of their cars.

They argued that much of the discovery process and underlying issues would overlap. A few disagreed, arguing the litigation was too complex for one judge to handle.

By one count presented on Thursday, 138 lawsuits against Toyota have been filed in federal court to date, nearly 60 of them in California, including consumer and personal injury cases.

The number of cases is expected to climb further, driving up the potential cost to Toyota in damages and legal fees.

By comparison, drug maker Merck & Co. recently agreed to pay $4.85 billion to settle claims over heart attack deaths blamed for the pain medication Vioxx. About a third of that sum was earmarked for the plaintiff's lawyers, while the defense team earned an estimated $2 billion.

http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...100329921/1147

Mister Two

At least we know who the winner will be.

jruhi4

That's for sure...

Joeb427

iTrader: (1)

No negative Toyota media talk or consumer incidents for quite awhile now.

LexBob2

Shhh. You're right. It seems like the frenzy has died down.

Allen K

iTrader: (4)

Healthcare debate has taken precedent right now. Once there is a lull in the action, someone will crash into a wall and the entire circus will begin anew

TorontoIS

Not true, someone up here in Ontario crashed their Venza and is claiming unintended acceleration. The police are investigating it now. Didn't anyone tell them that that model isn't on the recall list?

joe80

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/03/30/n...blem/#comments

Report: NASA will study sudden unintended acceleration problem

let rocket scientists take care of the problem.