A little perspective, please.
That's my gut response to the near-hysteria caused by Toyota's recalls to address concerns over unintended acceleration.
Yes, the company's recall of 6.5 million cars — 2.3 million for sticky accelerator pedals and another 4.2 million for pedal-grabbing floor mats — is the automaker's nastiest black eye in memory. Worse, unintended acceleration is the ultimate headline-grabber, one of the scariest scenarios for any driver. The specter of a runaway car worries people far more than, say, the engine sludge build-up that affected some Toyotas in recent years.
The company screwed up, and any consumer with an affected model should get it fixed immediately. But without minimizing the issue, we are talking 19 alleged fatalities among roughly 20 million Toyotas sold here over the last 10 years. That's roughly one death linked to the recall for every million cars Toyota has sold. That's small comfort for those victims, of course, but your lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash (1 in 6,137 flights), a lightning strike (1 in 56,439) or an earthquake (1 in 120,161) are all vastly worse than your chances of dying in a runaway Toyota.
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