Toyota Ordered To Pay $11 Million In Unintended Acceleration Lawsuit

American courts are truly incredible. CSIs (Crime Scene Investigators), multiple government inquisitions, and even NASA (yeah, the rocket scientist brainiac guys) couldn't find a defect, not even in Toyota's software, and yet, a US court a jury of laypeople determine a defect existed.

If you, the reader, believe the jury came to the right conclusion, then we should get rid of CSIs, engineers, and investigators, and let randomly selected people determine "the truth" by popular opinion. Ghosts exist, Bigfoot exists, the pyramids were built by aliens... and we know this is true because lots of people believe it!

I see where you are coming from, however, perhaps the jury listened to numerous recordings of 911 calls happening at a significant rate from Toyota/Lexus owners from 2001-2009 all frantically saying the same thing "I Can't stop my Lexus/Toyota!" until sudden impact.

Or maybe it was video footage like this one http://youtu.be/dsTiPhcaeus
of a Toyota Highlander going haywire and ruining a homeowner's house.

Todays electronics can have glitches and fix themselves with no sign of a prior glitch, take my iphone for instance which has frozen, mmisread apps, and more, then restart itself and function normally with no sign of prior malfunction

I respet the experts opinions, but sometimes lack of evidence can itself be subjective

ABC news also had a great report or the issue
http://youtu.be/NGe3EOJ-CMY

Car4Life: Respectfully, your iPhone analogy does not directly relate to Toyota's alleged unintended acceleration scenario. What happened with Toyota was a sudden rash of alleged unintended acceleration reports, which affected a tiny population of the user base. The reports then subsided and stopped altogether, without anything being done to "fix" the alleged problem.

To use your smartphone analogy, we'd see a scenario in which:

(1) Several dozen people report a severe problem. An infinitesimally small portion of the installed base is affected.

(2) Nobody can reproduce the problem. NOBODY! Not CSIs. Not multiple government inquiries. Not even NASA's brilliant engineers. This applies to randomly sampled phones, as well as the phones that had the alleged problem.

(3) After a number of months, the problem disappears without changing anything. Same phone. No new apps. No new data. No OS updates. It just magically disappears.

That's what happened with the allegations of unintended acceleration made against Toyota. It's also what happened with the allegations of unintended acceleration made against Audi, years later. The conclusion was "pedal misapplication", or put in laymen's terms, the user was standing on the gas pedal while BELIEVING they were mashing the brake pedal. This conclusion is 100% consistent with all the evidence, including the testimony of alleged victims, who are reporting what they *believe*, and not what actually happened.

Add the media into the mix -- which is a bunch of entertainers delivering sensational stories rather than being research facilities for independently validated and verified information -- and you end up with a media frenzy that promotes sensationalism and exploits public fear to increase viewership and thereby value to sponsors.

Investigators and good scientists know, if there is a conflict between what you believe and the physical evidence, go with the physical evidence. Humans' perceptions and beliefs have a long track record of being unreliable, incomplete, inaccurate, and wrong. But you can't change what some people believe. See my original post's references to ghosts, Bigfoot, ancient aliens, etc. Witches didn't disappear because the persecutors killed them all. They disappeared because people stopped believing in them.

Typo Correction: Allegations of Audi's unintended acceleration came BEFORE those leveled against Toyota.

Wrong Steve, the reports did not just suddenly stop, Toyota actually started using a different computer in their cars to receive acceleration instructions from the gas pedal, as the gas pedal is no longer physically linked to the engine, it is actually linked to a computer which thenelectronically dictates how fast the engine will go.

By the way, Ghost, Big Foot, Ancient Aliens is kind of a fail of an analogy. The toytoa Uninteded acceleration cases emerged between 2001-2009 when Toyota began implementing computers in their vehicles, like other manufacturers, to electronically control acceleration with no direct link between gas pedal and engine.

So unless you can tell me when Ancient Aliens, Big Foot, and Ghost were caught having a major convention spiking reports, i dont see the connection between the two.

And the agencies you speak of actually had experts on both sides of the argument which prompted Toyota to replace floor mats, and eventually replace a part in 2009 linking the gas pedal and computer, then reported incidents started to decline...

The reports did not just suddenly stop, as you suggested, Toyota had to quietly take measures to stop the problem themselves.

Car4Life writes "...Toyota actually started using a different computer in their cars to receive acceleration instructions from the gas pedal, as the gas pedal is no longer physically linked to the engine, it is actually linked to a computer which then electronically dictates how fast the engine will go..."

Are you saying Toyota switched to drive-by-write AFTER the unintended acceleration allegations? Can you direct me to where I can learn more about that? Actual details, and not just someone saying it's so. My understanding is that the suspect vehicles already had electronic accelerator control (not mechanical linkage), and that NASA's engineers inspected the components and computer code and concluded there was no flaw in it.


Car4Life writes "...And the agencies you speak of actually had experts on both sides of the argument which prompted Toyota to replace floor mats..."

My understanding is after CSIs, engineers, NASA, and numerous federal government enquiries could find no defect, the federal government was still persecuting Toyota, demanding they fix the problem (which the Feds believed existed, in spite of nobody being able to reproduce it, or find it). Toyota, who was suffering huge perception backlash and costs to defend itself, agree to "do something" on the condition that the feds call off the witch hunt. Both sides agreed, and so Toyota did some busy work to comply with the agreement, being unable to address an alleged, unreproducible problem, without a root cause. The feds stopped the witch hunt. Reports of runaway Toyotas faded away. Because there was never any proof of causality (that means "A causes B", or "this defect caused the alleged unintended acceleration") we have people *believing* that this proves Toyota actually had a problem and the changes fixed it, rather than seeing it was nothing more significant than a coincidence, similar to the Audi unintended acceleration debacle, in which no defect was found, no fix was issues, and the alleged problem went away by itself anyway.

If someone is convinced that a defect existed, then they will continue to believe that, no matter what. They'll surely ignore the facts that nobody could ever reproduce the alleged problem or identify its cause. They'll continue to believe that because a number of people insist it's so, then it must be so. After all, millions of Americans who believe they've been abducted by aliens can't all be wrong, can they?

@steve writes :If someone is convinced that a defect existed, then they will continue to believe that, no matter what.

It's called a settlement sir, welcome to America LOL and take a look at the current total $$$ of cases Toyota finally gave in and settled with families including an off duty officer killed driving his Lexus ES when he suddenly lost control of the vehicle adding another notch to the 911 call recordings...

Sheesh, you brush this case off as if there is no possibility these people were actually victims of an electronic glitch. I would hate to see you on a jury.