Unintended acceleration, revisited
by Volker Weber
Five months ago I wrote:
The phenomenon "unintended acceleration" is a technical problem that only manifests itself within the jurisdiction of the United States.
As it turns out, I was right:
DETROIT — The government’s investigation into complaints of sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles has found no evidence of flawed electronics in 58 of the vehicles that crashed, federal regulators said Tuesday.
Of course that does not help Toyota one bit.
Comments
Unfortunately you are right. This really is *major* for them, the losses are huge. The only thing they can do is to try really hard transporting that message / the DoT study in an image campaign... without telling the people that they are stupid :(
There were two things I observed while driving over 5k miles through the US in July:
1. Americans are bad drivers, they don't use speed control, use brakes in curves, straight streets, hill up and hill down, don't care about speed limits (in both directions).
2. It's quite often that the woman drives and the man is on the front seat.
I cannot comment on any causation or correlation.
Shades of Audi… people with no business being behind the wheel blaming the vehicle for their poor driving skills. I really wish the U.S. would model it's requirements for receiving a driving license on those found in Germany.
(Most) Europeans are far better drivers than (most) Americans. It comes down to paying attention. Drivers don't tend to daydream or multitask in Europe.
Arthur, that reminds me of another story from the trip:
"Arrive alive, don't text and drive."
In Europe (Germany?) we still have the calling discussion ... texting seems absurd.
