Here’s (perhaps) the finale of David’s remarkable data diving: a full chart showing all makes and models sold from 1995 through 2008, with their rates of reported UA incidents to the NHTSA. To make the findings easier to interpret, David has adjusted all the results as a relationship to the same year average, rather than just the raw results. This really highlights those vehicles with higher than average rates of reported UA.

The table has been inserted full after the jump, as well as our commentary, but if you want to access the excel file in its entirety, it’s here.

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Toyota is a customer centric company. It now considers a recall that will please the vociferous crowd that thinks something is wrong with Toyota’s engine computer. Reuters reports that Toyota is discussing with NHTSA whether and how they should fix nearly 1.2 million Corolla and Matrix models. They are at risk of unintended stoppage. They might stall out because of flaws in their computer. Read More >

Last week, Harrison Police Capt. Anthony Marraccini said he had no indication of driver error, after a 56 year old house keeper had driven her employer’s Prius into a wall. Wall and car were totaled. Airbags deployed, housekeeper was unharmed.  Now, Marracini isn’t so sure anymore.

Yesterday, six Toyota technicians and two NHTSA inspectors descended on Harrison, NY, to inspect the Prius, which had been kept in a Harrison police impound. According to CNN, “two independent inspectors from a forensic technology company, hired by the Police Department, also were aiding the investigation.” There was no shortage of experts. Presence of congressional aides was not reported.

Toyota successfully downloaded data from the vehicle. After receiving their findings (which have not been made public), Capt. Anthony Marraccini said driver error “was a possibility,” the New York Post reports. Read More >

Volkswagen may be much closer to its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world’s largest automaker. In an exclusive interview with The Nikkei [sub], Akio Toyoda said, Toyota will make its top priority the quality, not the number of the cars it makes.

So far, VW wanted to subjugate Toyota by 2018. But Toyota has decided to go slow. Said Toyoda-san: Read More >

Based on anonymous driving habit data from customers in 45 states, GPS navigation firm TomTom reckons that Americans tend to drive at about 70 MPH on the freeway, regardless of the posted speed limit. More specifically, most Americans tend to stay within a few miles per hour of the speed limit on interstate freeways. The WSJ [sub] reports that these findings are consistent with efforts to raise freeway speed limits around the country, as Virginia recently became the latest state to raise its freeway speed limit to 70 MPH or above. Naturally, there are still safety advocates still sticking to their “speed kills” talking points, but despite these state-by-state speed limit increases, America’s road fatalities per vehicle mile traveled has been dropping consistently. That Americans rarely drive over 70 MPH, even when limits are as high as 75 MPH, shows that motorists tend to find their natural comfort limit at that speed anyway. And the fact that states with higher freeway speeds tend to be large, sparsely-populated Western states indicates that motorists tend to vary their speed only slightly from the 70 MPH “state of nature” even when faced with longer distances and less traffic. [Hat Tip: ClutchCarGo]

Usually, we don’t report every recall (you’d be pretty tired of it pretty quick,) but in the interest of things being in the spotlight, please be advised that Honda will recall more than 410,000 Odyssey minivans and Element small trucks from the 2007 and 2008 model years, says Associated Press. Read More >

All eyes are on Harrison, NY, today. Technicians from Toyota and NHTSA will head to the NYC burbs and pour over a 2005 Toyota Prius that crashed into a stone wall in the tony bedroom town of Harrison. Its driver claimed the hybrid had sped up on its own. Toyota will read out the data recorded in the Prius computer. According to the Associated Press, Toyota techs will “use equipment to determine how many times the driver hit the brakes and gas. It used the same tools earlier this week to cast doubt on a California driver who claimed his Prius sped to 94 mph before a patrol officer helped him stop it.” Read More >

From the “how did we miss this?” file comes this story of Russian police pulling motorists over and using them to create a human roadblock. This incident built on anger in the wake of another recent incident [via the NY Times] in which the vice president of Lukoil apparently bribed police to cover up an accident in which his Mercedes crashed into a Citroen, killing two passengers. That incident inspired Russian rapper Noize MC to make this song, cleverly named “Mercedes S666.” As we noted the last time we covered the messy confrontations between Russia’s motorists and police, these incidents put the political problems of American motorists into much-needed context. We still have a lot to be grateful for.

After early versions of the 2010 Mustang Convertible were caught crushing crash dummy heads, Ford re-worked its retro cruiser for a less “mind-blowing” crash test performance. If you’ve got a 2010 ‘stangvertible in mind, you might want to make sure it was built after December of last year.

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, piggy-backing on analysis started by Overlawyered’s Ted Frank, tracked down all the available ages of reported incidents of unintended acceleration in Toyotas and graphed them. The results speak volumes, as does Frank’s assessment that:

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them. (If computers are going to discriminate against anyone, they should be picking on the young, who are more likely to take up arms against the rise of the machines and future Terminators).

McArdle’s graph of incidents by location (parking, freeway, etc) after the jump.
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“I rented a Toyota for the week. I noticed when travelling in the left lane that everyone moved over to the right to let me pass. Not a single foo slowed me down. With its current reputation, the Toyota hardly needs brakes.”

Comment entered by “charenton” on Mar 14, 2010 in response to Reuters story headlined “Investigation questions Prius driver’s story: report”

Your risk of dying from your Toyota’s unintended acceleration (UA) is so low as to be all but nil next to the more general risk of dying in an automobile, according to an “Opinionator” column in the New York Times, by journalist Robert Wright.
Wright calculates that your chance of dying from unintended acceleration in a Toyota is 2.8 in a million. Meanwhile, the average American’s chance of dying in a car accident over the next to years is one in 5,244, writes Wright. “So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of one percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent). (Methodology described in the article.)

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A few days ago, James Sikes and his runaway Prius was all over news. Until we mentioned that something is fishy. Sikes’ driving skills were put in question. Stories about a wife swapping website emerged. Stories about bankruptcy. Stories about an unpaid lease on the Prius. And sundry other stories. Quickly, Sikes turned into Balloon Boy 2.0

Michael Fumento, director of the Independent Journalism Project, went on Neil Cavuto’s show on Fox Business and said: “It appears that everybody on planet earth suspected that there was something horribly wrong with this picture – except for the national media. The real hoax wasn’t James Sikes, it was in fact our press.” Read More >

Based on my experience in the 1980s helping investigate unintended acceleration in the Audi 5000, I suspect that smart pedals cannot solve the problem. The trouble, unbelievable as it may seem, is that sudden acceleration is very often caused by drivers who press the gas pedal when they intend to press the brake.

Say what? UCLA professor emeritus of psychology Richard A. Schmidt seems to believe that something other than demonic possession is causing Toyotas to accelerate out of control. Research into the Audi 5000 debacle showed him that even experienced drivers can in fact screw up, and that absent any provable mechanical or electronic failure, the chances are good that most UA events are caused by driver error. And in one of the best op-eds yet penned on the Toyota unintended acceleration scandal [at the NY Times], he explains how anyone could accidentally drive a car of any make out of control.

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Two days ago, Ed Niedermeyer received a tip from an anonymous tipster that James Sikes, the guy who couldn’t stop his runaway Prius until a cop pulled up next to him and told him to, is, well, a bit exposed.

The tipster pointed out that a James Sikes had also started a business called Adultswinglife, LLC. A look at the phone numbers showed that Adult Swing Life LLC (619) 957-7355 shared the same phone number as the real estate business of Patty & Jim Sikes (619)-957-7355. We left it at that. Times are rough, and one needs to find extra streams of income.

A few hours later, an anonymous poster that went by the name “CincyJazzy” posted on the CBS news website that Sikes “is caught in 2 attempts to defraud his insurance company out of $60K, Just lost his house, and was fired for ‘unethical behavior’, in the middle of bankruptcy, and now this.” No reaction from CBS.

Then, nothing. Until ... Read More >