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Maybe the editor was appeasing Audi. The article said that the Audi SUA was caused by driver error. But the case is back before the jury, and the Swedes blamed SUA on the cruise control.
Now it gets more interesting:
State Farm Asks Toyota to Pay Up for 'Unintended Acceleration' Accident Claims (Straightline)
It doesn't matter whether the author knows that Toyota use hall effect sensors, variable rheostats, or a bent hairpin in the pedal, the point I was making is that he draws the conclusion that electronic issues could be the cause of SUA are "not in the least likely" based on the unsupported fact that Toyota's ECM is just like that of most other car companies.
He doesn't know that, and we don't know that. All we do know is that when the throttle body is wide open and the pedal isn't depressed the ECM sets no fault code, leading numerous service staff at Toyota dealers no choice but to to tell affected customers that "no fault was found".
We suppose it was only a matter of time before auto insurance companies joined the unintended acceleration party. State Farm is asking Toyota to reimburse it for claims paid out for accidents related to Toyotas that reportedly accelerated out of control, according to a report in USA Today.
It's unclear how State Farm's adjustors were able to determine the truthfulness of its customers' unintended acceleration claims, but it's likely the legal teams for both companies will get to spend some quality time together studying the claims.
For its part, State Farm says it warned Toyota back in 2007 that it was seeing a disturbing increase in claims for such accidents (with unintended acceleration of a Toyota the apparent cause).
insurance costs
car prices
I can see the insurance company perspective, but they are gonna have a heck of an expensive time trying to figure out what "thus far unidentified" defect they can sue Toyota for.
Sounds like an ambulance chaser to me.
Let's get a neutral party to investigate instead.
I do see the problems. I don't think it will be a long drawn out battle. State Farm says we paid out a $billion in claims that the customer says were caused by UA. We will settle for half and not drag all these cases through the courts.
If Toyota refuses, I see insurance companies raising rates on ToyLex vehicles. And raising the price of the vehicles at Toyota will not fly. They still have to compete with the other automakers.
Which brings up something for Edmund's. When you look at car prices in the UK, average insurance rates are part of the equation for each model and brand. That would be helpful if at all possible with all the variables. My experience is the smaller the vehicle the higher the rates. One thing I look at before buying. My current Sequoia was less than my VW Passat Wagon. Has little to do with original cost.
Nice deflection. The issue is EMI and Who is investigating. I posted that the NHTSA is investigating after letting the automakers have a free ride for decades. This attorney just happened to be attached to the same article. Does his book pick on Toyota specifically? Or are all attorneys suspect in your eyes. Or just the ones not working for Toyota? Toyota was quick to discredit a neutral University professor that looked into causes. Who do you think is Neutral?
I agree rates for Toyotas could go up if they don't work with insurers.
Having said that, my Toyota is cheapest to insure out of my 3 cars.
You quoted the attorney, not me.
You mention NHTSA but your position on them is clear - you don't trust them at all.
This case is becoming a who's who of people who aren't trustworthy, with few exceptions (Irv Miller and that PR consultant, I forget the name now).
Irv Miller is the PR guy.
Chris Santucci, lobbyist laughed at by NHTSA when he approached them on behalf of Toyota.
They totally violated the legal requirements to hide defects.
So I have no doubt they are untrustworthy about electrical vice floor mat problems.
Last Thursday, I received an E-mail from Toyota HQ in CA. They wanted to know what I thought of my dealers service They directed me to their website. After selecting "English" and clicking "next" I was directed to download Internet Explorer 5+.
I have IE 8. It would not let me complete the survey. There was a place to post a message. So I left them a message.
I described the problem with their survey site. I then said that this was typical of Toyota's total disregard of their customers. I said that Toyota must mean "cr*p in Japanese. I signed it "Former Toyota Customer."
I got an automated E-mail today thanking me for me for leaving a message.
The only way to judge a car is your personal experience with it, not what others tell you.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
The OEM tires are some of the worst tires I have ever experienced.
I have had no problems. It even gets over 40 MPG on long trips.
Toyota Customer Service is crappy. I found that out after they recalled it. I believe if you read my post, I was complaining about their customer service.
That has soured me with Toyota.
That is my personal experience. No one told me that. I observed it first hand.
Is rationality in the eyes of the beholder, as is beauty?"
Those are very good questions. Thank you for posting them. John
~ Sam
• Repair of floor mats, sticky pedals: $1.07 billion
• Repair of Prius brake glitch: $0.16 billion
• Litigation settlements: $1.07 billion
• Lost sales, production: $2.13 billion
Total: $4.43 billion
Source: Kohei Takahashi of J.P. Morgan
From an article at Autonews.com
i'm thinking those toyota execs sit around watching 'wall street' endlessly.
too bad that movie is 20+ years old. the world has changed.
look at the higher up people who left before things started publicly unwinding.
they are the one's who knew.
Now here's where a reasonable juror should say to him or herself, wait a minute, did the person die because the roof collapsed or because they drove in a manner that rolled over their vehicle? There would be no roof collapse if they didn't drive negligently in the first place, so either they are, (or the party that caused them to roll over and is at fault in the accident) is at fault, and the Roof strength really has nothing to do with it.
Bottom line, avoid driving in a manner that causes your vehicle (or another's) to rollover, thereby causing potential death.
maybe it was the fault of the victim, or maybe not.
i don't know and you don't either. before you blame them,
do your homework about it and present as factual account as best you can.
you have never been in an accident that was not your fault?
it still is your fault, you took up someone else's space on the road.
you just happened to get there first. :surprise:
I don't know if we expected it to be quite this dramatic, but many of us long-time Toyota owners called this one back in the 2003-2005 period. And even so, I don't think it was totally apparent then just how much the QC had been thrown out the window in favor of production quantity and how many of the normal feedbacks in the TPS had stopped working as a result.
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
It also was the first of several proven instances in the cost-cutter 90s at Toyota where engineers expressed concern about a design spec and it was intentionally ignored. Because it mostly affected vehicles outside the U.S. or trucks that were really old by the time the recall was announced, it didn't get a lot of attention here at the time (about 5 or 6 years ago now).
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
Hmmmm, if that is the case why does the insurance institute make roof strength one of the safety criteria. And Rollover testing by the Feds is one of the high priority tests for every vehicle. And why do automakers put in ESC if rollover protection is not the responsibility of the automaker?
I do agree that a lot of rollover accidents are driver error. Not all are and to make a blanket statement that the automaker has no responsibility is just wrong. If roof strength is not important, why did Volvo get slapped for faking an ad showing their supposed superior roof strength?
Any 4X4 that I own, I would like to know that it has an exceptionally strong roof. Back road running can often end up with your vehicle on its top. A well built vehicle gets rolled back on its wheels and keeps on going.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_16/b4174076731775.htm?campaign_i- - d=rss_null
Toyota Was in Denial. How About You?
A failure to deal with obvious problems was its biggest problem. But instead of just shaking your head, take a look at your own company
By Richard Tedlow
In the past weeks we have learned two things about Toyota. First, when it comes to crisis management, the company stinks. Second, when it comes to manufacturing automobiles, Toyota isn't what it was cracked up to be.
It is that second item that came as the real shocker. Anyone questioning this company's level of quality a year ago would have had difficulty finding an audience. But today, Toyota finds itself having to recall more than 8 million vehicles, and it may soon have to pay the maximum fine the U.S. Transportation Dept. can levy for concealing safety information.
As you surely know, a wide array of Toyota's vehicles must undergo repairs for a potentially deadly accelerator problem. Indeed, it has already cost lives.
Manufacturing defects can crop up at the best of companies. And Toyota was certainly counted among the best of the best. Anyone still interested in reading about the company's vaunted production system can go buy a book like The Toyota Way or The Machine that Changed the World. But evidence is starting to indicate that we were living in a "Toyota reputation bubble," comparable in its own way to the dot-com and housing bubbles.
In 2005, Toyota recalled more vehicles in the U.S. than it sold. Worldwide, nearly 1.5 million Toyota vehicles were recalled the following year. Why was there not a spate of articles about Toyota no longer being the company people thought it was? Outsiders writing about Toyota fell victim to what John Kenneth Galbraith many years ago called the conventional wisdom.
We all saw Toyota through the prism of its supposed manufacturing superiority, a prism that distorted reality. When the accelerator recalls were followed by Prius recalls over faulty brakes, the jig should have been up. But to this day I know people who do not plan to take recalled Toyotas back to the dealer. They are still in denial.
Evidence of trouble was available to Toyota long before American consumers were told. The gas-pedal problem appeared in Europe a year before it started causing accidents in the U.S., as the company's brass knew full well. Acknowledging as much in congressional testimony, Toyota's top U.S. executive, Yoshimi Inaba, characterized the company's response this way: "We did not hide it. But it was not properly shared." What on earth were they thinking? Did they believe that the failure of this most public of products would pass by unnoticed?
I believe I know the answers to these questions. Toyota's top people were in denial, just as the public was. By denial, I mean that they stopped being honest with one another. And they stopped being honest with themselves. If Toyota's products were as fatally flawed as they were, that would be too awful to be true. Therefore, the awful truth was brushed away. I've seen this happen in so many companies that I was compelled to write a book about it.
There's a highly valuable lesson for all businesspeople in the tragedy at Toyota: If denial can destroy the reputation of a company that was once so admired, it can destroy the reputation of your company, too. Unfortunately, organizations (and people) that are in denial have a hard time seeing through their own smokescreens. Here are some questions you should ask yourself to help you avoid Toyota's fate:
• What happens to the bearer of bad news? Does your company shoot the messenger rather than heed the message? There are indications that this may have been the case at Toyota.
• Do the real issues of the day only come up in the hallways after meetings are finished?
• Are you trash-talking your competitors' products? If so, how sure are you that yours are superior?
• Is your company building a new large headquarters to celebrate itself? There is some evidence of the "edifice complex" at Toyota.
• Would you rather be conventionally wrong or unconventionally right? Toyota's top people chose the former.
If your answers to these questions make you a bit uneasy, think about how Toyota President Akio Toyoda must be feeling right about now.
Richard Tedlow is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face.
toyota's best chance lies in the other countries like those in South East Asia, where I noticed there is a media black out abt these toyota news (maybe they are scared to lose toyota's advertisement business). People in these countries have not much clue what a jerk toyota is and keeps on buying their cars.
Someone used to post "Move on. There's nothing to see here." each time the expose started on toyota-lexus' runaway acceleration. AT first it was floor mats. When someone suggested there was more of a problem beyond a few floor mats, we were told "move on, there's nothing to see here at toyota-lexus."
Then it was the accelerator pedal. Again, "Move on, there's nothing more to see here." implying it was all over with the sticking pedals.
I think the poster who minimized any news about the problem has moved along, but the problems are still with us.
I'm still waiting for the full truth, the inconvenient truth for toyota-lexus to come about the electronic component of the runaway acceleration. Anyone who believes they were telling the truth in the US and were fully caring about building the best cars has been deceived and easily misled.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Yes, I admire anyone who has the guts to manufacture and sell any product in the U.S. I certainly would not attempt it. Fully 50% of our population is broke, too lazy to work, and clamoring to get something for nothing. Nobody will get rich off of Toyota except a few attorneys. My advice to the rest of you is get a job.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Tires on hybrids are chosen for low rolling resistance, i.e. specifically for their poor traction. Even most non-hybrid OEM tires suck.
Oil changes for $45? Try another shop. The Magnussen-Moss warranty act means you can go to any service shop as long as it meets the manufacturer's recommendations. I bet you can find a place to change the oil for half that much, just shop around. You're not required to go to a dealer.
If customer service is bad then it's up to you to find a good mechanic in your area. That's what I recommend.
Best of luck.
Here are some news articles coming out today.
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2010/04/consumer-reports-2010-lexus-gx-don- t-buy-safety-risk.html
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/13/autos/consumer_reports_lexus_gx460/index.htm?sou- rce=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36457556/ns/business-autos/
It's a fairly new test, so few models have been tested.
What happens to the bearer of bad news? Does your company shoot the messenger rather than heed the message? There are indications that this may have been the case at Toyota
Irv Miller is that person, and he conveniently "retired".
You really have to wonder if he was forced out. That's why I say bring him back. He should be leading Toyota, in the US at least.
That's actually true, though I would not include myself in that group because I took a wait-and-see approach.
However, we could say the "deceived and easily misled" applies to the Sikes hoax, too. A lot of folks here are eager to believe any bad news.
A couple of interesting observations:
* my Sienna's VSC is just the opposite, it's hyper-active and TOO intrusive. So much so that it prevents me from climbing my snowy driveway. I have to turn VSC off just to park. So that's a real surprise.
* anyone still think CR is biased in favor of Toyota? They've withheld the recommendations of all the recalled models and now pulled a Suzuki Samurai on the Lexus GX.
Even though CR hasn't had issues with rollover propensity since 2001, Car & Driver rolled a Jeep Liberty in a slalom test, not sure about the model year but it came out in 2002, so there have been more recent cases.
I realize it has to be frustrating for the toyota-lexus devotees. I understand your hostility. But things started downhill in 2002-2003.
>Nobody will get rich off of Toyota except a few attorneys.
...and toyota-lexus.
Remember the attorneys are just using the laws that toyota-lexus may have violated.
Ask State Farm and the other insurance companies how they feel about toyta-lexus' failure to keep their vehicles safe.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Background: Runge and Martinez are both former heads of NHTSA.
Runge and Martinez are proponents of the voluntary compliance system in which automakers are supposed to notify NHTSA when there is a problem. Automakers that don't can be fined
Read more: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100412/RETAIL03/304129959/1- 125#ixzz0kzZuzib9
Odd becaues that doesn't really give NHTSA much power until it's too late.
The editor concludes by saying:
just about everybody agreed on one more thing, that NHTSA needs to upgrade and upsize its staff to keep up with technological and logistical changes in the industry.
When you're Chris Santucci and you approach them about UA and get laughed at, you wonder if that's money well spent.
To be honest I'm not sure how to fix NHTSA.
CR attacking Toyota?? Not sure. As said a problem seems to exist.
Toyota and Exponent are in attack mode now, so could be interesting. And you are already aware of facts - Exponent will do highly questionable reports/studies. I have too much documented proof accumulated past several years to not believe/question anything Exponent claims. They are very good at legally twisting the truth, and making truth appear to be a falsehood.
Guess we shall see what happens now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NICO3f3jV1A
QUICK - watch it before YouTube takes it down!
I can't believe you can't drift the IS sports sedan, but you can drift a tall Lexus SUV.
Note they didn't actually roll one (or know of any such cases), before anyone jumps to conclusions...but this could lead to a situation where the tall Lexus was tripped and could then roll.
Never mind all that, the important part is that CR is very influential, and their readers are often Toyota buyers.
Looking back, they targeted the Samurai first, and Suzuki never really recovered.
Then they went after the Isuzu Trooper. Isuzu RIP.
Then it was the Mitsubishi Montero, in 2001. From 1999 to 2009 Mitsubishi sales dropped 80%!
So this has HUGE implications for Toyota. They need a revised stability control program ASAP.
FWIW, I think that while the drift looks cool on a video, I would call that a total failure of the stability control system in that Lexus.
CR said they felt vehicle was very nice, but quite dangerous for the average owner. Other experts agreed test demonstrates high safety risk. Commentator also said this was unbiased test. CR had no reason to lie. All agreed needs correction immediately.
Toyota and NHTSA both were notified.
Seems this is a new stability control system for this 2010 model, and CR said 2009 model or earlier in past had performed quite well in these tests. I was quite shocked this 2010 SUV had difficulty taking that curve!! Test video says it all.
Since CR went and got another vehicle to verify test results - same results - problems exist.
Guess we now wait to see when and how Toyota addresses this. Toyota does have posting on news release site already. Link below.
http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/default.aspx
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36391413/ns/business-autos/?ns=business-autos
So my Toyota Hybrid OEM tires stink.
My wife just bought a Subaru Forester. Her OEM tires are great tires.
If that occurs - will definitely evaluate situation.
Sad their GS SUV is a "no buy". It seems like they have similar problems but not exactly the same issues seen with the Jeep Wrangler roll over danger on tight cornering and steep angles.
Now only if they would bring the Supra back and bring the Hi-Lux to the US all would be well.
I went from an Acura Integra sports coupe to a Camry and Accord and it lowered my insurance by hundreds of dollars, better gas mileage and a sturdy car all around.