7 insurers sue Toyota over acceleration crashes

Why should Toyota be liable for something without merit? Final report by NHTSA states: No evidence of Toyota electronics problems. The review by federal investigators has turned up no evidence of electronic failures in Toyota vehicles involved in suspected runaway acceleration cases. This was nothing more than the drivers error and people that received the money from these insurance companies should return the money or face a legal proceedings. Toyota has nothing to do with this bogus accusations.

'The insurers cite data that blames 725 crashes on the problem and fault the Japanese automaker for failing to equip its cars with an override system that would cause a car to idle if the brake and gas were deployed simultaneously'

Are they kidding, exactly which other cars do have the failsafe where if one presses the brake and accelerator simultaneously, the car idles. And if there is such a car then please enlighten us.

That lawsuit will be thrown out solely on this point i.e., if this is what the insurance companies are arguing.

Actually, this failsafe method sounds like a great idea, probably relatively easy to add to future cars/models and probably cheap, too.

Too bad that creativity is put into making money for insurance companies(ahem, and their lawyers).

Total witch hunt. As for a failsafe, these people should try shifting the transmission into neutral if their car experiences sudden acceleration. Of course, this might be too much of a mental puzzle for the driver who can't tell the difference between the accelerator and brake pedals.

Since Americans like suing so much I guess it wouldn't be a bad idea if Toyota went after the licencing authorities for not testing the applicants if they could differentiate the differences between the brake and the gas pedal.

They could argue if the question is on the written test. And this is for the automatic transmission test. I think manual transmission license holders are expected to have a little more intelligence, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get their cars moving in the first place

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading in an article that these vehicles have "black boxes" like an airplane, and the reason the US government did not charge Toyota was that all the black boxes showed that the driver was at fault, i.e., they mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal, rather than anything malfunctioning.

I have never heard of any car having a BLACK BOX like airplanes do, so shinjuku, that info sounds real fishy, no lawyer would try to go against such evidence as a black box, so they must be some stupid UWASA, gossip by the Japanese to try to make American drivers look like the criminals, when in reality it is Japanese TOYOTA that is the real criminal here.

In modern cars they call them data/event-recorders or similar. Most cars now have them and are used by mechanics for service info, etc too.

Not all makers specify their existence though.

And, yes, that data has been used in courts before.

Poor Toyota... In unrelated news US auto sales data for 2010 came in today. All makers had excellent gains as sales recovered. Oh all but one, who's sales fell.... They must make dangerous cars...

Cars that have the On-Star system would have the so-called black box, so On-Star operators could tell what happened when you call them. That's why some people would not use their On-Star button.

elbudamexicano at 05:39 PM JST - 5th January. Japanese to try to make American drivers look like the criminals, when in reality it is Japanese TOYOTA that is the real criminal here.

You tell the U.S. Toyota buyers of Toyota being a criminal and don't buy Toyota they will laugh at your face. NHTSA investigated the sudden acceleration problem and they came to conclusion of no electronics problem in Toyota cars. Everything points to drivers error and this is a same situation that happened to Audi 5000. The U.S. goverment almost destroyed Audi in the late 80's based on accusation. Was Audi a criminal too? When you have your main competitor, GM that is majority owned by U.S. goverment, how can you have a fair investigation? The investigation should've been handled by independent party. It's ridiculous for U.S. goverment fine Toyota $16 million for a bogus drivers error. The U.S. consumers know that Toyota is one of the better buys in cars and you cannot fool the public. Check the resale value of 5 years old Corolla to your Colbalt and see the difference. Why don't you stick with your Chevy Colbalt or Pontiac G5 with the faulty power steering that injured many people and caused 1.3 million recalls. GM had this problem since 2005 and it took them almost 6 years to recall? How sad.