OP/ED: Great Toyota Panic of 2010

[Chuck]

Why doesn’t the mainstream press — okay, in particular the networks and liberal newspapers — do a better job of covering these issues?

Walter Olson - MANHATTAN-INSTITUTE - Mar 15, 2010

The sky was not falling after all. --Ed.

Reviewing the history of tort-bar opportunism and media malfeasance should dispel the Great Toyota Panic of 2010.

You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers. The Los Angeles Times has compiled a list of 56 fatal incidents over 19 years purportedly involving unintended Toyota acceleration, and according to my Overlawyered co-blogger Ted Frank — in a Thursday analysis refined and extended the next day by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic — the age of the driver can be publicly ascertained in a little more than half the instances. That median age turns out to be 60 — that is to say, half the drivers were that old or older. By contrast, only 16 percent of general auto fatalities in 2008 occurred with a driver 60 or older behind the wheel. Whatever is causing Avalons, Highlanders, and Tundras to misbehave is largely bypassing drivers in their twenties and thirties and instead homing in on drivers old enough to remember the Eisenhower era.... [Read More]

[xcel]

Hi Chuck:

___Just to give an idea as to how Toyota is doing in its home country, Toyota's share of the Japanese passenger car market hit new record high of 52%! This is just a blip and any journalist hanging on lowered sales due to the past frenzy over the intermediate term should take their chips off the table as they are going to lose that bet.

___Good Luck

___Wayne