Is Bob Herbert Missing Something About the California Toyota Plant? Chevy Volt Visits the “California of Texas"
Runaway Prius Is Labeled a Hoax, Another Zooms Out of Control in New York, and Sides Are Taken as the Great Recall Turns Nasty
By Matthew DeBord
Posted Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 9:14am
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How did I miss this? It might have had something to do with all the questions that swirled around the runaway Prius in San Diego. Last week, however, another Prius developed a itch to burn rubber and accelerated out of control in New York.
This is how it’s gone with the latest chapter in Toyota’s Great Recall: whoever is managing the crisis for the company will gain some, er, traction, as they did prior to the San Diego runaway Prius, when Toyota tried to refute an electronic-throttle malfunction test by Prof. David Gilbert. Toyota labeled the professor’s investigation bad science, yet almost immediately afterwards, reports of the runaway Prius hitting 90-plus mph on the freeway poured in.
The New York Prius followed. Then the record of James Sikes, the San Diego driver, was investigated. A bankruptcy and varies debts were uncovered, by among others the car blog Jalopnik. In Forbes, Michael Fumento challenged pretty much every claim Sikes made and even cast some aspersions on what the California Highway Patrol witnessed.
The upshot is that the Great Recall has turned decisively nasty. Toyota has an interest in defending itself, its cars, and its reputation. But others have also taken up the fight on both sides.
Edmunds.com’s CEO, Jeremy Anwyl, whose company has offered an astonishing million dollar bounty to anyone who can solve the riddle of sudden unintended acceleration, took to the pages of the Washington Post to explain the complexity of the problem.
We’re talking about real questions of safety here, questions that could mean the difference between life and death for Toyota owners. For someone like Fumento to flog the media for paying too much attention to Toyota and its woes and for assuming that Sikes was innocent before being tarred as an impecunious con-man, misses the essential point. Something is wrong with our Toyotas. And no one seems to be able to figure out what it is.
