Well what do you know?
Federal safety regulators investigating the crash of a Toyota Prius in suburban New York said Thursday that the car’s computer showed no evidence of braking by the driver at the time of the crash.
The driver told police she had been unable to stop the car from speeding and crashing into a stone wall.
The computer indicated that the car’s throttle was “fully open,” according to a statement from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sent investigators to examine the car along with Toyota engineers.
The finding raises the possibility that the car, a 2005 Prius, accelerated because the driver, a 56-year-old housekeeper whose name has not been released, mistakenly pressed the accelerator instead of the brake. The driver was leaving her employer’s driveway in Harrison, N.Y., when the car sped up, crossed a street and hit a wall.
What is unclear is whether the woman depressed the brake after the car sped up and then took her foot off the brake just before the crash. The recorder on the Prius involved captured data only after the air bags deployed, Toyota said.
Last week, Toyota cast doubt on the account of a California man who said his 2008 Prius took him on a 30-mile ride at up to 94 miles an hour. Toyota said evidence obtained from the car did not match the man’s account and showed that the brakes, though severely worn, would have been capable of stopping the car.
Great. They even come with blackbox recorders of driver behaviour. The blackbox account is saying these people are more than playing loose with the truth; they're lying. Why in the world would these people lie about such a thing?
To answer that rhetorical question, oh look, there's this article here from bloody Fox News.
The man who became the face of the Toyota gas pedal scandal this week has a troubled financial past that is leading some to question whether he was wholly truthful in his story.
On Monday, James Sikes called 911 to report that he was behind the wheel of an out-of-control Toyota Prius going 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. Twenty-three minutes later, a California Highway Patrol officer helped guide him to a stop, a rescue that was captured on videotape.
Since then, it's been learned that:
— Sikes filed for bankruptcy in San Diego in 2008. According to documents, he was more than $700,000 in debt and roughly five months behind in payments on his Prius;
— In 2001, Sikes filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff's Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a digital video camera and equipment and $24,000 in cash;
— Sikes has hired a law firm, though it has indicated he has no plans to sue Toyota;
— Sikes won $55,000 on television's "The Big Spin" in 2006, Fox40.com reports, and the real estate agent has boasted of celebrity clients such as Constance Ramos of "Extreme Home Makeover."
While authorities say they don't doubt Sikes' account, several bloggers and a man who bought a home from Sikes in 2007 question whether the 61-year-old entrepreneur may have concocted the incident for publicity or for monetary gain.
A man who bought a house in the San Diego area from Sikes in 2007 told FoxNews.com he immediately questioned the circumstances surrounding Monday's incident.
"Immediately I thought this guy has an angle here," the man said on Friday. "But I don't know what the angle is here."
The man, who asked not to be identified, said the home he purchased from Sikes had undisclosed problems that eventually cost him $20,000. He tried to sue in civil court, but Sikes had filed for bankruptcy during the process.
"It got to the point where it wasn't worth me paying legal fees to go after a guy who was broke," he said. "I ate the 20,000 bucks."
The man said Sikes came off as a dishonest businessman who was difficult to work with during the transaction.
"It didn't surprise me," he said of Sikes' recent troubles with his Prius. "I thought this guy is trying to pull a scam here."
Toyota executives, who have talked extensively with Sikes, have said they're "mystified" by Sikes' account.
"It's tough for us to say if we're skeptical," Don Esmond, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales, said Thursday. "I'm mystified in how it could happen with the brake override system."
Which just about makes him guilty by suspicion in trial by media, does it not? :)
I guess they now have to drag Akio Toyoda in front of a Senate committee hearing and have him apologise for the stupidity of his customers.
Toyota is quibbling about a misleading shot that US ABC put in their News story on 22 Feb this year. They should be demanding a right to rebut these Senators who came at them with all these crappy claims as if they had any merit. Or pay lots of money to their opponents in the coming elections, regardless of party lines. Just shower money on their opponents gratuitously.
I mean, really.
And oh, look, just as I had predicted, Toyota is now closing plants in America.
The company is planning to shut down the assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., that makes Corollas and the Tacoma compact pickup. The plant closure will throw 4,700 experienced, highly skilled and dedicated employees onto the street during the worst job market since the Depression, and it will jeopardize nearly 20,000 other jobs around the state.
It is a cold and irresponsible act on Toyota’s part, a decision that was not necessary from a business standpoint and that completely disregards the wave of human misery it is setting in motion.
The New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant (generally referred to as NUMMI) began as a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in 1984. G.M. abandoned the venture when it collapsed into bankruptcy proceedings last year. Toyota declared that the plant was no longer viable because of the absence of G.M. and announced that it would close at the end of this month.
What has not been made clear to the public is that for many years the plant has been used primarily to produce vehicles for Toyota, not General Motors. A report prepared for a state commission that has been seeking to avert the plant closure noted that “G.M. accounted for only 10 percent of the plant’s production last year and an average of 15.4 percent between 2001 and 2009.”
In fact, from Jan. 1 to Feb. 27 this year, with G.M. gone, Toyota produced 61,000 sparkling new vehicles at the plant. That was more than double the 27,000 that were produced in the same period in 2009, when G.M. was part of the operation.
The report, written by Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that “Toyota could easily fill its production lines at NUMMI by building a higher percentage of the Corollas it sells in the U.S.,” or by adding a new model to the plant — a hybrid, for example.
What we’re dealing with here is the kind of corporate treachery toward workers and their local communities that has ruined countless lives over the past several decades and completely undermined the long-term prospects of the economy.
Yeah, right. The last I remembered, the US government took its shots at Toyota, treating its CEO like some two-bit con man. If you start throwing punches, you've got to expect to take a few yourself. This crying over Corporate Greed and what Toyota should be giving back to the community is bovine-faecal-matter printed large.
But you know me, I saw that one coming.
No comments:
Post a Comment