saved $100m but will cost a whole lot more.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Documents-Toyota-boasted-apf-3066044297.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=

__________________
Ben
1987 190d 2.5Turbo

I'm so sick of hearing about this.

http://www.switchfires.com/

Lets hear about Ford's burning up insted. 4,500,000 vehicals recalled. Suspected 16,000,000 total affected.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Why?

- Peter.

__________________
2021 Chevrolet Spark
Formerly...
2000 GMC Sonoma
1981 240D 4spd stick. 347000 miles. Deceased Feb 14 2021
2002 Kia Rio. Worst crap on four wheels
1981 240D 4spd stick. 389000 miles.
1984 123 200
1979 116 280S
1972 Cadillac Sedan DeVille
1971 108 280S

I don't really understand the scale of this. There were 2000 or so acceleration reports and 30-some people died since the year 2000. That sounds like a big number until you consider the fact that tens of millions of cars were sold and used during that time and they are working fine. That's a miniscule percentage. This seems a little bit like a witch hunt.

__________________
1985 380SE Blue/Blue - 230,000 miles
2012 Subaru Forester 5-speed
2005 Toyota Sienna
2004 Chrysler Sebring convertible
1999 Toyota Tacoma

I'm pretty sure the 30 some people that died wouldn't agree with you if they were still around. Not to mention the thousand of people that experienced the problem that didn't die.

__________________
Question Authority before it Questions you.

I cant understand why they never changed the switch. I had a CC recal on my 98 explorer in 2001 and also on my 2001 excursion this year. seems like they have known about it a long time. I think the difference is Toyota seemed to try to ignore or cover it up. Maybe Ford did too, but they were better polititians

__________________

1982 300CD Turbo (Otis, "ups & downs") parts for sale
2003 TJ with Hemi (to go anywhere, quickly) sold
2001 Excursion Powerstroke (to go dependably)
1970 Mustang 428SCJ (to go fast)
1962 Corvette LS1 (to go in style)
2001 Schwinn Grape Krate 10spd (if all else fails)

The difference is that Toyota has always claimed to put safety and the customer first. From that memo, it's clear that is not the case at all. Like so many other corporations, their true focus is on the bottom line and they are willing to sacrifice quality, safety and, if necessary, customers to that end. It makes them look a lot like Ford, and pretty much demolishes most reasons why a buyer would prefer one over the other.

__________________
1984 300TD

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1963522,00.html

Joel Stein: My Prius Problem

I am not one of those people who sit around rooting for product recalls. That's because those people don't exist. But I got excited when Toyota recalled the 2010 Prius. It's not that I dislike the Prius. My lovely wife Cassandra has one, and it is an excellent vehicle. Except for its need to constantly tell you how excellent it is. There's a screen in the center of the dashboard with an animation that shows how much energy the car is recycling as you drive it. If one of your employees were really efficient but throughout the day kept standing up in his cubicle and yelling, "I am really efficient!" you would fire him. Or punch him in the steering wheel. The car on Knight Rider wasn't as arrogant as the Prius. You know why Priuses don't make any noise? Because they'll only talk to other Priuses.

When we moved to Los Angeles five years ago, Cassandra bought her first car ever — a totally badass 2005 black Ford Mustang with silver stripes. She looked like Starsky, if Starsky were hot and a woman and drove really nervously. The only bad thing about the car was that she spent a lot of time talking to young Mexican men at traffic lights. But two years ago, she inexplicably decided that she didn't trust Ford and wanted to get rid of the car before something went wrong. So she bought a used Prius — which now has something wrong with it.


The problem is that I can't rub this in, because she won't acknowledge it. I forward her every article about the car's problems, but she keeps saying, "It's fine!" as if this were some kind of Salem witch trial for liberals. Even though Toyota's website says to immediately remove the driver's-side floor mat because the accelerator can get stuck, she won't do it. In a car we drive our baby in. This is a woman who won't give our son nonorganic blueberries.

Admitting there's a problem with her Prius would imply there's something imperfect about her entire Whole Foods lifestyle. The Prius has made her feel so superior that, when I drive it, she tells me I'm driving it wrong. My primitive method of accelerating to speed up and braking to slow down does not maximize miles per gallon, as she can show me on an annoying bar graph on that center screen. Prius owners work very hard to get as many miles per gallon as they can to win a game they like to call Getting in an Accident While Staring at a Screen with a Dumb Graphic.
(See the top 10 product recalls.)

Prius owners act as if for every mile they drive, they prevent a coral reef from turning into a tidal wave that will hit Manhattan. (Most of my knowledge about global warming comes from The Day After Tomorrow.) Even though I drive a tiny Mini Cooper, I have been subtly shamed by all my friends in Los Angeles, a town that is one big river of Priuses. On Friday, I was shocked when a friend came over to dinner and he wasn't driving a Prius. It turned out he was driving his converted 1980s Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil and had left his wife's Prius at home. Nearly every time we drive Cassandra's metallic-green Prius, at some point we are either behind or in front of another metallic-green Prius. There are three Priuses on my tiny cul-de-sac. If this brake problem isn't repaired quickly, my neighborhood is about to be jammed up by some ugly Prius-on-Prius violence.

The worst thing about the Prius is that it has given people in Hollywood a way out of the natural order of status competition. If you want your friends and associates to think you're more successful than you are, you should have to waste $130,000 on a Maserati. These days, no one owns any other kind of hybrid, because you can't tell from a distance that they're hybrids. If GM made a car shaped like a crying planet, it could give our government all its money back.


For a while, Prius drivers in L.A. even got to park at meters without paying and drive in the carpool lane without a passenger. You don't get to drive in the carpool lane without a passenger the day you give blood. You could save every child in Haiti, and you would still have to feed the parking meter. And yet we could not thank Prius owners enough for their sacrifice in driving a really nice car that costs less to fill up. If Mel Gibson had been in a Prius, the cops would have set up a motorcade for him to weave behind and yell out his window about the Jews.

I'm hoping that the Prius malfunctions don't lead to accidents, because the odds are I'd get run over. But I also hope they point out to Prius owners that their lives aren't perfect. So for now, I'm going to make fun of how their vehicles of the future can't figure out how brakes work. The only thing better than this would be if they recalled yoga.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1963522,00.html#ixzz0gHkthI9c

I sure am glad I sold my Corolla back in December!!

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

The thing about Toyota is just their reputation as extremely reliable cars. Ever since the Pinto, we've kinda known that Fords haven't had a spotless record (case in point, firestone-gate). IMO it is impossible to build such sophisticated machinery without some glitches here and there. That's why I love old MB's...not all that sophisticated under the hood!!

__________________
TC
Current stable:
- 2004 Mazda RALLYWANKEL
- 2007 Saturn sky redline
- 2004 Explorer...under surgery.

Past: 135i, GTI, 300E, 300SD, 300SD, Stealth

Because its being blown out of proportion and the media is going after Toyota unfairly just to get them.

At this point its a media witch hunt.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

What's unfair about it? Has something that's been reported by the media been untrue? IF not, it seems like a reasonable news story.

__________________
I'd rather argue against a hundred idiots, than have one agree with me. — Winston Churchill

(AND then turned out to be just as much a pack of thieves as Everyone Else in
the Automotive Arena.)

[Ford executives will happily eat all the incriminating documents ,by the Thousands.Although by now you wonder at their Stupidity @ committing ANYTHING to paper.]

We've never been privy to viewing these kind of incriminating documents from
domestic manufacturers.

These latest revelations could be compared to one of the "Fords" being caught
refusing to install different Brake Pressure Switches (@ a Cost of less than
$50.00USD) callously suggesting that 300 people would have to be Burned Up
[along with all the Secret Damage Litigation and under the table payments]
before it approached the cost of a recall.

Unfortunately Toyota thinks Sacrificing it's Founder's Grandson on the Altar
Under the U.S. Capital Dome will make "Everything Alwright".

Note: Jim Moran's South East Toyota's Executive's Attitude about the whole
matter... President of Southeast Toyota, Ed Sheehy, of Deerfield Beach,
Florida.""Many of our competitors have taken the high road, others clearly have not,"




Has ABC News Found The Ghost In Toyota’s Machine?
By Edward Niedermeyer on February 22, 2010

Ever since Toyota’s recent problems hit “frenzy” level on our mainstream media monitoring system, speculation has been rampant that some mysterious electronic problem was at the root of the unintended acceleration scandal. We’ve been wary of jumping on the “ghost-in-the-machine” bandwagon, for a number of reasons, chief among which is the fact that it seems to be the product of an inability to explain specific instances of unintended acceleration, rather than hard evidence. Given that unintended acceleration occurs at the intersection of man and machine, good old-fashioned human error is an easier assumption than mystery software errors. Given the worrying results of our Toyota gas pedal analysis, we’ve been content to explain the situation on a combination of pedals, mats and human error. But now ABC News may just have the first positive evidence of an electronic problem that could explain the mystery behind Toyota’s unintended acceleration problem. Dave Gilbert of Southern Illinois University has found that it’s possible to cause unintended acceleration without it triggering an error code that might give some kind of clue as to its cause. Combined with our finding that Toyota actively conceals data from its black box data recorders (out of line with standard industry practice), this could be some of the first positive evidence that there’s more to the “ghost in the machine” theory than mere panic-driven speculation.

__________________
'84 300SD sold
124.128