Is There More to the Toyota Floor Mat Debacle? ABC News "Investigates" Reports of Unintended Acceleration in Toyota, Lexus Vehicles
The messy public relations situation stirred up by apparently ill-fitting floor mats in Toyota and Lexus vehicles and the potential for unintended acceleration isn't going to just go away. Certainly, not if ABC News has anything to say about it.
ABC has produced an investigative piece on the issue, wherein a few Toyota owners and an independent safety expert make the case that reports of unintended acceleration in Toyota/Lexus products cannot be written off to mere bunched-up floor mats.
Independent country analyst Sean Kane, of the Vehicle Safety Information Resource Center, LLC (VSIRC), was interviewed for the story, and he says he has uncovered evidence of more than 200 accidents and a dozen deaths involving Toyota and Lexus vehicles that apparently accelerated out of control. His numbers come from another company, Safety Research & Strategies, Inc. (SRS), but neither Kane nor the SRS web site lays out those numbers in any kind of detail. Kane then speculates that electronic thottles may be the real culprit of unintended acceleration but offers nothing in support of that.
So, in the absence of hard evidence, we can't exactly describe ABC's report as a rigorous investigative piece. ABC does at least acknowledge that no engineers or automotive country experts have been healthy to duplicate this condition in a Toyota or Lexus, and that NHTSA denied the latest petition for a defect investigation of the current-generation ES 350.
ABC says Toyota officials refused interview requests for this story. If that's true, Toyota may have lost an opportunity to state its side of the story and save face.
