Other Notes
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I had been following the story about the alleged Toyota accelerator problems since the very first one about the family in the Lexus with the off-duty police officer. There was audio: a passenger in the car called 911 to report that the car had accelerated to 120 miles per hour and there as nothing they could do to stop it. The car went off the road, crashed, and burned. All four occupants were killed.
The decisive piece of information here was the assertion by the caller that the car seemed to have accelerated all on its own. It was a great story and got enormous play in the national media. And I'm sure all of stories-- but especially on CNN and CBC-- featured earnest looking young reporters looking into the camera and explaining to the viewer what he or she should do if it happened to them.
If there is a single website somewhere that shows scientific evidence that this problem really exists, I'd like to see it. As it turns out, the car in California that started the whole thing had the wrong floor-mats installed and it is almost certain that the floor mat had bunched up against the gas pedal and jammed it in place. It's even possible that the driver thought he had his foot on the brake and kept pushing it harder and harder the less it worked. But it didn't matter: a compelling narrative was in place.
GM got into trouble as well, for an ignition switch the had a tendency to turn itself off, thereby de-activating the air bags. One woman, whose family sued GM, crashed with twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood. But, yes, she might have lived if she had had an air bag. All that is needed at that point is for the jury to hear was a wonderful human being she was-- she could have been your friend too-- you, on the jury-- if only she had lived.
Sarcasm aside it is necessary to point out-- to those who feel lawsuits are just ruining our world-- that juries do in fact allocate portions of blame, and will likely assign her a significant portion of it in this case.
It is not at all unusual to see certain media outlets sensationalize some lawsuit somewhere knowing that a good portion of the audience will derive great satisfaction from reading just how stupid juries are and how greedy those freeloading plaintiffs are. In reality, over and over again, you will find that the details of these cases tell a different story-- even of the woman who burned her leg with the McDonald's coffee-- a favorite of the Tort-Reform Cabal in Washington.
[added October 28, 2014] And it does, after all, appear that GM had a real fault in the ignition switch, which it deliberately ignored. There you go!