Toyota's Accelerator Malfunctions...

If you've been paying attention to this story, you already know the outcome: after months (and millions of dollars) spent investigating the media-hyped reports of electronics problems in Toyota's accelerators that allegedly led to hundreds of accidents and dozens of deaths, the official report says: there is no electronic problem.  The problem was drivers mistaking the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal:

A record $48.8 million in fines, nearly eight million vehicle recalls, hundreds of lawsuits and one humiliating set of Congressional grillings later, we finally learned Tuesday that Toyota cars can't magically accelerate on their own. So what happened? "Pedal misapplications."

Now there's a euphemism for the bureaucratic ages. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood couldn't bring himself to say "driver error" and he grew testy with a reporter who dared to put it so bluntly. But that's what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study, conducted over 10 months with the help of NASA engineers, concluded. Or to put it in plain English: Drivers, in moments of panic, sometimes mistake the accelerator for the brake.

There's something badly broken about a legal system that allows mistakes like this to occur over and over again.  Billions of dollars of shareholder value (that's mom and pop's pension, folks) were destroyed for no reason whatsoever.  I have no magic answers here; wish I did...

Operator Error...

Those of us in the software business are very aware of the “operator error” problem – some behavior the user didn't expect, but which was actually caused by something the user unwittingly did.  With software, most of the time the real problem turns out to be a misleading or unobvious user interface design.  Some fraction of operator errors, though, are things you're never going to be able to fix by redesigning the user interface.  For example, if someone insists on putting their name into a field labeled “street address”, there's probably nothing you can do about it.

Toyota's notorious “sudden acceleration” problems turn out to be a case of operator error – users (overwhelmingly senior citizens) were stomping on the accelerator instead of the brake.  It's not obvious to me what one can do about such a thing...

Toyota Defects...

Megan McArdle (my favorite economics blogger) does what the lamestream media won't do: some investigative reporting into the Toyota defects, using publicly available data.  She was suspicious of the hype around the reported defects, and indeed she found several things that raised her doubts even higher.  Perhaps the most interesting discovery is shown at right: most of the incidents occurred with drivers over 55 years old.  As Megan points out, “...however advanced Toyota's electronics are, they're not yet clever enough to be able to pick on senior citizens.”

Read the whole thing.  And if you're in the market for a new car, do consider buying a Toyota: we've had four of them, and we've been very pleased with them...and they're an especially good deal right now...