We’re seeing a widely admired multinational corporation suffer through what could be an existential crisis — although I imagine that Toyota has built up enough goodwill through the decades that, although it may take a hit, it should be able to recover if it responds prudently to the problem with Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) in so many of its vehicles. In Toronto’s National Post, Terence Corcoran sees protectionist sentiment at work from the American automobile industry and its political supporters. “Was Toyota panicked into doing something — anything — when faced with a looming full-bore economic attack from the United States Economic Marines, with the media imbedded [sic] as part of the crusade?”
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins is the type of fellow who sees ambulance-chasing personal-injury lawyers behind any such scare. Elsewhere on this site I’ve expressed my aversion to an “everything-is-a-scam” mindset. However, in a column from last week, Jenkins does have some pertinent points to make. In the first place, Toyota is not the only manufacturer to have experienced a SUA problem, although its vehicles are affected by the phenomenon far more frequently than are those of its competitors. Furthermore, if the problem lurks in the vehicles’ electronics, rather than the floor mats or the acceleration pedal (as has been speculated in the media), then the root cause may never be found. “Toyota may or may not have a legitimately bigger problem with unintended acceleration than other manufacturers, but Toyota clearly is hunting desperately for some problem, any problem, it can declare ‘fixed.’… The first thing to notice is that SUA complaints afflict all manufacturers without a cause necessarily ever being assigned. Strange things happen in small numbers when you put millions of cars on the road. Secondly, hardly certain is whether Toyota’s overweighting is significant…. Reinforced by Toyota’s own flopping around is the impression that even Toyota doesn’t really know whether it has a problem. That won’t stop the company from finding causes and fixing them anyway. But Toyota’s deliverance may ultimately have to come from the same ghost in the machine that likely brought about its SUA purgatory in the first place.”
In a December column, before the matter had risen to this week’s crescendo, Jenkins noted that “even a midpriced car nowadays can contain dozens of microprocessors and 30 million lines of code.” Toyota employs a “drive-by-wire” system that uses microprocessors rather than a traditional steel cable to connect the accelerator to the engine. Observes Jenkins: “Racecars and motorcycles increasingly have drive-by-wire systems too—but the trusty kill switch remains part of every design.” The solution, then, might be “simple analog overrides of the digital systems we increasingly rely on…. The world needs simple, straightforward on-off switches, with the inestimable virtue of having only two states—on and off.”
UPDATE: Friday’s WSJ features another Jenkins column on the matter here.