What's all the fuss about with the Toyota car recall?

The Japanese Toyota president was compelled to fly over to Washington from Tokyo and make a grovelling public apology under intense media scrutiny inside the US Congress. Politicians know they can get a lot of free press by stoking the popular perception that Toyota somehow knew the gas pedals were "dangerous," but installed them anyway, violating U.S. laws and regulations. U.S. automakers are doing everything to encourage this hysteria. This was just plain old fashioned bullying...

However, let's look at the facts so far. The probability these accidents resulted from the use of an ill-designed component of accelerator pedals getting stuck and causing fatal crashes, I had to consider the numbers: 34 people died in accidents blamed on the pedals. That's a pretty small number, but maybe enough to raise some concerns... until you realize that's the total number of fatalities since 2000.

Toyota has recalled more than 8.5 million vehicles in the U.S. Assume the owners drive those vehicles an average of 10,000 miles a year (that's less than 30 miles round-trip a day...conservative in the vast spaces of the US - and a factor of 10 makes the maths simpler). This means Toyotas are logging more than 85 billion miles a year in the U.S. or 850 billion miles during the last 10 years.

By dividing 34 deaths into 850 billion miles and the odds of a Toyota owner having one of these accidents is one in 25 billion for each mile driven...or your cahnces of being are a fatality are one in 2.5 million. That's a random event. If Toyota were using faulty equipment, we would have seen thousands more accidents and deaths...and you can bet in a litigious society like the United States, claims would have been filed by savvy lawyers and piled high in the law courts by now, on par probably with cigarette-induced diseases.

You're more likely to get killed by lightning: 60 people died from lightning in the United States just in 2009. The odds of a hole-in-one in golf are only 5,000 to 1.

Statistics aside, the allegedly defective accelerator part is made in Canada by Indiana-based CTS Corp. Many makes and models use this same part. For example, the Pontiac Vibe uses it. Ford sells a van in China with the component. Why aren't we hearing about those cars? None of the drivers with American cars that use identical parts ever experienced a stuck accelerator? US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told people to stop driving Toyotas... and then retracted it saying it was "obviously a misstatement."

I'm confident those parts are safe. It makes sense for those driving recalled Toyotas to get the pedal replaced and ignoring the recall voids the warranty.

Look for Toyota to be one of the consistent performers of the decade too...