Toyoto is not having a good time. A couple of days back I wrote about the Toyota slow-motion PR wreck. Yet here is another perspective on the whole matter from Ed Wallace on Business Week.

He cautions, soundly, against knee-jerk reactions and suppositions, citing very very biased reporting and investigation in the cases of Audi, Suzuki (do you remember the rolling-over jeep?) and Firestone tyres. According to Wallace, almost everything in those cases was invented, there being, in truth, either no fundamental defect or one that was minor, limited and quickly remedied.

Talking about the Audi 5000 incident in particular, Wallace is instructive:

In the 60 Minutes piece on Audis’ unintended acceleration that put this story over the top, they brought in William Rosenbluth to prove that Audis were defective on camera. As 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley said, “We took a car that had already been involved in two sudden-acceleration incidents and, without his foot on the gas pedals, showed it could do this.” Again from the book, Junk Science[1]: “… and 30 million viewers saw it with their own eyes.” What they saw was the gas pedal apparently moving under its own power.

But what the viewers didn’t see was also revealed in Walter Olson’s column, “It Didn’t Start with Dateline NBC:” Off camera, they had drilled a hole in the vehicle’s transmission and pumped extreme high-pressure air into it, which had the effect of moving the gas pedal down without the driver pressing it.

The audience and all of America came to believe that this Audi with two black marks against it was possessed. In reality, it was rigged.

As you’d expect, an Audi official appeared on that broadcast. He said his company had investigated these incidents and could find nothing wrong with their vehicles. Nobody believed him.

So it will be interesting to see what happens here.

Related posts:

1. Toyota D&O claims Oh dear. The train-wreck-in-slow-motion that is Toyota’s current crisis...
2. Deepwater oil spill: insider view on the incident There is an excellent guest post on the Oil...