"What comes around goes around" as my old fishin' buddies used to say. When we had a recall involving tires on our Explorers, Toyota was the loudest in exploiting it to make sales. Now it's happened to Toyota in a much more serious manner and to be honest both Ford an GM have been fairly sympathetic to their plight. After all, the people endangered by Toyota's action or lack of it are all future potential customers of ours.
My friends and customers have been discussing it openly and though I am biased there are some valid points. First Toyota blamed it on the floor mats~ then they found cars that had the floormats in the trunk. Now they are blaming the gas pedal and hope to fix it with a chunk of metal bolted to the inside of the firewall. CTS has emphatically stated that their product did not cause the runaway acceleration experienced by about 2000 drivers. I was giving Toyota the benefit of the doubt until they started recalling cars in Europe & Asia that don't have CTS parts installed. I sincerely hope this shim solves the problem. But I have my doubts as even if the accelerator were slammed against the floor and stuck someone like the California Highway Patrolman should have enough strength to get his shoe under it and free it. Or put both feet on the brakes and slow it down. Not die with 3 family members in a Lexus 350 while talking to 911.
I stated when I first heard about it that I suspected the PCM computer. My reasoning is that American emissions and safety standards are much stricter so the tolerances of the computer programs are much closer. A computer program also runs your cruise control. A car is basically a hostile environment for a computer. Americans have always been way ahead of the curve in inventions and technology while others exploit our knowledge for their own agenda. Computers crash all the time at home & work and it's hard to duplicate why sometimes. If the brakes and gas pedal mechanism all froze the computer could still cause the engine to run at top speed. Similar to the dieseling my VW Rabbit did. Every once in a while it would just run away from me in a cloud of black smoke and I would have to kill the engine and coast to the side of the road. Naturally I freaked the first time. But after that I always mapped escape routes as I drove. I was fortunate that it never happened in traffic but only when I was cruising in the country. Not having a VW dealer close by, I asked many garages if they had heard about it and could they fix it. They were all willing to work on it for big bucks but I parked it instead.
Talk around the customer service lounge is that it's related to the cruise control in some way. Steve Woz @ Apple is experiencing major problems with his Prius and blogging about it. Congress is investigating and Toyota is trying to stop the bleeding. Meanwhile Ford is staying the course to produce safer and more fuel efficient vehicles without aid from the Government. I'll continue to blog about this as it unfolds and add links and videos so that you know it isn't just my opinion driving this blog.