Lexus needed, desperately needed, a palatable explanation, one that the public would buy into, that an experienced CHP officer and his family would all die under circumstances beyond Lexus "control".

So the Bernard "story", previous driver statement, was cooked up.

Better the dealer be responsible, have responsibility, rather than Lexus/Toyota have corporate responsibility...like BP.

Look how long the Saylor car ran SUA and think about how many efforts the CHP officer would have made to overcome the problem.

Apply the brakes, certainly, Aggressively so, look at the post SUA photo's of the front rotors and pads.

Try shifting into neutral...of course, a given.

Try ignition shutoff....maybe, but the engine/transaxle MUST be paying attention, monitoring, the "start" pushbutton for the entire 3 seconds of depression, NOT in a deadly embrace executing cruise control "accelerate" mode.

And listen to the testimony of the southern (TX, TN, ??) lady before congress. Cruise control light came on as the SUA began. She turned CC off but no help. Brakes had no effect on stopping the car until reaching the grassy medium wherein the front drive/DRIVEN wheels no longer had enough traction to overcome the rear brakes.

And even if you but into the gas pedal being trapped on the floor mat you still have to accept that the CHP officer was too stupid to try shifting into neutral.

Or else the true explanation is that the engine/transaxle controlling ECU firmware was stuck in a "deadly embrace", executing ONLY a tight CC acceleration instruction "loop" sub-routine.

Obviously the latter might also explain the Sikes SUA episode.

 

"...exposed as an obvious fraud..."

Only for the "want to believe" public, no direct evidence that the Sikes incident wasn't an actual SUA, only Toyota PR teams "inference" that Sikes couldn't, shouldn't be trusted.

 

>> . . . no direct evidence that the Sikes incident wasn't an actual SUA. . . <<

When did the burden become to prove the negative?

You advance numerous suppositions, all plausible for sure, but still not the same as evidence of a ECU problem.

I merely pose the question of why no followup by a media quite receptive to your point of view, and why, seemingly, has the problem of SUA ended when nothing corrective to the ECU has occurred?

 

Willard: I think I read somewhere that the investigators found that the floor mat was infact fused on the top of the gas pedal in the CHP accident.

 

There was an article talking about this. The Lexus shifter is a maze-like "gated" shifter. If you aren't familiar with it you may not be able to hit neutral. Just like not being familiar with the ignition switch.

Even well trained people can make mistakes when using unfamiliar equipment. Pilots are very well trained and even they make mistakes.

 

Yes, there are even pictures to that point, but fused to the BOTTOM of the gas pedal. But did the fusing occur as a result of the gas pedal being trapped in the floor mat or was it simply the result of the post-crash fire, happenstance..??

 

The "media" has two masters that must be kept in balance, money from "product" sales and advertising revenue. The dog doesn't often bite the hand that feeds it.

 

...and one agenda, that being to promote, defend or support the party that believe in. They will blindly and unquestioningly swallow any story that agrees with their ideology.
I say this because statistics showed that Ford had double (or triple) the number of UA instances as Toyota in the most recent five year period. Yet Ford, like GM and Chrysler, who similarly had many UA reported cases, have one thing in common that Toyota doesn't. That one thing is a union work force...union's are huge supporters of the current administration...as are the main stream media.
It's not a stretch (nor a wacky conspiracy theory) to see that the public assassination of a successful enterprise was simply an attempt on the part of the administration to help out their union supporters.
The media played the part of the stooge perfectly.
I found the stats showing Ford's problems with UA in five minutes. Why wouldn't the media investigate whether this was a Toyota specific issue or a wide spread one?
I don't trust the media.

 

The media cannot ignore a potentially high profile case such as was the Saylor case, 4 deaths, CHP driver. Nor even the Sikes case, occuring so immediately after.

Did Ford or Chevy have a high profile SUA case that I missed...??

With the US automotive manufacturing move to the deep south, lead by the fureigners, unionization of the automotive industry is dead walking.

Just look at the media profits from all the current Toyota "we're safe" advertising.

 

I said before that the only ones "happy" for the Gulf oil disaster are the people at Toyota. They're *finally* out of the news.