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Comment by timurlenk | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to imply a lot but it's important to note that Toyota's bad press is coming overwhelmingly form the US. Of course this is not 100% relevant since the US is a bad market but Toyota in particular and Japan in general have quite a history of taking safety serious. It's unlikely for them to ignore a matter of safety over economic concerns.

In case we are dealing with a cover up we would at least see some resignations at a top level. Japanese take their job very serious and probably some would commit suicide if it would be proven that they didn't do their job properly and people got injured because of this.

Could it be that we are dealing with economic protectionism though propaganda?

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I think it's mostly the American tendency to inflate controversy, and it's particularly juicy given that Toyota is the biggest car company and the Camry is now basically the All-American Car. Of course, it seems to me that all the controversy is warranted: I subscribe to the theory that the problem is with the software that controls the engine and transmission.

This is because of my own experience with a Camry that shifts at the wrong times and has unpredictable acceleration or lack of acceleration. Several months after we bought the car (a 2007) we were able to get a firmware upgrade that improved the performance somewhat, but at the cost of gas mileage. Since the car doesn't perform as well as it should (it's nowhere near as responsive or efficient as our '97 Camry was), it seems like the underlying problems still haven't been fixed.

Toyota has offered two other "solutions" for their problems, but neither rings true, and as the LA Times points out, neither can explain all the reported incidents. If Toyota were covering up their inability to find and fix the real problem, this is what it would look like. Here in the US, we've seen a lack of honesty from Toyota that seems very typical of American corporations.

I had similar thoughts when I saw this. It made me think of that old Audi case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_accelerat...

Too early to say, but I would agree that having the US Government as the majority stockholder of Toyota's largest competitor, GM, could subtly influence disclosures from government agencies and media coverage.

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