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Comment by zb | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see some statistics on the number of these incidents that have occurred with Toyotas versus other makes as a proportion of the total fleet.

These incidents happen all the time, and it almost always turns out that the driver was standing on the accelerator instead of the brake. (Naturally they adamantly deny it - if they'd thought they were pressing the accelerator they would have stopped, after all. Everyone underestimates how much your brain can play tricks on you in this situation.) Of course that does not eliminate design flaws as a cause - for example in the Audi case the pedals were too close together.

Ever since this all blew up I've suspected that it's quite possible the floor mat recall may have simply brought a lot of cases out of the woodwork that are actually not inconsistent with the normal "background" level of such accidents.

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Not sure if you saw the graph hidden in the side: "Complaints rose after Toyota recalled 3.8 million vehicles in November..." -- it makes the same case as you.

Let's have an experiment: another manufacturer can institute a fake recall and see what happens.

> Naturally they adamantly deny it

And, thanks to the nature of human memory, after the first few times they aren't even intentionally lying. (A memory is part recall, part imagination. Replay something enough times, it can become more of the latter than the former.)

Faking a recall is a bad idea. Consider the possibility that Toyota drivers were primed by the media hype to believe that the acceleration problems were real and out of their control. Thus, when they found themselves mistakenly pressing on the accelerator, they were less likely to reevaluate the situation. If they had, they would have realized what was happening and pressed the brakes. The accidents, regardless of cause, were real and dangerous. Inducing more accidents to prove a point is bad policy.

Not sure if you saw the graph hidden in the side

I actually missed it, thanks. But what I'd really like to see are the number of police reports of unintended acceleration by model.

And, thanks to the nature of human memory, after the first few times they aren't even intentionally lying.

What you say about memory is completely correct, but in this particular instance I don't imagine for a second that they were intentionally lying even the first few times.

people can't seem to acknowledge that they're getting fuzzier as they get older. I know! Its happening to me and I refuse to acknowledge it as well.

The uncommanded accelrations are proprtional to the numbers of that car model on the market.

20years it was AUDI (accelerates under demonic influence) - it can't be the drivers cos they are Americans - it must be those foreign cars.

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