When I was a kid I used to read through car magazines religiously. I spent hours thinking about what my first car was going to be, and at one point I decided it was going to be the Toyota Sera. Pretty slick for 1988, no?
Unfortunately, that was the last time I really coveted a Toyota. I'm a sucker for stylish, sporty cars, and most Toyotas don't really fit the bill. Reliable, yes, stylish, no. So when Toyotas start accelerating randomly and uncontrollably, what's going to keep customers coming back to the dealerships? Probably nothing. But people will forget. They always do. If Tylenol can go back to being the market leader in OTC pain relievers after the cyanide scare, then anything can happen. Let's not forget that the perpetrator was never actually caught--he could be lacing my hamburger meat with cyanide right now!
Anyway, just like Johnson & Johnson's mass recall back in 1982 (and the genesis of the now-ubiquitious tamper-proof seals), suspending sales of the affected models is such a drastic measure that I think that in the future, people will adopt a fairly favorable view of Toyota. It'll pass. People always forget these things.
With that said, I don't know why it's so hard to just shift the car into neutral. I can understand that if your car accelerates unexpectedly while you're rounding a bend on the PCH, maybe you'll go over a cliff and die. But in one of the incidents, there was enough time for a passenger to get out his phone, dial 911, and say: “We're in a Lexus ... we're going north (state Route) 125 and our accelerator is stuck. We're going 120 (mph)! Mission Gorge! We're in trouble – we can't – there's no brakes, MissionGorge ... end freeway half mile.”
Neutral, folks. Neutral.
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