How is it reasonable to hold a car manufacturer responsible for what could happen with aftermarket parts, unless those parts are designed to be an exact duplicate of an OEM part?
> Well engineered products should work in the environment that they operate in.
Completely agree. Toyota has produced a lot of cars, and only a minuscule subset seems to have actually been affected.
> These cars didn't perform in a variety of typical conditions, putting human life at risk.
Human life is at risk whenever a person is driving in a car, regardless of manufacturer. I think the proper question is do the Toyota designed cars present an unacceptable risk?
> The "obvious" workarounds presented by the engineers aren't things that drivers are trained to do and aren't obvious to drivers in emergency situations.
Stomping on the brakes seems like a reasonable response to an unintended acceleration event for an untrained person, and was experimentally shown in Toyotas to be sufficient to stop the car with an open throttle in a reasonable distance. If Toyota has a proper risk management plan in place (and I don't know of any evidence that they lack one), it would incorporate risk mitigation for an unintended acceleration. How an untrained driver would react, or a driver who didn't read the instruction manual, would be considered in the risk management plan.
As to driver training, I personally was taught that applying full brakes, handbrake, placing the transmission into neutral, and killing the engine are all options, in addition to the downsides of all of these. I am certain that many drivers don't know this, but to say that all drivers aren't trained on remedies is not wholly accurate.
As I see it, a true engineering failure is if there isn't a corrective process in place to replace affected parts and if there isn't a process to incorporate design process changes to prevent these problems from occurring in the future; clearly, there is a quality system in place. If Toyota produced new cars that had floor mats or pedals that had the previous problems that would be a clear engineering failure. What actually happened was that the cars were produced under the constraints of a realistic budget and acceptable defect rate.
How is it reasonable to hold a car manufacturer responsible for what could happen with aftermarket parts, unless those parts are designed to be an exact duplicate of an OEM part?
> Well engineered products should work in the environment that they operate in.
Completely agree. Toyota has produced a lot of cars, and only a minuscule subset seems to have actually been affected.
> These cars didn't perform in a variety of typical conditions, putting human life at risk.
Human life is at risk whenever a person is driving in a car, regardless of manufacturer. I think the proper question is do the Toyota designed cars present an unacceptable risk?
> The "obvious" workarounds presented by the engineers aren't things that drivers are trained to do and aren't obvious to drivers in emergency situations.
Stomping on the brakes seems like a reasonable response to an unintended acceleration event for an untrained person, and was experimentally shown in Toyotas to be sufficient to stop the car with an open throttle in a reasonable distance. If Toyota has a proper risk management plan in place (and I don't know of any evidence that they lack one), it would incorporate risk mitigation for an unintended acceleration. How an untrained driver would react, or a driver who didn't read the instruction manual, would be considered in the risk management plan.
As to driver training, I personally was taught that applying full brakes, handbrake, placing the transmission into neutral, and killing the engine are all options, in addition to the downsides of all of these. I am certain that many drivers don't know this, but to say that all drivers aren't trained on remedies is not wholly accurate.
As I see it, a true engineering failure is if there isn't a corrective process in place to replace affected parts and if there isn't a process to incorporate design process changes to prevent these problems from occurring in the future; clearly, there is a quality system in place. If Toyota produced new cars that had floor mats or pedals that had the previous problems that would be a clear engineering failure. What actually happened was that the cars were produced under the constraints of a realistic budget and acceptable defect rate.