Plus ça change...

No doubt you remember that a couple of years ago there was a rash of car accidents involving Toyotas (oh, come on: you must remember! It was on the news every night for months. The 'news' is that show on TV before all the sit-coms start at 7). It seems that Priuses and Camrys were launching themselves of their own accord. The drivers claimed that they drove into a brick wall even though they tried to brake because the gas pedal got stuck.

Well the U.S. Dept of Transportation just released a report that got to the bottom of the issue. They actually borrowed rocket-scientists from NASA to work on the study (You see the space shuttle program is being wound down and now that the replacement rocket has been cancelled by Obama, I guess they have some time on their hands). The conclusion: dumb people were pressing the wrong (i.e. "gas") pedal.

The funny thing is that this is an exact repeat of what happened a quarter-century ago with Audis*. Now, as then, the government took pains to tip-toe around the real issue. You can't blame voters for doing something stupid. So they call it "pedal misapplication", a term brilliantly mocked by P.J. O'Rourke's review of the (original) sudden-acceleration hoax.

That's what this post is about. Others who remember both incidents have pointed out the irony of the same problem being papered over in the same way 20-some years apart. And thanks to P.J., it's as funny now as it was then.

* = You see, back in the 1980's the whole yuppie thing was in its infancy. There was no such thing as Lexus or Infinity, and there were no SUVs. So an up-and-coming stockbroker could only choose between a large American luxury car (which looks rediculous if one is wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt) an a German import. So it was trendy to drive foreign. At the time Audi was not as upmarket as it is now, and specialized in 4-wheel drive rally cars. But they were less expensive than BMWs and Mercedes, and that lower price was correlated with the driving skills of some buyers.