Sudden unintended stupification

The Grim Reaper's favorite ride, before the Prius.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Audi was gripped with a crisis. It’s car, the Audi-5000, was linked with SAIs – Sudden Acceleration Incidents. The vehicle would allegedly speed off while the helpless driver gripped the wheel in sheer terror while unavailingly mashing one’s foot through the floor board. As a result, sales of Audi’s fell from 30,000 a year to nearly 10,000 in subsequent years. The sales of the brand rebounded domestically by 2000, a full 10 years after the Audi 5000 was subject to calls from critics and the media as a rolling, hyper-accelerating, harbinger of death and destruction.

Problem was there was nothing wrong with the car, but the driver. Drivers were mistaking the accelerator for the brake pedal – in a panic, the driver would hit the gas thinking it was the brake and press harder as the adrenaline began to flow, thus the cars would seemingly burst through garage walls and convenience stores at a moment’s notice or careen off the side of the road.

Claims of SAIs involving Audi 5000s began rising, not as the cars became more apt to speed out of control, but as the media began to report more and more ‘incidents’ of Audi’s taking off in a rage reminiscent of “Maximum Overdrive.” It also coincided with the late 80s German car boom amongst the middle-age set – guess what the cheapest German import of the era was?

Despite the public outcry against Audi, all scientific evidence showed there was no actual mechanical cause of SAIs, but there was one thing most of these incidents had in common. From P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores:

It’s worth noting (and the NHTSA report did note) that the Honda Civic’s pedal placement is nearly identical with the Audi 5000′s, yet the Civic got few SAI complaints. On the other hand, the Mercury Marquis – where, on a clear day, you can almost see the accelerator from the brake – was in the SAI top ten. We don’t need a “60 Minutes” investigative team to tell us what kind of person buys a little Honda rice rocket and what kind of person buys a huge Mercury Medicare sled.

On that, here’s this note from the Washington Examiner via Daily Caller’s Eye-Street blog. These are ages of drivers involved in recent Toyota acceleration accidents:

In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

In the last 20 years, the difference isn’t so much between the Audi or Toyota, but with the Department of Transportation and Washington. O’Rourke noted the DOT’s reluctance to blame drivers for the incidents, hiding behind a wall of politicized legalese in its own press release back in the 80s. How much influence would a DOT, wary of the AARP and other interest groups, not to mention an administration that just bought a couple car companies, have in spinning Toyota as the cause of the root cause of the incidents? Toyota’s don’t vote in droves.

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