Replies to post #92464 on Biotech Values

[medchal]

Totally OT:  Your point is well taken.  However, my reaction to the latest Toyota "failure" was simply, "There's something fishy here."  Some clown drove thirty miles, for twenty minutes, without having presence of mind to shut off the ignition or even put the car into neutral (he said he was afraid the car might "flip" [?]), but had presence of mind to get on his cell phone to a 911 operator and carry on an extended conversation?  Maybe he should have tried to send a fax?  I see now that the Federal agency for automotive safety concerns (the name escapes me) and Toyota, together, were not able to replicate his problem.

The driver's license should be revoked.  Barring that, his right to carry a cell phone should be revoked.  I predict there will be more to be disclosed about this story.

[mouton29]

<<I would think you’d be more worried that the programming was designed by Toyota.>>

Maybe you shouldn't worry:

from an opinionater blog on the NY Times website (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/toyotas-are-safe-enough/?scp=1&sq=toyota%20safe%20enough&st=cse)

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent).

I can live with those odds. Sure, I’d rather they were better, but it’s not worth losing sleep over. And I don’t think it’s worth all the bandwidth the Toyota story has consumed over the past couple of months.