We had a similar story in France about 4 years ago. A guy got flashed by a speed camera going 110mph and claimed that the cruise control on his Renault had gone rogue and forced him to accelerate. Cue outraged articles in the press, by any journalist who had ever had a large garage bill, about how modern cars are all full of flaky, expensive electronics (never mind that they need most of that to be able to meet emissions requirements, as campaigned for by the same journalists) and how their dad use to fix his car with duct tape. Only later, after several other morons who crashed their various models of Renault claimed that the cruise control - which typically had no components in common with the model in the original case - was to blame, did we discover that the guy in the original case had just returned from a 3-year license suspension for drunk-driving and excess speed. But by then Renault had taken a sales hit, their CEO had been up in front of a commission of inquiry, etc etc.
In a similar case a few years before in the UK, a truck driver called the police because his manual throttle (sort of poor man's cruise) was stuck, on the busiest highway in the country. Cue 40 minutes of dramatic helicopter footage. Again, only later did we find out that the driver was undergoing psychiatric treatment for an attention-seeking disorder...
The Audi case alluded to above was the worst, though. A woman ran over her kid in her garage. When paramedics arrived, she was distraught. Then her lawyer arrived and within a few minutes, she was angry. It was Audi's fault. The car had leapt forward on its own. "60 Minutes" even showed an Audi leaping forward on its own (although they didn't show you the hole they'd drilled in the transmission to insert the compressed air). It went to court and finally the woman's case collapsed. I think she got probation or something for wasting everyone's time. It cost $100 million+ of VW/Audi's money and she didn't get her kid back.
But on a brighter note, Congress passed a law saying we have to press the brake pedal before we can start our automatic transmission cars, although they didn't say that we have to keep our feet on the brake while putting it into Drive.
This latest case just continues the saga. I'd already seen someone pointing out that almost all of the Toyota cases involved drivers over 65 (sorry, non-early retirees, but we don't become better drivers as we get older). If this report is correct, there's only been one non-driver related incident, and that was caused by faulty fitting of floor mats, which isn't really Toyota's fault (OK, they should maybe have trained the dealer's people better).
