



In fact, it's a little hard to be sure that some of the cases were sudden acceleration incidents, because the witnesses to what happened in the car were all killed; the family is trying to reconstruct what happened from their knowledge of the deceased. Obviously, most people are going to err on the side of believing that the car was at fault, rather than a beloved relative.





Further complicating matters, most of the cases involve either a lawsuit against Toyota, a complainant facing possible criminal charges, or both.





In some of the cases, the police or doctors have an alternate theory of what happened: one of the SAIs was bipolar, which puts you at extraordinarily high risk of suicide, and no one knows what actually happened in the car. At least two others involve young men who were driving at very high speed, which is something that young men tend to do with or without a sticky accelerator. Several more of the drivers seem to have had a medical situation, like a stroke, to which doctors and/or police attribute the acceleration.





The oddest "striking" fact is that a disproportionate number seem to be immigrants--something like a third, by my count, which is about double the number of immigrants in the general population. I have no idea what to make of that; are they more likely to file complaints with the NHTSA? Maybe they're shorter, on average, or learned to drive later in life? Or perhaps it's just a statistical fluke.





At any rate, when you look at these incidents all together, it's pretty clear why Toyota didn't investigate this "overwhelming evidence" of a problem: they look a lot like typical cases of driver error. I don't know that all of them are. But I do know that however advanced Toyota's electronics are, they're not yet clever enough to be able to pick on senior citizens.





Unfortunately, that won't help Toyota much. It will still face a wave of lawsuits, and all the negative publicity means that it may be hard for the company to get a fair trial. Even if it does, the verdict in the court of public opinion will still hurt their sales for some time to come.

In many of the other cases, we don't really know what happened, because there were no witnesses of exactly when the car started to run away.