Robert Wright on culture, politics and world affairs.

Several months ago, a 63-year-old Harvard professor lost control of his 2005 Toyota Highlander, crashed into another car and died, along with two family members. Now the government is trying to decide whether Highlanders of this vintage are prone to sudden acceleration and should be added to the lengthy Toyota recall list.

I drive a 2005 Toyota Highlander, and ever since I read about the case of the 63-year-old Harvard professor, I’ve felt … well, nothing in particular. I mean, I’m sorry about the professor and his family, but I think this whole Toyota thing is overblown.

Let’s do the math.

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.

But lots of Americans seem to disagree with me. Why?

I think one reason is that not all deaths are created equal. A fatal brake failure is scary, but not as scary as your car seizing control of itself and taking you on a harrowing death ride. It’s almost as if the car is a living, malicious being.

Maybe we should get used to this kind of scare, because cars are becoming more like living beings. I suspect that Toyota’s acceleration problems lie in the software — the “electronic throttle control,” which replaces the old-fashioned direct mechanical link between your foot and the throttle with a “brain” that “decides” how much the throttle should open in response to foot pressure, depending on the circumstances.

A fatal brake failure is scary, but not as scary as your car seizing control of itself and taking you on a harrowing death ride.

I’m not a fan of electronic throttle control — I didn’t like the feel of it when I bought my Toyota, and I still don’t — but it’s getting hard to find a car that doesn’t have it. So too with various other little vehicular brains, like electronic stability control, which will deny you permission to take turns at dangerously high speeds; our cars are, increasingly, software-driven — that is, they’re doing more and more of the driving.

And software, as the people at Microsoft or Apple can tell you, is full of surprises. It’s pretty much impossible to anticipate all the bugs in a complex computer program. Hence the reliance on beta testing (and on the subsequent, de facto beta testing that is also known as “selling the product and then reading the user forums”).

Now, “beta testing” sounds creepy when the process by which testers uncover bugs can involve death. But there are two reasons not to start bemoaning the brave new world we’re entering.

First, even back before cars were software-driven, beta testing was common. Any car is a system too complex for designers to fully anticipate the upshot for life and limb. Hence decades of non-microchip-related safety recalls.

Second, the fact that a feature of a car can be fatal isn’t necessarily a persuasive objection to it. One feature that all cars possess and that has been shown to cause death is motion. But we’ve decided that the benefits of automated motion are worth the cost of more than 30,000 American lives each year.

Seems like a good trade-off to me. After all, high-speed motion will also save some lives (e.g. those of ambulance-driven heart-attack victims) and improve the quality of life in various ways. Life is full of trade-offs, and sometimes trade-offs involve death.

Similarly, those software features that are sure to have unanticipated bugs, including fatal ones, have upsides. Electronic stability control keeps cars from flipping over, and electronic throttle control improves mileage.

Good mileage may seem less worth sacrificing a life for than, say, God or country. But bad mileage means consuming more gas, creating more pollution and contributing to global warming — and so ultimately translates into lost or degraded lives.

Besides, good mileage means dollars saved, and dollars can be translated into human welfare. I could take the gas money I save via electronic throttle control and send it to Africa and save several lives.

It worries me that this Toyota thing worries us so much.

Of course, I probably won’t. But if I don’t — if I pass up the chance to spend some money to save a life — am I any less culpable than Toyota was when it bargained with the government to get the least costly fix available (new floor mats) without obsessing over whether floor mats were the root of the problem? (Perhaps the most nauseating sight in Washington recently — and that’s saying something — was the infinitely contrite Toyota head, Akio Toyoda, being browbeaten by legislators who, God knows, discharge their professional responsibilities no more conscientiously than he discharges his.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration keeps an eye on carmakers, so that the beta testing doesn’t get too gruesome.

But it worries me that this Toyota thing worries us so much. We live in a world where responding irrationally to risk (say, the risk of a terrorist attack) can lead us to make mistakes (say, invading Iraq). So the Toyota story is a kind of test of our terrorism-fighting capacity — our ability to keep our wits about us when things seem spooky.

Passing the test depends on lots of things. It depends on politicians resisting the temptation to score cheap points via the exploitation of irrational fear. It depends on journalists doing the same. And it depends on Americans in general keeping cool, notwithstanding the likely failure of many politicians and journalists to do their part.

So go out today and buy a Toyota. It’s the patriotic thing to do.



Tedious methodological footnote for statistics nerds: As best I can make out from published reports, the following is the case:

Toyota has recalled about 6 million vehicles in the United States to correct a sudden acceleration problem, and when the last of those recalls was issued, the number of fatal accidents that had been linked to sudden acceleration was 17. That would suggest that if you drive one of those 6 million vehicles, and you don’t get the problem fixed, your likelihood of being involved in a fatal accident due to the defect is 2.8 in a million (17 in 6 million). To judge by the model years of the recalled cars, it looks as if the average vehicle (of those 6 million) has been on the road for about two years — which means that, to put a finer point on it, 2.8 in a million is your probability of being involved in a fatal accident in the course of a two-year period.

In the most recent two years for which I could find data (2007 and 2008), a total of 57,216 drivers or passengers died in car accidents in the United States. (That’s the sum of the 2007 and 2008 numbers in the “subtotal 1” row here.) Those deaths are in an American population of 300 million; dividing 57,216 by 300 million gives you the one in 5,244 I cite above as the chances of dying in a car accident over a two-year period just by virtue of being an American.

Now, strictly speaking, the numbers in the previous two paragraphs aren’t comparable. The number in the first paragraph is “fatal accidents,” whereas the number in the second paragraph is “drivers or passengers killed.” And there’s always a chance that you could be involved in a fatal accident without being among the dead. In that sense, my calculations actually overstate the risk of death posed to you by driving a Toyota with a speed-control problem. On the other hand, in cases where the Toyota driver isn’t the one killed in a fatal accident, a family member may be the victim — and that can be almost literally a fate worse than death. So for back-of-the-envelope math, I think my numbers are adequate.

If you really want to get down in the weeds and ask why I didn’t compare apples to apples — either 1) compare fatal accidents to fatal accidents or 2) compare fatalities to fatalities: 1) The routinely collected government numbers for “fatal auto accidents” include accidents that killed only pedestrians or motorcyclists, and so far as I can tell the Toyota numbers don’t include any such accidents; 2) if I used “fatalities,” I’d in principle be including passengers who don’t own a Toyota but were riding in one at the time of an accident. And the point of the thought experiment that yields the 2.8-in-a-million number is to help owners of Toyotas ask how much risk is associated with driving their cars.

A caveat: Since the most recent sudden-acceleration recall in late January, at which point those 17 fatal accidents had been reported, the number of reported accidents has grown. As this article notes, by mid-February an additional nine fatal crashes were brought to the government’s attention, including the one involving the 63-year-old Harvard professor. But many if not most of these seem to involve vehicles that aren’t among the 6 million that have been recalled — so, in the calculations above, it wouldn’t make sense to add 9 to the 17 unless you added the additional Toyota models (e.g. 2005 Highlanders) to the six million recalled models — which I can’t do, since I don’t have those numbers (and which might yield little change in the overall risk probabilities anyway).

Besides, the posited connection between these fatal accidents and sudden acceleration seems in many cases extremely conjectural. So far as I can tell from available news accounts, the basis for suspecting unintended acceleration in the Harvard professor’s crash may be just that the professor “lost control” of his car. Well, loss of control is a pretty common feature of car crashes. Another case seems to be under study because the sibling of a driver who died after his 2008 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck hit a pole wrote, “It may relate to the gas pedal, so let Toyota know to recall this model too.”

Moreover, now that Toyota’s speed-control problems are world-famous, you’re naturally going to get a flood of reports conjecturally linking Toyota accidents to those problems, so until those reports are appraised, the data isn’t worth much. And that, by the way, explains why you shouldn’t put too much stock in graph like this, which seems to show Toyota way outdistancing other car makers in speed-control complaints. So far as I can tell, the number of reported accidents in all years of that graph include reports not filed until after Toyota’s problems became famous, so reports about Toyota accidents are naturally going to way outdistance reports about accidents involving other kinds of cars.

Notwithstanding all this, it’s certainly possible that there have been fatal accidents that were caused by acceleration problems and aren’t included among the 17 cases known at the time of the most recent recall. On the other hand, the evidence linking the accidents to acceleration problems isn’t overwhelming in all of those 17 cases. So it’s conceivable that the number 17 actually overstates the risk. In any event, that number seems like the number to go with for the time being, all things considered.

