by J. Alan Beck

Created on: March 12, 2010   Last Updated: March 13, 2010

Please “get a grip”, fellow citizens: Your lifetime chances of getting struck by lightning (one in 6250 by one estimate) are far greater than dying in a runaway Toyota. Perish the thought, but statistically, you're probably more likely to drown (one in nearly 9,000 lifetime odds), or die from a venomous bite or sting (one in 100,000). It is true that, despite any advertising claims, individual Toyotas do not usually last a lifetime. For rough comparison though, nineteen claimed fatalities (related to unintended acceleration problems) among about

20 million Toyota/Lexus vehicles sold in the U.S. over the last ten years, will be used here for starting numbers.  

(Note: The Toyota sales number in the U.S. for the multi-year period seems difficult to precisely verify, so I'm using 85% of the figure above (or 17 million vehicles) as the estimate in calculations for this article.)

Update: A recent article now pegs the number of alleged (acceleration) fatalities at 52 – as publicity spreads far and wide. Each accidental death is a tragedy, of course; no one is saying otherwise. But the newer number remains very tiny compared to the vast number of Toyotas: It's one out of about 325,000 sold in the U.S. over the last ten years.

Not into statistics? Look around for a bit of anecdotal evidence of Toyota's ubiquity: Next time you are stuck in slow traffic, count all of the Toyota vehicles around you. Quite a few of them will likely be found in a short period. (Also note how many seem to be accelerating away uncontrollably.) Not surprising: Toyota was ranked third in U.S. car sales from 2001 into 2010.

Per the pertinent Helium.com article linked at the end of this one, consumers should always “do their homework” before buying a new vehicle. As suggested, checking government recall databases on-line is a good idea.  But even such “due diligence” may not have flagged a problem in this case: Edmunds.com found that Toyota was ranked 17th (out of twenty automakers) in NHTSA complaints from 2001 through (the start of) 2010, while (it was) third in overall sales. The manufacturer thus was among the safest during the period, even if all of the acceleration cases against it (at least until very recently) are proven. However, it is also worth noting that Toyota had the most sudden-acceleration complaints (filed with NHTSA) of major automakers, for model years 2005 to 2010. (Over 1100 complaints received (about Toyota/Lexus/Scion)

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