Boeing - Toyota

No, there is nothing connecting the two of these corporations ... I just want to write about them.

First ... Toyota. I can't help but enjoy a little schadenfreude in this regard. I have been so darn sick of all the Toyota owners telling me how smart they were in buying one -- and in particular, the Prius owners. Yeah, so smart ... a car with an eco/carbon footprint exceeding a Ford F-150 truck in dust to dust costs to our environment. A wonderful device that sends profits back to Japan, bought by Liberal weenies who would claim all day long to support American workers and the respective unions. A car that served only to enrich a cynical corporation engaged in the age-old tradition of pulling the wool over American eyes. And let me tell you, it drives like crap -- I had the "pleasure" of a Prius loaner car for a few days.  That said, I'd guess that virtually all of the complaints are driver-error.

I am not a Toyota  fan: the only bright spots for me in the Toyota line-up had to be the reputation for durability and the Sienna (a minivan designed with some intelligence).  But as the recent Tundra recall (for rust!!) has made clear, the durability reputation was a hold-over from the days when Toyota made a simple car.

So what about the "sudden unintended acceleration" thing?  On its face, this happened because Toyota got greedy.  Europeans, remembering the Audi fiasco (thanks for the lies 60 minutes) -- have installed a brake-accelerator cut-out: if you are on the brake, the engine cannot accelerate, end of story.  Also remember the Audi thing probably WAS due to idiot drivers standing on the gas: it is almost impossible to create the phenomenon in a manual car, and Europeans drive manuals 90% of the time -- that is why this happened almost exclusively in the U.S. where the manual car is a rarity. Also, people who drive manual cars never use their left foot on the brake -- it is reserved for the clutch. If it had been an accelerator problem, it should have happened in Europe too. It didn't.

So in the present instance -- we might try to make the same claim about Toyotas and Americans -- this won't fly. That is because the circumstances are different: (1) throttles were mechanical in the Audi event, they are now electronic; (2) this is also happening in Japan and other places where people only use the right foot for the brake/throttle; (3) almost all other car manufacturers use brake cut-outs ... Toyota does not.

Toyota has been aware of this potential problem for some time. They have been repeatedly contacted by various safety organizations requesting that they install a cut-out. But they have stonewalled. In fact, there have been stirrings of trouble in Japan for almost a decade, but this has always been swept under the rug. In once instance, a wanna-be Ralph Nader in Japan tried to sue Toyota about it, but found himself imprisoned for attempted corporate blackmail: the idea was that this suit was brought merely to damage Toyota's image and receive a pay-off.  The evidence (totaled car) was investigated by, get this ... TOYOTA ... and the Japanese NHTSA and found not to have defects. Yeah. Great investigation, that.

In Japan, all revolves around the corporate identity and the need to protect Japanese corporations, even at the expense of the citizens. It is part of their culture and consistent with the need to put the individual's needs behind the "greater good." Since the Meiji restoration (or indeed before) the greater good has been defined as what is good for Japan's corporations -- which may indeed explain World War 2 in the Pacific.  So when someone comes out and claims that Japanese cars are unsafe and killing Japanese citizens, well, that is like declaring that hot dogs at a ballgame are a communist-inspired plot.

Behind this wall of official immunity, Japanese corporate officials have committed simply awful crimes against their citizens: mass poisonings, environmental catastrophes, unsafe products are every level, inhumane working conditions, rapacious use of nature's resources. And they thought even less of doing this sort of stuff to foreigners -- Gaijin.  True, American corporations would have done the same -- and did -- but have been accountable, repeatedly. Not so in Japan. And within the corporations, there is a culture of secrecy and obedience: whistleblowers are almost unheard of.  So it is as if the Ford Pinto paradigm is an everyday occurrence: to the extent that Japanese goods developed the reputation for excellence and durability, it was to increase market share abroad: at home you could sell any old shit and they would buy it, thereby supporting the export drive that Japan needed to survive. And they did sell shit at home -- but in a throw-away culture, who cares if it needs to be replaced every three years?

Which brings us to the present: it seems pretty clear that Toyota officials KNEW ABOUT THE PROBLEM and have know something was up for years. My guess is that it has been more profitable to ignore it -- the Pinto calculation. And it is possible that Toyota don't know how to fix it anyway, apart from installing a cut-out ... like the Europeans. So millions of cars will need to be re-recalled at a cost of ????  And the owners who cannot sell a Toyota at almost any price will sue for their economic losses, too. What will that set Toyota back? Toyota's President, Toyoda, admitted that they focused "too much on expansion" -- parse that and you get "we sold cheap to increase market share, and didn't give a damn about engineering." So who is clever now?

What is the problem? Apart from driver error, it is electronic ... software and not the hardware. Who has not had something weird happen to software running on their computer? Apply that phenomenon to cars ... scary, right? Airplanes have multiple system redundancy for precisely this risk. Not cars. Ever had your computer go crazy because your put your iPhone too close? I have. Wonder why airlines want those phones and everything else "off" during the risky takeoff and landing phases? Redundancy might not be enough when life or death is measured in seconds. And you see too many people with phones glued to their ears while driving ... electronic risk and driver-stupidity risk combined.

Now onto Boeing. Northrup Grumman is all bent out of shape that their bid is uncompetitive to the Boeing bid for the aerial tankers. Let's pull back the curtain, folks and look to the Wizard ... EADS is bent out of shape, etc. That is, FRANCE AND GERMANY are bent out of shape, etc. My response is" "who gives a rat's ass?"  It is not as if France or Germany will be buying any American fighters, electronics, missiles, cars, toasters, steel, or anything else that they can figure out a way to exclude from their markets. A little secret is that specifications and requirements for imported goods change in the E.U. all the time -- notices of which changes are known well in advance by the European manufacturers ... who help draft the changes.

If we are to spend $50 billion on planes to replace Boeing tankers from the 1950's, lets buy such that the money stays in America. Our planes can't be that bad, or Boeing would not continue to exist.  Instead of buying a European plane off the rack, let the French buy an American aircraft carrier off the rack, instead of building their own (hiding all development costs in secret budgets -- just like their helicopters).  And as it happens, Boeing makes many of the parts in Europe ... but we just had a commitment from EADS to "assemble" the modified A330's in Alabama.

And lately, I cannot say much about the nature of dependability of the French and Germans as allies.