What was happening at the grilling of the President of Toyota was pretty clear early on. When I tuned in, the chairman of the committee was explaining that she owned a Camry Hybrid, and that the only reason she had bought it was that, although she has wanted to buy American, the American manufacturers didn’t make that model. One of the inscrutable Japanese executives remarked, quite innocently, that the car she had bought was American.
“Ah…err…but it has your (dirty Japanese) name on it”
“Yes but it was made in America using American made components with American workers”
“Oh…so you are blaming this whole thing on American workers then?”
A little bit later one of the inquisitors pointed out that Toyota sells cars to Iran and asked the Toyota President with an ominous tone to “consider that”…dot…dot…dot! And then there was the internal memo that came to light that had been prepared by some anonymous Toyota staffer that had suggested Obama was “industry unfriendly.” How dare a foreigner suggest, even in a private memo, written in Japanese, in Japan, that America is industry unfriendly!
Plus, of course the damning evidence that Toyota applied one set of quality standards to Japanese manufactured cars (which have Japanese accelerator parts), whereas American cars were fitted with “sub-standard” American ones that were designed and built in America (like over 60% of the components). But why a re-design? Now surely that’s the smoking gun of a conspiracy…or could it be that Japanese drive on the left and Americans drive on the right so you can’t put a Japanese unit in an American car (the architecture is different).
Afterwards the ambulance chasers were crowing that they might be able to “get” Toyota for racketeering, on top of “criminal negligence” (triple damages) which was looking like a slam-dunk, thanks in part to the sterling efforts of the US Congress (which now basically runs the new state-owned American automobile manufacturing industry), in getting Toyota to make some slips “under oath.” Well, that will surely drag its way through the courts and, regardless of the outcome, billions will be made by the lawyers.
But the truth right now is that no one knows for sure if the 11 deaths attributed to un-intended acceleration that were reported before this thing blew up, or the additional 23 reported afterwards, were in fact due to a mechanical or electronic defect.…
