Sudden vehicle acceleration in the news again

Some in-depth reporting on the Toyota Tacoma from the Detroit Free Press:

It's a wonder Frank Visconi walked away from the crash that turned his new Toyota Tacoma pickup into an unrecognizable mush of metal, plastic and dirt. But Visconi has a different wonder -- why Toyota doesn't believe his complaints of sudden acceleration....

Toyota spokesman Bill Kwong says the company has found no problems with the Tacoma that would explain the complaints.

"We don't feel it's an issue with the vehicle," he said. Regulators "get sudden acceleration complaints from consumers for various manufacturers ... and in most cases they have found it's a misapplication of the pedals by the driver."

But attorneys and safety advocates argue that sudden acceleration complaints are symptoms of defects, including electronic failures in increasingly complex vehicle-control systems that may leave no trace and can't be easily reproduced by a mechanic.

If there "were truly human error, there would be a proportional distribution across models," said Clarence Ditlow, who has spent years researching sudden acceleration as head of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington. "It's very difficult to explain how some makes and models have higher numbers of complaints than others absent some flaw in the vehicle."