Remember the whole Toyota catastrophe years ago when the cars supposedly accelerated on their own? I love how conveniently the media stops reporting on it when it comes to settlement time. This article shows how the author received $20.91 for owning a Toyota and why he admits he doesn’t deserve it. But there is a better part to the story:
- The 25 primary plaintiffs and class representatives—those connected directly to the case and participating in the actual lawsuit—received $395,270.
That’s it! Oh, but what about the lawyers?
- The court awarded attorneys fees totaling $200 million, plus $27 million for expenses.
Where is the outrage for this? And I don’t want to here those rationalizations that people, usually lawyers, use when they say that it is not so much about the money but about keeping these companies in line. Bullsh$t. I point out these lawyer class action suit disparities all the time and it never stops. This crap brings up the prices of cars or supplies or healthcare or whatever is a target at the time. Don’t believe me? Check out my malpractice rates.
Doug, its is worse than that.
The whole thing was a scam and has been carefully debunked. See:
Skeptical Inquirer September-October 2014
Runaway Hysteria
Author Michael Fumento discusses the Toyota “runaway acceleration” mass hysteria, comparing it to to the Adam Walsh stranger kidnapping case and McMartin Preschool. He blames MSM and the federal government for the scare and calls it a “mediagenic illness”. The NHTSA maintains a database of complaints that was heavily mined by the news media during the scare; Fumento notes that the NHTSA doesn’t edit or cull entries, merely presenting them as received; as a result the database includes entries for sudden acceleration accidents in Toyotas that occurred before the model in question was manufactured and others that involved more passengers than the car could possibly carry. The Washington Post printed a bar chart that showed Toyota as having the most sudden acceleration complaints of six car manufacturers; the chart had been edited from NHTSA data to eliminate the four manufacturers with more complaints than Toyota. His final note is that even though Toyota paid a fine in a settlement, it was for making “deceptive statements”, not for any actual vehicle defects.
The article is not avail online but could be ordered from a public library. As I subscribe to the journal, I can attest it was carefully researched and well written. Toyota, however, would just prefer forget the old controversey not bring it up again, even to protest its former innocence.
Problem is the representatives who make the laws in this country are mainly lawyers that are aren’t going
to pass anything that’s going to hurt their “bretheren” period.