ONE PROBLEM WITH THE EQUATION...:

Toyotas Are Safe (Enough) (ROBERT WRIGHT, 3/09/10, NY Times)

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent).

I can live with those odds.

...the idea that they'll do anything that matters if you bring it in during the recall. They aren't going to change the drivers.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2010 11:04 AM