Unintended Acceleration

[gregsj@mail.imm.com]

Fellow Audians: It is Road & Track's 50th Anniversary this year. 
They've been covering their automotive history by decades. The April 
1997 issue covers the 1980's. Part of the article reads as follows:

"Had it not been so serious, the Audi "sudden acceleration" episode of 
the Eighties would have been laughable. Instead it led to panic among 
large segments of this country's driving public and also to Audi's 
sales plummeting from 74,000 in 1985 to just over 12,000 in 1991. Audi 
was accused and convicted by a group of headline-seeking television 
personalities most notable those on the CBS show 60 Minutes. That 
there was no connection between the accelerative and decelerative 
systems of the cars, or that the reported condition could never be 
reproduced in tests, had no effect. When the government finally 
announced that its investigation showed the cause to be driver error, 
sometimes known as "pedal" error, the complaints dropped almost to 
zero."

"What the manufacturers -- not only Audi -- had known all along was 
that the complaints generally fell into two categories: attempted 
insurance fraud (taking advantage of the climate of the times) or 
driver error. Kinesiologists place this in the same category as touch 
the wrong key on a telephone or computer -- only with more disastrous 
results. The driver's reaction, in many instances, was a psychological 
rejection of any wrong doing on their part--to the point where they 
could pass a lie detector test."

OK, so I'm a little hung-up on this particular issue. I promise to get 
over it by the turn of the century. To this day, I wish Audi had sued 
SeeBS. GregJ.