Deja Vu or Deja Moo?

In the news today, Toyota are having engine management problems: the car's brakes don't seem to want to work sometimes. It seems I've heard this all before somewhere... way back around 1998 with the Ford Explorer and Ranger models here in the UK having cruise controls that suddenly set themselves to some ridiculously high speed and wouldn't let go of the throttle.

This is not the most worrying aspect of this "occurrence" as far as I'm concerned. What I find more worrying is the initial response from both manufacturers was exactly the same when the problems first became apparent:

"Problem? What problem? There's no problem!"

In the case of Ford, it had to take a couple of severe accidents that couldn't be attributed to either mechanical defect or "pilot error" for them to even begin to admit there was a problem, and to show how widespread that problem actually was, the recall is well over 4.5 million vehicles worldwide as of the end of 2009.

At least Toyota were willing to entertain the possibility of a problem existing or though why the customer facing parts of Toyota in both the US and UK say they knew nothing until very recently says a lot about the "never admit blame, even if it's true" culture in both countries. Come on guys, what's better; admit that you may have got it wrong or have the stigma of at least one very large lawsuit hanging over the company's profit forecast for a number of years.

As my wife often says to Customer Service departments: "Better safe than sued!"

Oh, the definition of Deja Moo: "having heard that bullshit somewhere before."