PJ O'Rourke's description of the Sudden Acceleration Incident craze of the 1980s (found in his book Parliament of Whores), describes what happened when the National Highway Safety Transportation Authority released its report on the phenomenon:
==
"In the twinkling of an eye (by the standards of bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude's girls in Paris) the thing was done. On March 7, 1989, the DOT-NHTSA-ODI-TSC-OPSAD-VRTC . . . effort produced an eighty-one page report written by an eight man group of engineering savants with more than fifty years of college among them. This document presented evidence from exhaustive experiment and analysis that proved what everybody who understands how to open the hood of a car had known all along about SAIs: "Pedal misapplications are the likely cause of these incidents."
Yes, the dumb buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake. The government had released a huge report showing that there was no such thing as unintended acceleration in automobiles. They could be safely left unattended.
So the truth was out, and we people who like automobiles and can tell our right foot from our elbow should have been glad. But there was, in fact, no reason to celebrate. This message from the federal bowl of Alpha-Bits had cost us taxpayers millions of dollars and came too late to save Audi from the ignorance, credulity, opportunism and sheer Luddite malice directed toward that corporation and its products. Furthermore, the Department of Transportation press release introducing the SAI report absolved the paddle-shoed, dink-wit perpetrators of sudden acceleration. It just let Betty Dumb-Toes and Joe Boat-Foot right off the hook:
NHTSA declined to characterize the cause of sudden acceleration as driver error. Driver error may imply carelessness or willfulness in failing to operate a car properly. Pedal misapplication is more descriptive. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly.
The next time I get pulled over by the state highway patrol, I'm telling the officer, "You probably intend to ticket me for speeding, which would be driver error. But pedal misapplication is more descriptive of what occurred. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly."
Then the NHTSA functionary gave me an explanation--the second most disheartening thing I ever heard in Washington—of why the DOT had to commission a multi-million-dollar study to prove that there is no such thing as sudden acceleration even though he and everyone else at DOT knew sudden-acceleration incidents didn't exist: SAIs would be reported to NHTSA. NHTSA would investigate them thoroughly. NHTSA would say they were caused by human error. And no one believed NHTSA.
The public would say, "Who me? Make a mistake? Me, the voter?"
In a democracy we regular citizens don't make mistakes. We never get in a car and step on the wrong pedal and run people over. Somebody does these things to us. The Trilateral Commission or the Freemasons. Maybe it's part of the Iran-contra conspiracy or a big foreign corporation's fault. You can't blame us.
And indeed, the DOT couldn't blame us. Even after completing its massive study of SAIs and showing that SAIs were all our own fault, the DOT couldn't quite bring itself to blame us.
Still, the study had to be done. Before the SAI study, blame evasion was getting out of hand. Newspapers were saying that sudden acceleration was caused by malfunctioning cruise-control mechanisms. The Center for Automotive Safety was claiming that radio waves made the computers in cars act up. Other ignorati pointed fingers at arcane goings-on within transmission housings and fuel-injection systems. Then, when "60 Minutes" did its piece on SAIs, Audis began jumping and leaping and cavorting in suburban driveways like killer whales at Sea World, and the sky turned legal-pad yellow with law suits.
The people at DOT had to make their investigation of sudden acceleration not because they're fools, but because we are."
