Yes, of course. How could we believe it is only Toyota?


A mother and her 14-year-old daughter were returning from a shopping trip and were turning onto an exit ramp from an Interstate highway. Both were secured in their seat belts in their 1998 Lincoln Town Car, and the vehicle's cruise control was engaged. As the driver stepped on the brake to slow down, the cruise control actuator cable stuck in the open throttle position and would not allow the engine to return to idle. Instead of responding to the driver's frantic braking, the Town Car left the road at a high rate of speed and crashed into a rock embankment. The mother received severe, permanent injuries and her daughter was killed.
When victims of these sudden-unintended-acceleration or stuck-throttle events have complained to Ford, the automaker has invariably blamed the driver, alleging that the driver must have pressed the accelerator or allowed the floor mat to interfere with its operation. When victims have asked the National Highway Safety Administration to investigate, the agency has relied almost exclusively on Ford's explanations and statistics and has accepted Ford's denial that there is a design defect. The result has been that the in-depth investigation of these design defects and ultimate justice for the victims has fallen upon the shoulders of experienced plaintiffs' lawyers willing to expend the time, energy and money necessary to expose the true facts and circumstances and hold Ford Motor Company accountable. In recent litigation, Ford has been required to disclose documents that revealed the breadth of the problem (almost no Ford vehicle is exempt, and failures have been reported in such popular models as the Taurus, Explorer, Mercury Marquis, Crown Victoria, Lincoln Continental and F-Series pickup trucks), the company's prior knowledge of the cruise control design defects and its efforts to keep them hidden. Ford today is finding it difficult to hide behind its decades-old strategy of claiming that "these failures don't occur in the real world" in the face of hundreds of highly-credible victims (including Secret Service agents and police officers) who have come forward and testified about their horrific experiences when the Ford vehicles they were driving suddenly took off on them or failed to respond to a braking command. As a result, victims are winning their cases against Ford.

The year? 2002