‘Toyota has decided that a defect which relates to motor vehicle safety exists in certain 200_ through certain 200_ model year [name of model] vehicles. The defect is the potential for an unsecured or
incompatible driver’s floor mat to interfere with the accelerator pedal and cause it to get stuck in the wide open position.'”

This says a defect exists in the *vehicle* in that an unsecured or incompatible floor mat can interfere with the accelerator pedal. If you think about it, how can a problem that can involve an incompatible floor mat possibly be a defect in the factory-supplied floor mat?

The defect is in the arrangement of parts, not any one part.

CarLitGuy: You’re changing the subject a bit. I agree that the other problems you mention do exist. But that doesn’t mean that Toyota’s floor mats aren’t defective for reasons I detail at a post at TortDeform.com. Of course Toyota isn’t to blame if a driver buys a generic floor mat and installs it in his vehicle upside-down on top of his Toyota floor mats and that causes a problem. But a Toyota floor mat in a Toyota shouldn’t jam the gas pedal.

I’m also going to agree with you that no car can be made idiot proof, and if one ever was, we’d just build a better idiot. We’ll just have to agree to disagree about whether the test under the 3rd Restatement is too friendly to manufacturers.

Manufacturers see all of the above, plus their own floor mats removed and installed upside down – for reasons suggested in my earlier post. I stand by my earlier comment – a car can’t be made idiot-proof.

Other than perhaps Ralph Nader, I’m not sure who thinks the 3rd Restatement of Torts is too manufacturer friendly, premised in part as it is on retrospective forseability.

Floor mats from competing manufacturers are keyed to specific vehicles. For example, you can’t take a floor mat from an SUV and use it in a compact car because the retention holes are keyed differently. This insures than neither users nor dealers mistakenly install the wrong mat. (If the dealer does it, is it the user’s fault for not catching the dealer’s error?) Floor mats from competing vehicles are also labeled to prevent the same problem.

Finally, if you choose to believe that the floor mats are not defective because they did in fact protect the carpet, that’s fine. However, the floor mats meet the legal definition of a defective product. Under the Restatement 3d of Torts, (which is sometimes criticized as being too friendly to manufacturers) a product is defective if:

“the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the adoption of a reasonable alternative design by the seller or other distributor, or a predecessor in the commercial chain of distribution, and the omission of the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe.”

There is no question that the floor mat becoming detached is foreseeable. There is no question that reasonable alternative designs for floor mats that won’t jam the gas pedal exist and could have been used by Toyota. There is room for argument whether that renders the product not reasonably safe, but I think it does.

Certainly, new fuel economy regulations are no friend to any full line vehicle manufacturer – though they might be better than a patchwork of California regulations across the nation. Nor are the numerous state by state “Lemon Law” changes that have swept the nation since Chrysler’s bankruptcy, and GM’s following. Finally, plenty of people have sought to attach liability to the new GM for the actions of the old, in spite of the rulings of the bankruptcy court.

If there is a bully pulpit out there (one I think you will find any number of politicians on), I submit that GM is at best an unintended beneficiary. There are others among the voting public to whose benefit that pulpit is focused.

…the potential for an unsecured or incompatible driver’s floor mat…

That’s “user error” and “user error”. User error in the first case by thru failure to resecure the mat after removing it for cleaning, picking up loose change, etc, and user error in the second case for either doing as I did, or placing a second floor mat (such as the ubiquitous “all weather” floor mats) on top of the first, to protect the factory floormats from dirt, mud, etc. In other cases, people remove their floor mats and flip them over (carpet down, rubber up), again to keep the mats from getting dirty. In short, the “defect” is that the vehicle isn’t, apparently, sufficiently idiot proof. The defense of too stupid to take responsibility for one’s actions is not one I find palatable.