Unintended Acceleration Round 3: NPR Does The Math

NPR posted a nice widget on their web site, here, where you can check the statistics on unintended acceleration complaints. Most importantly, the data is normalized, so you can see which carmakers are having more complaints than their market share and which are getting less.

Here is a snapshot for 2009. Notice that the worst three carmakers, in terms of complaints per 100,000 vehicles, are Toytoa, VW, and BMW. Also notice that VW/Audi is more over-represented even than Toyota is!

model year 2009

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration identified 251 complaints alleging sudden acceleration and related problems for vehicles in model year 2009. A breakdown by vehicle make follows.

Vehicle make	Complaints	Market share	Share of complaints	Sales	Complaints per 100,000 veh.
TOYOTA-LEXUS	133	16.7%	53.0%	1,773,609	7.5
VOLKSWAGEN-AUDI	34	2.8%	13.6%	295,778	11.5
FORD	17	15.3%	6.8%	1,620,949	1.1
BMW	14	2.3%	5.6%	241,711	5.8
HONDA-ACURA	14	10.9%	5.6%	1,151,309	1.2
GM	9	19.6%	3.6%	2,075,748	0.4
NISSAN	7	7.3%	2.8%	770,719	0.9
CHRYSLER	5	8.8%	2.0%	931,860	0.5
SUBARU	4	2.0%	1.6%	216,268	1.9
HYUNDAI	3	4.1%	1.2%	434,656	0.7
MAZDA	2	2.0%	0.8%	207,787	1.0
VOLVO	1	0.6%	0.4%	61,488	1.6
KIA	1	2.8%	0.4%	300,019	0.3