Risk Professor Isn't Scared of Driving a Toyota
March 10, 2010

Paul Fischbeck, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a "risk expert," noted in a release late last month that although Toyota Motor Corp. has captured the attention of the media and the driving public numerous reports linking its vehicles to unintended acceleration, driving while talking on a cell phone or even innocently walking a mile are riskier than piloting a recalled Toyota.

"There hasn't been a discussion about the actual risk of driving one of Toyota's recalled vehicles," said Fischbeck, a professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy, in a statement. " I think it's important for people to realize that when you look at the actual risk of driving one of these cars, it's actually very low."

Fischbeck calculates that walking a mile is 1,900 times riskier than driving the same mile in a recalled Toyota. He said driving while talking on a cell phone increases risk "much more than the chance of having a stuck accelerator."

He explained, "In the U.S., there is a little more than one fatality for every 100 million miles driven. The average U.S. vehicle logs about 13,000 miles each year. Based on these averages, for the 2.3 million Toyotas being recalled, there are about 340 fatalities every year for causes unrelated to the accelerator. The accelerator problem is adding about six deaths every year to this total - meaning that the accelerator problem is increasing the driving risk by about 2 percent."

The CMU professor also put the risk in simpler terms. He says the chance of dying in a year "because of the accelerator problem" is about one in 500,000. And "the additional risk from the accelerator problem increases an individual's annual risk of dying by less than 0.5 percent.

"Bottom line, it is important to keep risks in perspective," Fischbeck said in a release. "The stuck accelerator problem does make driving riskier and needs to be fixed. But at the same time, the increased risk is very small." - Bill Visnic, Senior Editor

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