> Even if the cars turn out to all be fine (and we don't know that yet)

Test enough cars and you'll find consistent defects. Test yet more and you'll find consistent and potentially life threatening defects. Is this a fatal problem with your product? Yes. Is it acceptable? Yes.

No one would envision my hifi burning my house down, but if it turned on (and it turned itself on at 9pm and off at 11pm every day, I never found out why because it didn't even have a timer or alarm circuit) and something failed in just that right way then yes my house could burn down. If my accelerator has a defect and fails in just that right way then yes I could crash... or I could put my car into neutral like a non-retarded person, or I could drop into 1st or 2nd gear (even in an automatic, which way too many people don't even know they have a 1st and 2nd gear), or I could just take my foot off the accelerator and apply it to the brake.

I'm sorry, but when it comes down to the simple facts that all these accidents were caused by driver error, or in the very few cases where defects did exist the accidents were ultimately caused by inexperienced drivers, and yes a person driving for 30 years can be way more inexperienced than someone who just got their license. Vehicles ultimately fail-safe. If you turn you engine off, you're left with a vehicle with no power steering and no power brakes. If you're on a highway your power steering is largely irrelevant anyway, unless they suddenly started introducing hairpin turns on all the national highways that I've yet to learn about. Your brakes, again, don't need to be power assisted for them to work, all you have to do is get to a shoulder and let your vehicle roll to a damn stop.

There's claims that switching the engine off while in motion is dangerous, but that's a wholly unproven and rather stupid claim. The problem, if there is one, is that people would panic and over-steer because of the resistance of the wheel, which would be deadly at 70mph. However, that's still driver error.

There's only one thing I find dangerous that car manufacturers have let remain for a long time, is that your brakes are a fail-deadly system. Hydraulic brakes need manual-pressure to activate whilst air-brakes are a fail-safe system requiring manual pressure to release. This would mean that in that situation where you have to turn your engine off at highway speeds, your brakes would gently start applying as the PSI drops in the air compressor.

You're claiming it's unacceptable to hide a problem with your product, but you're naively not understanding that there is always a defect margin and if that's within the government required percentage then they really shouldn't need to publicly disclose anything at all because it's in the publics best interest not to know that every appliance we own has the potential to defect in a way that could kill us.

I had a humble old school MP3 player that melted itself because for some bizarre reason it tried to charge the alkaline battery in it. Worse yet, the battery connectors were actually gold plated and managed to burn a series of parallel lines into my desk. If it had been set on a piece of paper and had been equally as unattended, I'd have likely set my desk alight.