Class action against Toyota on Prius Brake Booster Problems

After the lawyers take their cut, we ll be left with pennies to fight over.

 

Yeah! We'll all get a $5 coupon good for our next Toyota vehicle purchase!

 

april 6, any news yet?

 

Gaaah, another lawyer building a case by throwing actual brake failures and the way the unplanned regen-to-friction transition always feels into the same basket.

Which means there is no good way for it to turn out. If it prevails, we may learn a lot and see some progress on the brake failure front, which would be great, but the lawyers get rewarded for making a dishonest case.

If it gets booted, that's richly earned just desserts for the lawyers, which would be a very valuable outcome, but leave us back to square one on the brake failures.

Somewhere, on some corner of the planet, you're telling me, there aren't two or three lawyers smart enough to see that?

 

There was a lawsuit that I joined which I was paying electronic payment fees for school loans back while ago. I made a lump sum to pay off the entire ending balance in the 5 digit value range and was hit by the big fee it being a large transaction. Last week the check issued to me arrived, 20 big cents.

 

I wonder if this is related to a disgruntled newbie who posted here sometime in the past year. But I haven't found that thread yet.

 

If I'm remembering the same thread, I think I more-than-half-suspected that "disgruntled newbie" was an intern from the law firm, assigned to "go join some forums and generate some outraged Prius owner comments", and who was totally unprepared for responses like "well, you're mixing together real failures with a different known behavior some drivers aren't used to, wouldn't it be better to learn the distinction and build an honest case around the failures?"

 

I know who the person is. There are quotes that I have saved up for my next signature. That person has Provided me some valuable quotes!

 

@JackTheNarrator ?

 

This thread title sounded promising, concerns about the brake booster. But the link is about the wonky brake feel, running over manholes and the like. Bait and switch?

 

It's mixing them together indiscriminately. That's the thing:

The second one is clearly a brake failure, detected with warning lights, maybe one of the rare but awful floored-pedal-no-stoppies. The fourth one is clearly an "ok, you haven't familiarized yourself with what the regen/friction transition feels like, have you?" The first one is probably also that, with an added "how on earth did you let that split-second transition turn into hitting a car?" The third one sounds pretty scary but leaves so much out it could go either way.

Law firm for old UA cases at least hired the Barr Group to study the ECUs and present a case that made an effort to get the facts straight. This law firm seems convinced there's nothing needed beyond throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping the jury likes mushrooms.

That rots, because we know some cars in fact have had scary failures including floored-pedal-no-stoppies, and it would be great to have some process to learn more about what's going on there, but I'm not optimistic a bunch of spaghetti-throwing is how that'll happen.

 

The lawsuit described in this press release seems to be one of several with broadly similar allegations.

Besides that case in the Southern District of Ohio (Hendricks v. Toyota Motor Corporation et al., 1:20-cv-00263-TSB), cases have been filed in the Northern District of California (Alaniz v. Toyota Motor Corporation et al., 4:20-cv-01351-JST) and in the Eastern District of Texas (In re: Toyota Hybrid Brake Litigation, 4:20-cv-00127-ALM).

The courts are still working out where the litigation will proceed, and the parties to the Ohio case, in which Toyota has not yet filed an answer, have stipulated to a stay through July 7.

Interested readers can use PACER to view the docket sheets and filings.

 

It’s behind a paywall but it seems like Toyota is settling with the individual litigants.

 

20 cents each?