The Sykes scam is a good analogy for the entire Government Motors’ dumping on Toyota (a chief competitor).
We are seeing fascist economics unfold before our eyes.
Reminds me of the “exploding Pinto” stunt the news outlets pulled way back when.
Because most of the "media" are whores for the government, and the government owns a competing car company.
No mystery here.
I never get why the dispatchers, police and reporters refuse to ask the simple questions — like, have you turned off the ignition or how about shifting into neutral?
Basically the state attracts parasites because they know if they scream loud enough, the cowards here will give in and hand them a free lunch: a house on the beach, an unearned income, a posh do-nothing job at 90k a year (none of these examples are made up, and the people in the government here are basically no different from him).
The financial implosion of California is the result of massive handouts that amount to a giant ponzi scheme benefitting the worst of the worst. The game is now ending.
Jim Sikes is just one of millions who are about to find out they don't have the skills or the character to afford the lifestyle they think they're entitled to.
The next time I’m running late I’m gonna claim that my Yukon’s pedal stuck and I couldn’t get it stopped until I got to whatever place I was going.....:)
[I might even get a totally cool police escort to Wal*Mart, maybe!]
I was taking a break from the news and missed the initial story. hubby told me about it the evening it was reported and seemd to believe it...until halfway through. He hesitated at the whole “unable to shift into neutral” thing and grimaced. When he got to the “all failsafes failed” part he was obviously getting skeptical. He just read this article. He does math. He appreciated it. Yep, it’s a hoax.
that might be the photo of the reporter, I’m not sure.
Anyway, this is a feeding frenzy of a car company that choses not to use Unions, and we KNOW what THAT means..!
At first I didn’t know why you posted that picture. I thought it was a mannequin. Then I see it’s the author. Creepy.
While Government Motors is benefitting from the Toyota show-trial and purge, this attack was actually the brainstorm of the UAW (also a GM owner). The real intent is to unionize the US Toyota factories—which would occur as part of an under-the-table settlement of some sort. Very Old School mafia type stuff—the way the capos sold protection. With Bolsheviks, you get a similar type of thuggery with lots of theater thrown in for good measure.
I wish we could call for an investigation into this hoax but, unfortunately, our whole damn government is corrupt. There’s nobody to go to anymore.
I’ve seen about a million (OK, a little exaggerated) articles about how to stop a car that has a pinned gas pedal. The one thing they agree on is that the only chance you have to get it stopped is to nail the brakes *once* *hard* and stand on them. If you can’t figure out how to get the car onto neutral, and try to pump the brakes or do two applications, they are going to boil the fluid and fail.
My Point: I know a Prius is a relatively light, relatively underpowered car, however, even though the Highway Patrol cruiser would have not had a pinned throttle, it would have had that one chance to get itself stopped, because the Prius had a (supposedly) pinned throttle. So he’s stopping *both* cars? I’m throwing the BS flag here.
Too bad this driver did not think to turn off his ignition, put it in neutral, and coast to a stop. Apparently he had plenty of time to take rational action.
The statistical data on reliability and low cost of repairs for Toyota remains in the top three. I will not hesitate to consider a Toyota for our next vehicle. We have been driving one for seven years.
FOLLOW THE MONEY!!!!!!
Sikes is a scam artist and our glorious Mainstream Media accepts his story without question because it demonizes the company who makes GM compete!!!
So why did he do it? Sleuth work at the Web sites Jalopnik.com and Gawker.com reveals that Sikes and his wife Patty in 2008 filed for bankruptcy and are over $700,000 in debt. Among their creditors is Toyota Financial Services for a lease on a 2008 Toyota Prius, with value at time of bankruptcy of $20,494. The Jalopnik Web site shows a copy of Toyota’s secured claims form, though when Jalopnik questioned Sikes by e-mail he denied being behind on his Prius payments.
Sikes also has a history of filing insurance claims for allegedly stolen items that are slowly coming to light. In 2001 he filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff’s Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a prosumer mini-DV camera and gear, and $24,000 in cash, according to Fox40 in Sacramento. His bankruptcy documents show a 2008 payment of $7,400 for an allegedly stolen saxophone and clothes.
G. A. Y.
The real tragedy here is that the government has killed thousands by forcing people into smaller cars due to fuel economy standards: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2468420/posts
We live in the most litigious nation in the history of the world and i’d wager that at least 2/3rds of the claims against Toyota are little more than attempts by low-life scam-artists to hit the jackpot.
>>But the press conference alone makes it clear Sikes’ story didn’t wash. Journalism schools are supposed to teach that skepticism is paramount. “If your mother says it, check it out,” goes the old adage. Yet comments on Web sites across the country reveal that practically everyone thought the Prius incident was a hoax—though they couldn’t prove it—except for the media.<<
The most important line in the whole story - and the REAL story itself.