No - there were thousands of complaints before the news reports... the rate just skyrocketed even more afterwards as people jumped on the bandwagon.
I don’t believe that’s true. Before the press started reporting the supposed “issue” I’m pretty sure that Toyota had only gotten about 8 reports of unanticipated acceleration. A couple of them were actually a mechanical malfunction of some kind, but the rest were all floormat-jams of the pedal.
In the well-publicized case of the guy who called 911 and they recorded his whole call and crash... he was driving a loaner car that had mistakenly been outfitted by the dealer with floormats from an SUV model that didn’t fit correctly... and jammed against the pedal.
What’s a huge mystery is why he didn’t just hit the brakes, which would have stopped the car, or turned off the ignition, or popped it into neutral... any of which would also have stopped the car. That he didn’t try any of those things is unfathomable to me.