The city of Chicago is suing Toyota, accusing the company that makes one of the most popular vehicles in America of “willfully” ignoring a design that allows users to install third-party modifications such as more powerful aftermarket engines.
These modifications make the vehicles more powerful. For example, a 2.5L Tacoma can be upgraded by a user to have a 4.0L engine.
According to the suit, these allow anyone to circumvent long-standing federal and state fuel efficiency regulations. These replacement engines are available for anybody to order over the Internet.
Such an engine replacement can substantially increase the horsepower available. This can lead to loss of control by driver/operators.
While Toyota does manufacture these engines, they are for other vehicles. Third-party vendors are creating the swap in capabilities.
However, the suit accuses Toyota of making a “willful decision to not take meaningful action to address this problem”. They claim that other manufactures have designs that make third-party engine swaps more difficult or expensive.
The city claims that they have confiscated many of these Toyota vehicles with overpowered engines in the last few years.
You guys can go read the article in full:
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Comments
8 responses to “Chicago Sues Car Manufacture for Faulty Design”
Doesn’t Chicago PD use Glock handguns? The taxpayers of Chicago are gonna pay for the legal fees and settlement when they arm the PD. Another episode of The Twilight Zone.
I wonder if Glock will continue to sell/service handguns for the Chicago PD after this. Or any other PD in Illinois, for that matter. And I wonder if other manufacturers are taking notice and will adjust their police marketing accordingly.
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It would be interesting if the Chicago PD became persona non grata among firearm companies, with nobody willing to sell to them at anything resembling a reasonable price.
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Actions have consequences; legal actions even more so. It’s a lesson the Woke Left never learns, and I don’t expect this instance to change anything.
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(As an aside, the NSSF bills itself as the trade group for the firearms industry; where are they on this?)
Given the Hyundai & Kia suits, it would not have surprised me.
I aee what you did there…good analogy, but the swapped Toyota engine is not in and of itself illegal. An auto sear without an NFA license is a federal offence with a penalty of up to 10 yra in prison and up to $250,000 fine……unless you are a protected minority….
I think you might have missed my point. Suing Glock for something bad guys do is as stupid as suing a car company for something bad guys do. It is a forced analogy. Damn square peg being driven into a round hole. The best I could come up with was “fuel efficiency regulations”.
ssssooooo lets all modify our Fords and Chevys…. America, have you had enough of democrats yet???? apparently not as you keep fukkin electing them
On one hand, Glock probably could alter their pistols going forward to make it harder to convert them to full-auto with a drop-in part.
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On the other hand, holding them responsible for Gen 1-4 pistols being converted is ridiculous, first because they cannot be responsible for what bad guys do, and second because most of those pistols were designed, built, and sold LONG before the “Glock switch” was a thing! Even if they offered a recall to “fix” the existing pistols, will they still be held responsible for owners who don’t send in their recalled guns?
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Using the Toyota analogy: It’s one thing to demand that Toyota modify their new models to make third-party engine swaps harder going forward. It’s an entirely different thing to hold them responsible for people doing engine swaps on 1980s-era SR5 pickups designed and built decades before engine swaps became common. While both “things” are patently ludicrous, the former is at least somewhat reasonable; the latter is completely UNreasonable.
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The actual, reasonable solution — charging gang-bangers caught with modified Glocks under the NFA and putting them in federal prison for 10 years for that on top of whatever else they’re charged with — would be hard, and the Left would cry “Racist!”, and it doesn’t virtue signal anti-gun Woke-ness.
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So they won’t do that. Instead, they’ll use taxpayer money to file frivolous lawsuits against a lawful manufacturing company for third-parties’ actions outside their control. That’s the ticket!
As an afterthought, it occurs to me that if ANYTHING could get the Woke Left to push for repealing the NFA, it would be this very issue.
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Supposing a bunch of inner-city (probably racial minority)
gang-bangerschoir boys were convicted and sent to prison on federal NFA charges and the demographics of NFA convicts suddenly and dramatically shifted heavily toward POCs, the Left would very quickly find itself in a conundrum: Keep a federal gun law that previously entrapped more white men than anyone else, or get rid of it so fewer black men are sent to federal prison in the future?.
What to do… what to do….