Unintended acceleration to $1.2 billion

Walter Olson notes the speed with which the U.S. Justice Department moves when it wishes to extort money from major corporations;

The acceleration claims themselves had turned out to be almost entirely bogus, and were refuted in a report from the federal government’s own expert agency, NHTSA. Instead, the prosecution relied on a single count of wire fraud: Toyota had supposedly given regulators, Congress and the public an erroneously positive view of its safety efforts. It should therefore have to “forfeit” a huge sum supposedly related to the volume of business it did over a relevant period.

Toyota's cars work just fine...that'll be $1.2 billion for our trouble confirming what its customers already know, thank you very much.

[Bold in above by HSIB]