It's a wonder Frank Visconi walked away from the crash that turned his new Toyota Tacoma pickup into an unrecognizable mush of metal, plastic and dirt. But Visconi has a different wonder -- why Toyota doesn't believe his complaints of sudden acceleration.
Visconi, a retired vehicle theft investigator, describes driving down a rain-slicked freeway north of Nashville last June when he tapped the brakes to avoid another car. Instead of slowing, he says, the engine revved, spinning out the truck's rear wheels. The truck ran off the road, jumped an embankment and rolled several times before coming to rest on its side.His crash is one of eight in a passel of 33 complaints to federal regulators that has restarted a decades-old debate about whether sudden acceleration claims reflect vehicle defects or mental ones. At a customer's urging, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into 2006 and 2007 Tacoma pickups over sudden acceleration -- the fourth such look in three years at Toyota models over similar complaints.