Is ABC News Cheating a Toyota Test Drive?
ABC news correspondent Brian Ross, the man originally credited for breaking the Recall story, has apparently staged a Toyota test run for a recent piece. You see, the original clipping was supposed to cut back and forth from Ross driving a 2010 Toyota Avalon and a close up of a sporadic tach. In the original piece, it turns out, the tach was videotaped from a car in park – tisk tisk Mr. Ross.
To keep things fair, Ross and the ABC team went back to redo the Toyota test – at least part of it. He took a shot of the tachometer from a different test-drive – then edited that footage back into the original piece. Now don’t get me wrong – this blogger once owned an early 2000′s Avalon and believe me, it had more than one unexplained revving/acceleration issue. But with all the dismay surrounding our favorite Japanese auto maker they shouldn’t need any help from their own personal devil, Brian Ross.
The video above is an ABC News online official feed, which now seems to have completely edited out all of the Tach Shots. Gawker Media talked to ABC rep Jeffrey Schneider and when they asked why different tachometer shots were used: he paused for at least five seconds. Then he said, “I don’t know how that would happen. The tachometer was surging during each test we did, and the video is an accurate portrayal of what happened in the car to the tachometer.”
No one (ie: Gawker or Toyotapedia.org) are accusing Ross, ABC or anyone else of faking the test. But we’d love to see a redo where the actual proposed experiment was carried out fully on video. I mean, it’s not like this story is going away anytime soon…unfortunately for Toyota .
Leave a Reply