It's like it's 1983 all over again:

On a rainy night last fall, a couple of months after Riner bought her Prius, she was driving toward the Houston Galleria for a sales meeting ... Suddenly she felt the car hydroplaning out of control, and when she glanced at the speedometer she realized the car had shot up to 84 mph. Riner wasn't hydroplaning; quite simply, her Prius had accelerated on its own.

Back then, Audi tried everything it could to reproduce the "sudden acceleration syndrome," but couldn't. What the Germans never really understood was the problem had very little to do with their cars and everything to do with American politics and media perceptions. Audi people who talk to car journalists seem bitter about it to this day.

Will this "new" Prius behavior have the same root causes* as the Audi phenomenon more than twenty five years ago? Almost certainly. Will the results to Toyota's reputation be a severe as they were for Audi? Hard to tell. The Japanese have always been more agile when it comes to PR, and they do have the lesson of Audi before them.

We'll see...

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*to wit: alcohol, inattentive drivers, and extremely attentive lawyers.