酷学2017考研英语能力提升班-丁晓忠时文精读第一季视频教程

酷学2017考研英语能力提升班-丁晓忠时文精读第一季视频教程

The scale of GM’s carelessness reached an apex in 2010, when it suffered the ignominy of bankruptcy, and was derided by some as Government Motors. Yet even that embarrassment failed to force GM to entirely regroup. Last week (Sept. 17) the company agreed to pay a $900 million fine for deliberately concealing a faulty ignition switch responsible for the deaths of some 120 people.

Meanwhile, Japanese carmakers, once a joke in the US, surged into the market with vehicles admired for consistent quality and innovation. At the front of the pack was Toyota, with its market-leading Camry. Toyota came on strong—before anyone, the company produced a mass-market hybrid electric vehicle, the 1997 Prius. Pictured at the left, it may not look like much today, but at the time it was a visionary move. Within a few years, the Prius did something for the Japanese company that GM could only dream of—it placed Toyota on the leading edge of cool. In 2008, the market rewarded Toyota by buying more of its cars than anyone else’s—including GM.

But the very next year, Toyota began to be the target of complaints and accusations regarding the inadvertent acceleration of some of its vehicles. The company insisted there was nothing wrong with its cars—while there was acceleration in some cases, it said, it was because of drivers kicking the floormats in a way that caused the pedals to stick.

But reported fatalities as a result of the acceleration forced Toyota to order massive, rolling recalls, and to suspend the sale of its best-selling models. And in March 2014, Toyota finally admitted that it had been lying—the pedals did stick, and it agreed to pay a $1.2 billion US fine to avoid prosecution. In an interview last year, a Toyota executive said the company now understands that it should have moved much faster and not covered up the facts.

Meanwhile, its reputation had taken a blow. Two months ago,VW grabbed the global car-sales crown. One of VW’s big boasts has been that it had figured out how to make diesel engines clean. But now it turns out that its technical triumph was a ruse. Today the company admitted that that “discrepancies” in the software that controls emissions in some diesel-engine models affects some 11 million vehicles around the world.