There, now somebody's said it. A Republican senator, Mike Johanns, has suggested banning all Japanese car imports to the US in response to Toyota's problems with defective accelerators.
During a congressional commitee hearing, Johanns, who hails from Nebraska, asked transport secretary Ray LaHood what would happen if "until the Japanese government can assure us that all the defects are out of these vehicles, we're just not going to accept any vehicles from Japan".
To be fair, Johanns has an axe to grind. USA Today points out that he was agriculture secretary in the Bush administration when the Japanese banned beef imports because of a scare over mad cow disease. He told LaHood: "That's what they did with one of our industries."
Johanns went on to assert, somewhat dubiously, that he is "as free trade as anybody" but that "the American consumer is getting tired of this thing if we are getting substandard products".
Let's keep a sense of perspective. The number of deaths linked to Toyota defects, so far, has reached 37 over a decade. That's about 0.009% of the 40,000 deaths annually on American roads. And I wonder how many Japanese toddlers have been crushed under the chassis of a poorly driven Hummer?
