This is kinda crazy, the story behind how Audi almost got canceled in the United States because of some questionable Americans is wild. Back in the late 1970s, Audi was on a roll. Not too long ago, they had just entered the US market and sales were climbing year after year. And one particular car they had just recently introduced was doing extremely well, the Audi 5000. Everybody loved these things, man. They were flying off the shelves and things could not look better for the Audi brand. Until… Very quickly after introducing this car to the US market, Audi started to get some complaints for some customers. And at first it was just like one person would walk into the dealership and say, oh hey, this car is kinda doing some funky stuff. It’s going really quickly out of nowhere. And then it turned into two complaints, three, and eventually things kind of escalated. Because you see, very shortly after Audi had released this car to the US, they started getting a bunch of reports that this car had a big issue with unintended sudden acceleration. This issue was exactly how it sounded. This car would accelerate out of nowhere. This was a big deal because it led to a ton of accidents and ended up even unaliving seven people. Audi being a huge car manufacturer, they took these claims very seriously because they knew if they didn’t figure out what was going on, they were going to be in a lot of trouble. So they threw a ton of engineers at this problem and said, hey, figure out what is going on. We need to fix this immediately. While Audi was trying to figure out what was going on with their cars, the media was running with this story. And one particular outlet, 60 Minutes, they published a show that tanked Audi sales in the US. They published a one hour long segment on national television interviewing victims, talking to mechanics that were speculating and basically guessing as to what they thought the issue might be. And near the very end of the show, they managed to show that the Audi 5000 had a real problem by making the car accelerate by itself with nobody in the car. While Audi’s reputation is getting dragged through the mud by the media and everybody’s losing their confidence in the brand itself, they finally figured out what the problem was and you would not believe the cause. It turns out the unintended acceleration that all the US customers were experiencing wasn’t some brake failure and it wasn’t some like faulty electronics. It was actually user error. Yes, that’s right. User error. This was actually verified by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration inside of the United States. They did their own investigation and found out that there was nothing wrong with these instead with the US customers that weren’t used to European cars with the different type of throttle and brake pedal. So along by the time when these customers would try to go for the brake pedal, they would end up hitting the accelerator pedal. Now as you can imagine, having your brain almost ruined by something so simple to probably rub you the wrong way. But Audi actually took the high road on this. This is a PR film released at the time by the president of Audi of America. And in this video, he’s actually acknowledging the issue and taking some of the blame, even though none of this is really their fault. But he’s saying, hey, we’re going to recall all these cars and change up how they all work. Your safety is our number one concern. Kind of a cool move. Also, the 60 minute thing where they show the car driving itself with nobody in the car that was later debunked and they found out that they actually faked that experiment.