1. Yes, because a 14 year old van with 165,000 miles is exactly like a 6 month old car with fewer than 5,000 miles on it...
2. Mechanical components should wear out over time. Major structural components, such as the frame, should not fail after a mere 165,000 miles or 14 years.
A search of this problem finds many events, even when the vehicle was nearly new.
3. This is a case of the Obama administration trying to bash Toyota. It's theatre for ratings, basically. I hadn't recalled any time that they pulled this kind of stuff on American companies with other kinds of bad problems. Your cited example is amazing.
4. #1: lol--around this house, a car with 165,000 miles on it is known as a younger car. We don't ditch them just because they hit 50k. We buy them at 50k used. Frankly, I have a 1993 Honda Accord with 290,000 miles on it and have never had anything as dangerous as described on that 1994 Ford happen. That is not to be expected and shouldn't have happened.
5. My take on it - Toyota has hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of vehicles with a proven issue. The E150 frame failure is apparently many, but is that 3, 4, a dozen?
The difference is the scope of failure. When you make literally hundreds of thousands of a model every year (the E150 is basically an F150 truck with a van body on it, something Ford sells a tens of thousands of every month), you'll get some failures over time. Is it terrible? Yes, but it's also the real world - nothing lasts forever.
So how many E150s have this failure? What's the rate of failures? If we're talking dozens over 14 years it's basically a non-issue; it's a terrible failure, but worthy of recall?
6. This toyota thing is all a big conspiracy.
Big Government is just trying to prop up Government Motors.
Notice how all this toyota nonsence started right after Government Motors started its commercials comparing itself to Toyota?
Yeah, that's just a coincidence!
Well, we can connect the dots can't we.