Hmmm…wonder if my local dealer knows about this. Just in from CNN — Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius – CNN.com.

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — Toyota's consumer woes deepened on Wednesday, and for the first time on native soil.

Japan's Transportation Ministry has asked Toyota to investigate brake malfunction complaints in Japan on its Prius, the gasoline-electric hybrid car which was the best-selling vehicle in the country in 2009, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association.

Ministry officials said 14 complaints regarding brakes in the new Prius model has been filed since July. Toyota officials said the Prius has received similar complaints from North American car dealers and that the company is investigating.

If, like me, you’re irritated by the smugness and irrelevance of the WEF, then this post by Jeff Jarvis will strike a chord.

The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting at Davos was “rethink, redesign, rebuild.” When a friend recited that list for me, I responded that given the institutions there, the more appropriate slogan is “replace.”

Last year when I arrived at Davos, I wondered whether we were among the problem or the solution. This year, I wondered whether we were among the future or the past. Well, actually, I don’t wonder.

We were among the disrupted. The only distinction among them is that some know it, some don’t. At Davos, I fear, most don’t.

I ran a session with international organizations about transparency and new ways they can govern themselves. I didn’t get far. “Oh, yes, we understand Twitter and all that,’ they said. “We have people who do that for us.” Don’t you want to read what your constituents and the world are saying about you? “We don’t have time.” Oy. I invited a young disrupter into the room who talked about his ability to organize efforts to help people quickly — not so much breaking rules but discovering new ones — but he didn’t get far either.

I sat in a session about the future of journalism that was set in the past. No fault of the moderator, the panel pretty much issued the same old saws: The internet is filled with trivia, sniffed one: “The stuff that goes on the web is just suffocating.” The free market will not support a free press, declared another. (How do we know that already?) Thus their conclusion: The only hope for journalism is state and foundation support, said a few. Oy again.

At the end of the week, I sat in on a session trying to brainstorm under WEF’s theme of the three re’s. They said the point of the exercise was to get soundbites (as they used to be known; tweets as they are now known) and that’s what they got: PowerPoint (actually, Tumblr) platitudes. There were good points: We need to change what we measure, said one table, for now we get what we measure (true from media to economies). But there was also insipidness: “We are what we allow to happen.” And: “Ecology means caring. Equity means sharing.” Put that on your T-shirt and wash it.

What’s nice about Jeff’s account is that he’s clearly not seduced by the complacency that seems to infect most hacks who receive an invitation to the Swiss smugfest.

As a Toyota owner, I have a particular interest in this.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The Lexus ES 350 sedan, made by Toyota, had hit a sport utility vehicle, careened through a fence, rolled over and burst into flames. All four people inside were killed: the driver, Mark Saylor, an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law.

It was the tragedy that forced Toyota, which had received more than 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, to step up its own inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.

Yet only last week did the company finally appear to come to terms with the scope of the problem — after expanding a series of recalls to cover millions of vehicles around the world, incalculable damage to its once-stellar reputation for quality and calls for Congressional hearings.

It’s sobering, this. Toyota has for two decades been the world’s best car manufacturer. But something clearly went very wrong. Success does strange things to organisations. And it leads to hubris:

At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes.

As recently as the fall, Toyota was still saying it was confident that loose floor mats were the sole cause of any sudden acceleration, issuing an advisory to millions of Toyota owners to remove them. The company said on Nov. 2 that “there is no evidence to support” any other conclusion, and added that its claim was backed up by the federal traffic safety agency.

But, in fact, the agency had not signed on to the explanation, and it issued a sharp rebuke. Toyota’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate,” the agency said. “This matter is not closed.”

We have two Toyota cars, and they’re the most reliable and efficient vehicles I’ve ever owned, with the possible exception of the old VW Beetles I had in the 1970s. Even so…

Charles Leadbeater has written a characteristically thoughtful pamphlet on Cloud Culture: the global future of cultural relations for Counterpoint, the British Council’s thinktank. It is being published next Monday (February 8) but he’s summarised the argument in this blog post.

The Internet, our relationship with it and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena. The rise of “cloud computing” will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. As Hillary Clinton’s announcement to release funding for the protection of the net – a day after Google’s announcement to stop self-censoring its service in China – indicates, the battle lines are already being drawn.

The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.

As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.

Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?

It’s interesting how these issues are gradually coming to the fore. Sometimes it takes events like the launch of the iPhone or (now) the iPad to provide a peg for thinking about what all this stuff means and where is it taking us. In my darker moments I have a terrible feeling that we’re sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare — that our great-great-grandchildren will one day look back on this period in history and ask “what were they thinking when they skipped happily into the clutches of Apple, Google & Co?”

Well, what are we thinking?

LATER: Bill Thompson reminded me of a column he wrote way back in October 2008, in which he wrote about cloud computing as “a generational shift as significant as that from the mainframe to the desktop computer is happening as we watch”. But, he wondered,

what does this do for the companies that sell cloud-based services rather than operating systems, routers or hardware? What happens when Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and IBM are actually running programs and storing data on behalf of their customers? We may criticise Google for censoring search results in China, but what happens when Microsoft data centres are being used to store data on political prisoners or transcripts of torture sessions?

There is already a lively debate about the dangers of having the US government trawl through a company’s confidential records using the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, taking advantage of the fact that the main cloud platforms are run by US companies.

But the other side of the equation matters too. Should Amazon feel happy that its elastic compute cloud could easily stretch to support human rights abuses that would still be considered unacceptable in most of the world? And if so, what should we do about it?