Toyota Confident Of Developing A Working Car By 2020

Excited engineers at leading dud car manufacturer Toyota announced today that they are now probably less than ten years away from developing a car that actually works.

“We have been building prototypes at a rate of approximately eight million a year for some time now,” said head designer Honto Kamikaze. “And each terrifying defect that appears in those testbeds takes us one step closer to our ultimate goal of a reliable car.”

TV's Stewart Lee test drives one of Toyota's comedy vehicles

Toyota has cemented a reputation for road-testing its prototypes under ultra-realistic conditions, with a vast beta-testing program involving millions of drivers all over the world voluntarily testing the experimental vehicles to self-destruction – a process that can take as long as six weeks.

“We’ve just found out that all of our Highlander and Lexus RX400h hybrid prototypes are displaying an interesting tendency to grind to a halt because of a blown fuse,” smiled Mr Kamikaze. “It seems that this fuse thing is notoriously prone to breakage, and therefore we’ve taken the precaution of recalling the 110,000 development vehicles so we can rip out these defective parts.”

“We can botch a quick fix by soldering the bare wire ends together, and I daresay we’ll be deleting fuses altogether from future test models,” he explained. “Statistically, every single vehicle we’ve made in the last 18 months has now been returned to have at least one fundamental design fault patched up – so, with the aid of this unparalleled store of data on how not to build a car, by a simple process of trial and error we must surely get it right one day.”

Toyota May Kill You Today or Tomorrow

As it was revealed that a small number of Ford Transit vans share the same defective Chinese-made accelerator pedal that caused the urgent recall of 1.8m Toyotas in Europe and 3.4m in the United States, worried vehicle owners around the world are desperately searching for a car that might not kill them.

"I thought Hondas were a pretty safe bet," said one concerned parent. "But they're recalling cars over a window-heater switch that incinerates the entire car when it fails. It looks like I'll be doing a lot of walking from now on."

China insisted that it was working hard to develop a product that actually worked.

"Unfortunately, our courts would be facing a huge backlog if we tried and executed every factory manager with a laissez-faire attitude to quality control," said a spokesman for the Chinese government. "And international calls for fair trials aren't going to make things any easier."

With scant hopes of finding a car in production today without at least one potentially-lethal Chinese component waiting to maim, roast or skewer its hapless occupants, the British government is rumoured to be considering a non-scrappage scheme, in which owners of cars more than ten years old would be paid £2000 not to replace them with a murderous new model.

Everything You Own Is Trying To Kill You

The public were today urged to throw every single object they own out of the nearest window before it inflicts fatal injuries on them and their loved ones.

The alarming advice came after mobile phone giant Nokia revealed that over a million chargers were likely to have a potentially lethal electrical fault, and Maclaren USA warned parents to stop using their baby buggies immediately if they wanted their children to grow up with hands.

"I've already encased my iPhone in concrete, after hearing that the battery might explode without warning," said harassed consumer Josh Geake. "I was thinking of using it as a headstone to mark the spot at the bottom of the garden where I buried my similarly explosive MacBook. Now I'm too scared to move. How many other household gadgets want me dead?"

A spokesman for the British Retail Consortium appeared on television to explain why everything you buy is shoddy. Unfortunately, however, due to ongoing problems with Freeview reception nobody could understand a single word he said.

'LDV Would Probably Only Spend Money on Alcohol or Drugs,' Says Mandelson

The government has refused a request from the collapsing van manufacturer LDV for the loan of a fiver till Friday, announced Lord Mandelson today.

"LDV, as you know, is owned by my very good boating chum, Oleg Deripaska," pointed out the Business Secretary, "And even if I were to reach into my pocket and find a crisp new five pound note - and I don't generally carry cash, it's quite, quite vulgar and I much prefer to use somebody else's - then I would immediately come under a scandalous attack from the gutter press for being biased towards my billionaire friends. I have to think of my spotless reputation for honesty, you know - very important."

The LDV management are optimistically turning out their pockets for loose change to see if they have enough coppers between them to buy the company. However, they said that, realistically, their best hope of saving the company now lay in sitting outside the headquarters of Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland under a newspaper, on the off-chance that a banker hurrying to the nearest four-star restaurant might accidentally drop a little of the £500bn of taxpayers' money which the government has kindly handed to them by guaranteeing to underwrite their monumentally wrong-headed investments in various kinds of rubbish, in the vague hope that they might actually grant somebody a mortgage this year.