Category: Automotive

DOT Settles Lawsuit over Toyota UA Documents, New Congressional Inquiry Raises More Questions

Posted on | by admin

The dam against electronically caused unintended acceleration in Toyotas that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota built, with outrage, secrecy, pedal interference recalls, and capped with the February 2011 NHTSA-NASA report springs more leaks. The question is: Can they keep it from collapsing entirely?

Safety Research & Strategies continues to examine information showing that unintended acceleration still plagues Toyota vehicles and that many incidents cannot be explained by floor mats, bad drivers and sticky pedals. Recently, the Department of Transportation settled a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit with SRS, agreeing to turn over investigatory documents, videos and photos related to the agency’s involvement with a 2011 recall of Toyota and Lexus models for alleged accelerator entrapment by interior trim. (The agency also agreed to pay our lawyer’s fees – this from the Most Transparent Administration Ever.)

The recall was precipitated by the Timothy Scott incident. Scott is a former 2007 Lexus RX owner who reported a frightening UA event as he headed home from the gym one morning. In short order, Toyota bought Scott’s vehicle, and pronounced it a case of trim interference. NHTSA never looked at Scott’s Lexus, but began to investigate this root cause in other vehicles. Within six weeks, Toyota recalled the vehicles and NHTSA was all done.

We were eager to see just what the agency found out about the possibility of trim interference as a root cause of UA and what it didn’t want to show us– enough, at least, to try to stash it behind Exemption 5 of the FOIA, which protects agency deliberations. Imagine our amazement when the videos – sans audio- appear to show that the Lexus RX trim does not interfere with the accelerator — or, not without a lot of manipulation of exemplar vehicles. We are no closer to understanding why NHTSA dropped its investigation, or how trim interference can cause a UA like Tim Scott experienced, or, more importantly, why we had to sue the DOT to get this. Continue reading →

NHTSA Wobbles to Congress on Shaky Jeep Issue

Posted on | by admin

The YouTube videos say it all: a Jeep Wrangler vibrating so intensely, a bystander can see the front wheels plainly shimmy. Inside the vehicle, another Wrangler owner demonstrates the steering wheel shaking with such force that the driver has a death grip to keep control of the vehicle, but don’t worry, NHTSA told two U.S. Reps., it’s not a safety hazard.

Hapless Wrangler owners have dubbed it the “Jeep Death Wobble,” and some journalists who have reported on the phenomenon have been more than happy to give this snappy name some play. The problem caught the attention of Rep. Henry Waxman, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and California Rep Anna Eshoo, who last week released a letter they wrote to Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, urging the company to do more to educate consumers and dealers alike about the problem and its remedies:

“Chrysler should undertake an outreach campaign to its customers, such as a Customer Satisfaction Campaign, to notify Jeep owners of the risk of the “wobble” condition, also described as a “vibration” or “shimmy,” and the possible methods for repairing and preventing the problem. Such a notification could alert owners to the existence of Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) that advise dealers how to diagnose and make repairs to address this issue, emphasize the degree to which aftermarket modifications might affect or exacerbate the wobble problem, and advise customers how to stop the wobble if they experience it while driving.”

Apparently the five Technical Service Bulletins that Chrysler already issued relating to the problem were not enough. And apparently, Waxman and Eshoo turned to Chrysler, because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had already turned them away. Continue reading →

Toyota and the Case of the Electronic Floor Mat Entrapment

Posted on | by admin

As the last work week in June slouched to a close, Toyota announced another floor mat recall – this time for 154,000 model year 2010 Lexus RX350 and RX450 H vehicles. Frankly, we were slack jawed. This is the automaker’s fifth floor mat recall since 2005 and the eleventh alleging that unintended acceleration was caused by something interfering with the accelerator pedal – all weather mats, plastic trim, condensation in the pedal’s friction lever. That’s double digits, people.

NHTSA quickly claimed credit for influencing the recall:

“NHTSA approached Toyota regarding this issue late last month after the agency observed an increase in consumer complaints and other reports regarding pedal entrapment in these vehicles. When Toyota confirmed last week that it had received a significant volume of complaints on the same issue, NHTSA asked the manufacturer to conduct a recall.”

We guess that at this point, NHTSA and Toyota are tight enough that the agency can dispense with the whole investigation thing and just pick up the phone. So, the public doesn’t know what data the agency collected, and how many complaints directly to Toyota constitutes “a significant volume.”

The agency said that it had “carefully” reviewed “the available data” and “does not currently believe the issue involves additional vehicles beyond those indicated as part of the recall.” “..NHTSA anticipates the remedy proposed by Toyota will address the problem.”

Sadly, we do not share the agency’s confidence.  We have carefully reviewed the 2010 RX350 speed control complaints and we noticed something pretty interesting. Drivers were reporting that during the unintended acceleration event, the “brake failure” telltale on the dash was lit up. Check out ODI 10445439, reported to NHTSA last October:

On Oct. 5, 2011 at 7:45 am, I was traveling on a one lane road each way in rural Connecticut (35 mph zone). I decided to pass a car that was traveling well below the speed limit when my Lexus RX350 lurched forward suddenly and then had a huge burst of accelerating speed. I applied my foot to the brakes and the car slowed very slightly, but started to buck a little and then once again felt like it kicked into a higher gear. My dashboard was flashing “brake failure.” as I looked down and saw that my foot was firmly planted down on the brakes. Fortunately, there were few cars on the road and only once did I have to pass a car on a blind curve hoping no one was approaching from the other way, so as to avoid ramming a car in front of me. I had resolved in my mind that I was going to crash, and was trying to find a place to take the car off the road while trying to minimize injury to me. I stopped looking at my speed, but it was clearly in excess of 60 mph in a 35 mph zone. I was lucky that day, since there were few cars on the road and the stretch of road I was on was fairly straight. I drove this way for about 1.5 miles when it then occurred to me to shift the car into neutral. Once I did this, the car eventually reduced speed to about 5-10 mph. I threw the car into park and jumped out of the vehicle, which at this point was engulfed in smoke from the failed brakes. Lexus blamed the incident on a stuck accelerator pad, although they admitted when the car came to their shop the pad was not stuck. I know factually that the pad was not stuck, since I looked down at my feet during the episode and saw my foot on the brake, and the accelerator pad in its normal position. This was clearly an incident of sudden acceleration.

Or ODI 10445422, concerning a January 25 UA:

“I went out to grab a bite to eat for my daughter and I came to a stop light at a major intersection. I received the turn arrow so I accelerated thru the turn and then punched the gas to make it thru the next light that will turn red if you don’t give it a little gas to get thru it. I make it thru the light and get in the right lane to slow down to make my turn and my brakes don’t work and my car starts accelerating on its own. I have no control of the speed so I throw the car in neutral and keep slamming the brakes while the brake malfunction light appears. I’m not sure how my car slows down and I make a right turn into a parking lot and my engine is still sounding like it is accelerating and I am in neutral. My car rolled to a stop, I shut it down and called the Lexus line. The [sic] had a towing company out within an hour and the tow truck driver told me this is at least the 10th time he has hauled this type of car for the same thing.” Continue reading →

Better Consumer Protection in China?

Posted on | by admin

China may be better known for afflicting consumers with shoddy products than protecting them from shoddy products, but if you own a newish Jeep Wrangler, apparently you’re better off if your vehicle is registered in Beijing rather than Boston.

In November 2011, the Chinese government strongly suggested that Chrysler recall its 2008 – 2010 Jeep Wrangler models because the skid plate and exhaust configuration allowed debris to collect in the undercarriage of the vehicle while off- roading, allowing the catalytic converter to ignite the dried grass. The recommendation came after consumers filed three fire complaints in the month of October alone. Chrysler tried to argue that only the 2010 MY Wrangler possessed uniquely defective underbody conditions, but the Chinese government lit a fire under the automaker to recall the 2008 and 2009 model years as well. Owners of those Jeep Wranglers got the skid plate replaced by the new skid bar, which didn’t allow debris to accumulate.

So what happens if you are Rob Pyrock of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the owner of a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon? You don’t know anything about the Chinese Wrangler recall, but two months later, your Wrangler vehicle catches fire after a trip across a meadow, according to some fine reporting by WCNC’s Bill McGinty. Continue reading →

Sudden Unintended Braking: The Mercedes Problem that Didn’t Go Away

Posted on | by admin

German engineering ain’t what it used to be.

Melissa Marsala, a Mercedes owner from Cape Coral, Fla., was driving her 2001 ML430 at about 45 mph down a main thoroughfare, when her vehicle suddenly went into braking mode. The two vehicles behind her in the inner left lane slammed on their brakes to avoid a collision, and Marsala was able to ease the bucking vehicle onto the grassy median that divided the roadway.

“It terrified me,” Marsala recalled. “There was no reason for the brakes to engage. I was trying to come to a full stop but the car went boom-boom-boom-boom. It happened in an interval that was so quick. The car was skipping, smoke was coming off the wheel wells and you could smell the rubber burning. I veered it right into the median strip and it stopped itself.”

Those moments of sheer fright were courtesy of a malfunctioning yaw sensor – a problem primarily in the M-Class – well known to Mercedes, some M-class owners and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation. In 2007, NHTSA opened and quickly closed a Preliminary Evaluation into sudden unintended braking involving about 100,000 MY 2000-2001 M-class vehicles, without taking any action.

In May of 2007, Mercedes explained it all away to ODI at a presentation in which the automaker simulated electrical faults in the yaw rate sensor and showed how “the ESP [Electronic Stability Program] system is programmed to diagnose electrical faults and that brake applications resulting from yaw rate sensor electrical faults are very short in duration (0.3 seconds or less) and don’t affect vehicle control or stability.” NHTSA’s Vehicle Research and Test Center was unable to duplicate the problem in a vehicle that had experienced multiple events; and ODI’s attitude was: no documented crashes, low complaint rate, no problem. Continue reading →

It’s Tire Safety Week! Is There Anything to Celebrate?

Posted on | by admin

In April, materials scientist John Baldwin bluntly schooled insiders at the annual Tire Industry Conference about things the rubber industry has known for decades from its own internal research. He pointed out that relying on tire tread depth to determine the viability of a tire is a bit of a crapshoot:

“In the tire industry, a lot of decisions are based on tread depth,” he said. “But what is the significance of tread depth? There is uneven wear on damn near every tire.”

He took note of the unsafe practice of rotating unused, but old spares onto vehicles:

“The average full-sized spare tire is nine years old,” he said. “You can tell your tire store to take that perfectly good spare tire and put it on your car. But if you’re in Yuma or Miami, do you really want that nine-year-old spare going on? “Meanwhile, the average mini-spare is 12 years old. That means you’re screwed.”

And he took exception to what he calls the Rubber Manufacturers Association’s (RMA) mischaracterization of his tire aging research for Ford Motor Company. Continue reading →

Ford Offers “False” Testimony; Alliance Swears to It

Posted on | by admin

From the annals of chutzpah: On March 12, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers filed a friend of the court brief to head off a potentially disastrous breach in the auto industry’s carefully constructed dam around the causes of unintended acceleration (UA). To wit, there are no electronic causes of unintended acceleration. This phenomenon, as the industry and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would have it, is solely caused by drivers hitting the wrong pedal and mechanical causes, such as pedal entrapment and bound Bowden cables. Electronic systems cannot have electronic malfunctions that can go undetected or cause UA, got that?

William T. Swigert, the Senior Judge of the Florida’s Fifth Judicial Circuit, however, had no respect for industry/government mythology. He set aside a jury verdict in favor of Ford Motor Company, after deciding that Ford’s victory in Stimpson v. Ford was won with “false and misleading” testimony and defrauded the federal government to boot, by claiming that it knew of no other cause of unintended acceleration than driver error and concealing years of testing that showed that electromagnetic interference was a frequent root cause of UA in Ford vehicles. (See How Ford Concealed Evidence of Electronically-Caused UA and What it Means Today) Continue reading →

NHTSA Proposes Rubber Stamp Brake Throttle Override Rule

Posted on | by admin

For the second time in 40 years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is attempting to upgrade the accelerator control standard by proposing that manufacturers be required to equip all vehicles with a brake override.  A brake override system cuts throttle voltage in electronic throttle control (ETC) vehicles when the brakes and throttle are in conflict. Variations of this type of fail-safe have been incorporated in a number of ETC equipped vehicles since the 1990s.

“We considered establishing a design requirement as the sole requirement for BTO, but the differences among BTO systems currently available from different vehicle manufacturers are significant enough that a design requirement by itself cannot effectively accommodate them all without being overly complex and/or design restrictive. By combining a relatively simple performance test with the basic equipment requirement described above, we can achieve a robust standard which is largely performance-based and minimally costly or burdensome.”

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is in direct reaction to the Toyota Unintended Acceleration (UA) crisis, noting the August 2009 deaths of California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law in Lexus ES350 loaner that experienced a UA event at highway speed. But, the proposal appears to be more of a political response than a technological one. It ignores past recalls for UA events that are electronically caused; and it fails to base this upgrade on any statistical analysis. It merely codifies manufacturers’ current equipment without teasing out the differences between more effective and less effective brake override systems, such as the Toyota system, which doesn’t activate in some of the most frequently reported UA scenarios – when the driver’s foot is on the brake – or on no pedal. According to Toyota’s “Smart Stop Technology,” “the feature doesn’t engage if the brake pedal is depressed before the accelerator pedal. The driver must press the accelerator first and then depress the brake.”

Antony Anderson, a U.K.-based electrical engineering consultant who has studied unintended acceleration, says that the rule fundamentally misses the essential ingredient in any failsafe system – independence from the malfunctioning component. This is why many machines, from motorcycles to escalators, have separate kill switches that can independently remove power from the throttle, he says.

“For some reason, the automobile industry seems to think they don’t need to bother,” Anderson says. [The agency] “has a well-developed NHTSA-speak, where they are all the time trying to minimize the possibility of an electronic malfunction.”

“This just captures the state of the industry, not the state of the art,” says Neil Hanneman, an automotive engineer who have overseen automotive electronic designs and has consulted with Congress on Toyota unintended acceleration. “For it to really be a robust standard it would have to address things that have not been addressed yet – which will be with the electronics.” Continue reading →

Who Owns Your Black Box Data?

Posted on | by admin

When a crash triggers the Event Data Recorder, who has a right to the information? The police, the automaker, the insurer, the driver, and crash victims may all clamor for a peek into the black box to find out what really happened. Privacy advocates are launching a grassroots campaign to ensure that the black-box crash data stays securely in the hands of the vehicle owner. The National Motorists Association is calling on the public to sign a White House petition to include a provision in the new transportation bill that mandates a lockable cover to the EDR’s data port.

The NMA has until May 22 to gather 25,000 signatures, the threshold required to solicit a response from President Obama on the proposal to amend Senate Bill 1813. This measure within the federal transportation bill, which has had an agonizing and slow birth, requires all vehicles manufactured after September 2015 to be equipped with an EDR capable of capturing a wide range of data points under a specific list of crash conditions and within certain parameters of accuracy. The bill requires automakers to make third-party data readers available to the public and contains language covering the ownership of the data. Currently, 13 states address the privacy aspect of EDR data in their laws, but there is a lot of variability in what protections they afford vehicle owners.

“We say that when the customer drives off the lot with a new vehicle, the customer owns more than the vehicle — they own the data that the vehicle generates. Under this law, there are no ways or means for customer to control it,” says Thomas M. Kowalick, chairman of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE) global standards development for Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorders. Continue reading →

The Poker Face of Wall Street Calls NHTSA’s Bluff

Posted on | by admin

We read uber-Risk Manager and author of The Poker Face of Wall Street, Aaron Brown’s post “Sympathy for the Flash Crash” in Minyanville, a business and investment information website, with great enthusiasm. It was fascinating to see a business pundit draw parallels between Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the flash crash of May 6, 2010, in which the Dow dropped about 1,000 points, but recovered almost immediately afterward. It was refreshing to read a financial columnist who actually understands what happened after NHTSA tried to wrest control over an elusive technical problem. He writes:

“…the net result was that the agency ordered the recall of 8 million vehicles and levied the maximum allowed civil fine, then waited for the problem to go away on its own before issuing a study denying there had been a problem in the first place because they looked really hard and couldn’t find one.

When you don’t understand a system, throwing experts at it to announce they can’t understand what happened so it must have been human error, is an unconvincing—but irresistible—tactic.”

While we part company with Mr. Brown over the possibility and advisability of implementing regulation to fix the problem, and a few other details, his viewpoint is worth a read. The good folks at Minyanville kindly gave us permission to re-print it.  (The original article can found here on Minyanville.)


Sympathy for the Flash Crash

Reprinted with permission from Minyanville

By Aaron Brown May 04, 2012 9:00 am

The entire modern world has become too complex for anyone to understand, and therefore, too complex for anyone to fix with top-down rulemaking.

MINYANVILLE ORIGINAL When I learned to drive 40 years ago, there were direct mechanical linkages between the car’s controls and its wheels and power train. When I turned the steering wheel, my muscle power (mediated by some levers and gears) changed the direction of the wheels. Accelerator, brakes, heater dial — all affected things through direct physical actions. We make fun of someone who confuses effects with causes by saying he tries to slow down a car by moving the speedometer needle. But in that 1962 model VW bus, pushing down the speedometer needle would, in fact, increase friction on one rear wheel and reduce the speed of the car. The cable was too delicate to provide significant deceleration, but in physical principle it would work.
Continue reading →