The witness chairs in the House hearing chambers hadn’t even cooled, when Toyota owners who dutifully took their vehicles into the dealership for a pedal fix were reporting more sudden acceleration incidents to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
On February 24, the president of Toyota Motor Corporation, Akio Toyoda, raised his right hand before an investigative congressional oversight committee and swore: “I’m absolutely confident that there is no problem with the design of the ETC system.” Continue reading →
Last week, Ed Towns, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform went to town on Toyota, asking five very pointed questions about the automaker’s “Books of Knowledge,” compendiums purportedly containing, among other things, damning information about the automakers acknowledgement of design issues and countermeasures, by component and vehicle. References to these so-called Books of Knowledge appeared in documents produced under a committee subpoena from former Toyota counsel, Dimitrios Biller. In a letter to Yoshimi Inaba, CEO of Toyota Motor North America, Towns asked him to respond to e-mails such as this June 2005 correspondence to Toyota executive Webster Burns, regarding the Greenburg SUA lawsuit:
“When this lawsuit was threatened, no one was surprised. This issue [sudden unintended acceleration] had been the subject of a number of meetings and the exchange of a number of documents between TMS and TMC, (did anyone ever gather and organize all those documents and memorialize the “meetings”? If so, were [sic] are the documents and information about the meetings?) [emphasis indicates Biller’s comments] and the possibility of a class action lawsuit was used as one way to try to get TMC to work on a series of proposed countermeasures.” Continue reading →
Juanita Grossman was a petite 77-year-old woman who died from the injuries sustained from barreling into a building full-speed in her 2003 Camry in March 2004. When the emergency medical technicians arrived to transport Mrs. Grossman to the hospital they found her with both feet still jammed on the brake pedal.
Mrs. Grossman was still conscious, and in the days before she succumbed to her injuries, she kept telling her family: The car ran away on me. The car ran way on me. These statements and the placement of both feet on the brake – verified by two independent witnesses at the scene of the crash – did not rouse the curiosity of Toyota or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which was in the midst of an investigation into Toyota’s electronic throttle control system when ODI investigators learned of her death. Continue reading →
Safety Research & Strategies letter to Administrator Strickland asks why Toyota it wasn’t recalling its accessory sport pedals. The automaker has identified these aftermarket accessories, which it sells and installs through Toyota dealers, as contributors to unintended acceleration.
Toyota made this startling admission in denying a claim by Michael Teston, an unfortunate Toyota customer from Maaumelle, Arkansas.
On December 13, Teston was driving his 2006 4-Runner into a small town with the cruise control on. He had disengaged the cruise control and the vehicle began to slow, with his foot on the brake as he approached a parking lot for a convenience store. He turned into parking lot at approximately15 mph, still coasting with his foot on brake. As his speed dropped to about 3 mph, Teston heard the ABS brakes activate, followed by clicking sound when the engine raced to full-throttle. The vehicle surged forward, hit a pole about three feet in front of him. There the vehicle came to rest, with the rear of the vehicle hopping as the rear tires continued to spin. Teston placed the vehicle into Park and the engine maintained wide-open-throttle until the ignition was turned off.
Teston’s 4-Runner was fitted with OE carpeted floor mats, secured in place. North Point Toyota, in North Little Rock, inspected the vehicle over a three-week period, but found nothing wrong with the vehicle. A Toyota Technical Specialist also took a look on January 4, and here was the result: there were “no codes stored in the computer to indicate any product concern or failure.” However, “Our Technical Specialist noted that aftermarket pedal covers were installed on the brake and accelerator pedals that increased the length of the pedals, which could have contributed to the accident described.”
Gee, Teston purchased the “aftermarket pedal covers” from a Toyota dealer as a Toyota accessory and these parts were installed by that same Toyota dealer.
Since Toyota said that the increased the length of the pedals could have contributed to the crash, seems like Toyota has a duty to recall these parts too.
One of the fiery moments in Tuesday’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee was Rep. Steven Buyer’s (R-Ind.) prosecutorial turn on SRS founder and President Sean Kane. Buyer attempted to undermine Kane’s testimony, and that of Dr. David Gilbert, whose early research into Toyota’s accelerator pedal position sensor showed that Toyota’s fail-safe strategy was supremely flawed, by suggesting that they had been tainted by their ties to litigation. Continue reading →
We have been watching with great interest as NHTSA has suddenly proclaimed 34 deaths in Toyota sudden unintended acceleration incidents, (when nary but one has been officially counted in eight investigations) and Toyota has doubled down on nothing-is-wrong-but-floor-mats-and-sticky-accelerator-pedals. We are pleased to see that NHTSA, under the current administration, is now taking the fatality reports more seriously and Toyota’s claims with a healthy dose of skepticism.
But we’ve been looking back – specifically at eight deaths that occurred during a six month window in 2003 and 2004 that alleged unintended acceleration. These all occurred in Toyota Camrys during the time that NHTSA, after meeting with Toyota, narrowed the scope of its investigation (PE04021) of Camry and Lexus ES vehicles for throttle control and vehicle surging to exclude the very scenarios that were alleged in some of these fatal crashes. But the lost lives of eight people were apparently horse-traded out of investigatory view.
On March 22, 2004, Mrs. Juanita Grossman died from her injuries in a crash that rocketed her out of a pharmacy parking lot, into another vehicle, then into one building and finally, the offices of Statewide Realty. (They still remember the crash very well.) The EMTs who extracted Mrs. Grossman noted that both feet were “jammed” on the brake pedal.
Remember: Toyota says the brakes always work and its electronic throttle system never fails unless the computer records it and the vehicle goes into limp-home mode.
So, how does one slam at full throttle into a building with both feet on the brake? We’re very curious. Toyota and NHTSA? Not so much.
We’ve taken a closer look at the public record on these incidents and we’re posting our analysis.Read our addendum.
SRS has just released its comprehensive examination of Toyota SUA. Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration covers this continuing safety defect from its roots to the current crisis:
– The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s unsuccessful efforts to identify all the causes;
A new scientific report from Quality Control Systems Corp. finds that the proportion of consumer complaints related to vehicle speed control in some Toyota Camry, Tacoma, and Lexus ES vehicles is substantially higher in those models with electronic throttle control systems (Toyota’s “ETCS-i”) than it is for the same models without electronic throttle control. The report also finds the proportion of reported speed control failures among complaints in the non-recalled Toyota Camrys with electronic throttle control compared to the recalled Camrys with electronic throttle control particularly troubling. Continue reading →
This morning, Jim Lentz, President and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales, joined the brigade of executives dispatched to put out the unintended acceleration wildfire currently consuming the company’s sales, stock rating and reputation. As the Today Show’s Matt Lauer tried to corner him, Lentz emphatically insisted that the only two issues affected Toyota vehicles are floor mat interference and sticking accelerator pedals. The company has studied this issue exhaustively and is confident that these fixes will solve the problems, Lentz told Lauer, trying not to shift uncomfortably in his chair.
First, the recent recalls do not, we repeat, do not cover all of the vehicles plagued by SUA. In fact, the most troubled vehicle in Toyota’s fleet – as measured by consumer complaints, the 2002 and 2006 Camry, is not a part of any recall. Continue reading →
Safety Research & Strategies has completed our latest review of Toyota unintended acceleration complaint data. Our database consists of incidents from the following sources:
Consumer complaints to NHTSA
Toyota-submitted claims from several NHTSA investigations into unintended acceleration
Incidents reported by media organizations
Consumer contacts made to our firm and other firms that are reporting incidents they have received.
Every effort has been made to identify duplicate records and combine them. However, often the reports do not provide enough detail to link incidents to other reports. There are likely some duplicates among our records – if there are, they are few.
SRS’s database consists only of incidents reported from 1999 to the present (regardless of model year). We have defined unintended acceleration as any incident in which the complainant reported an engine acceleration that was unintended – regardless of whether the car was in gear. We understand that this is a broader inclusion than others have considered; however, because we are still at a stage of trying to understand the incidents we believe this inclusiveness will help us discern vehicle years / models and incident types that we may want to investigate further.
Since our last summary of reported incidents in December 2009, we have identified over 200 additional incidents, resulting in a total of 2262 reported incidents, 815 crashes, 341 injuries, and 19 fatalities.
