Tag: nhtsa

Why Toyota Has a Whisker Across its Bumper

Posted on | by admin

When you’ve shelled out big bucks for a message, the dissenters have to be squashed – and fast. Yesterday, Toyota public relations rapid response team tried to bring the Toyota Unintended Acceleration (UA) problem back into its multi-million-dollar corral at the There’s Nothing to See Here, Folks Ranch.

Mike Michels, Vice President for External Communications of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., wrote an editorial, in response to a well-reported and written story by the Huffington Post’s Sharon Silke Carty about one of the most significant physical findings of the NASA Engineering Safety Center’s (NESC) study of the electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles: tin whiskers. Tin whiskers are crystalline structures that emanate from tin and other alloys used as solder on printed circuit boards. These nearly microscopic metal hairs can bridge circuits, leading to electrical shorts and significant malfunctions. They have caused failures at nuclear power plants and medical devices and downed satellites. While we don’t believe that they are the cause of UA in all Toyota vehicles. Clearly, tin whiskers have been strongly implicated as a cause of UA in some Toyota vehicles. Continue reading →

NHTSA: No Evidence Prius Unintended Acceleration Linked to Known Causes

Posted on | by admin

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has acknowledged what it has emphatically denied so far: Not all instances of Toyota Unintended Acceleration are linked to sticky pedals, floor mats or driver error. The UAs in a 2003 Prius witnessed by ODI engineers last May were not linked to “known causes.”

True, the agency response (see second page of report) to reporters’ questions about the Unintended Acceleration events two Office of Defects Investigations engineers witnessed, videoed and captured data from was tortured. The most interesting admission was swaddled in a lot of hot air about how wonderful and competent the agency is at ferreting out problems and protecting consumers, but it was there:

“We sent two investigators to evaluate and inspect a vehicle based on a complaint we received (complaint number 10428551) and did not find any evidence linking the car to known causes of unintended acceleration cases,” [emphasis ours] the agency said in a statement. “NHTSA concluded that the speed of the vehicle could easily be controlled by the brakes. In contrast to other UA complaints, the vehicle displayed ample warning lights for the driver indicating the car had encountered problems.” Continue reading →

Nine Recalls, Ten Investigations and Toyota Unintended Acceleration Continues

Posted on | by admin

As part of our ongoing investigation into Unintended Acceleration in Toyota vehicles, Safety Research & Strategies has identified 330 UA complaints reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for incidents that occurred in 2011. These complaints range from consumers who experienced multiple instances of UA to events that resulted in a crash. Below, we’ve captured six of those stories in interviews with Toyota owners.

In addition, a separate review identified 247 unique UA incidents following repairs made to the vehicle in one or more of the Toyota recall remedies.

The 2011 NHTSA complaint data suggest that Toyota has not recalled all of the vehicles in need of a remedy. The post-recall UA incidents, reported to the agency between February 2010 and January 2012, further suggest that the remedies were ineffective.

What is most striking in reading the 2011 complaints is how little anything has changed. The most troubled vehicles – the Camry, the Tacoma and Lexus ES350 – continue to show up in the complaints. The scenarios vehicle owners report are the same:

* Low speed incidents, often described as occurring while parking or repositioning a vehicle, during which vehicles accelerate or surge very quickly while the driver is braking or lightly pressing on the accelerator pedal.

* High speed incidents, often described as occurring on highways, during which vehicle speed increases without increased driver pressure on the accelerator pedal, or highway speed that is maintained after the driver has removed his or her foot from the accelerator pedal.

* Incidents in which vehicles are described as hesitating, surging, or lurching. Consumers reporting this type of incident often indicate that their vehicles are not immediately responsive to pressure on the accelerator pedal; instead there is a delay between operator input and acceleration, followed by higher acceleration than intended, often described as a surge or lurch.

    As ever, the vast majority are low-speed/parking incidents, resulting in property damage. However, there continue to be high-speed, long duration events and cruise control-related events. Toyota dutifully inspects these vehicles and tells the owner that the car is “operating as designed.” Dealers continue to follow the floor mat/driver error script.

    One thing that appears to have changed: more Toyota owners, now educated about Toyota’s UA problems, have a strategy for dealing with an incident and also take note of the position of their feet. Many drivers specifically report braking at the time of the UA, and shifting the transmission into neutral to bring the vehicle under control. Here are their stories. Continue reading →

    NAS Report on Vehicle Electronics and UA: More Weak Tea

    Posted on | by admin

    The National Academies of Science released today its long-awaited review of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Toyota Unintended Acceleration investigations, its regulatory policies and the agency’s next steps in dealing with electronic defects. The 16-member panel of volunteers, from a multitude of related disciplines, met 15 times over about 18 months, and were, at least, in attendance for presentations from 60 contributors.

    The panel’s most significant critique was an acknowledgement that NHTSA is ill-equipped to deal with the new age of vehicle electronics:

    “For NHTSA to engage in comprehensive regulatory oversight of manufacturer assurance plans and processes, as occurs in the aviation sector, would represent a fundamental change in the agency’s regulatory approach that would require substantial justification and resources (see Finding 4.6). The introduction of increasingly autonomous vehicles, as envisioned in some concepts of the electronics-intensive automobile, might one day cause the agency to consider taking a more hands-on regulatory approach with elements similar to those found in the aviation sector. At the moment, such a profound change in the way NHTSA regulates automotive safety does not appear to be a near-term prospect.”

    Conclusions like these pepper the NAS report. Throughout The Safety Promise and Challenge of Automotive Electronics; Insights from Unintended Acceleration, the panel tries to have it both ways: to lay claim to a scientific process, without employing any actual science, to maintain that it was not second-guessing NHTSA’s investigations, but concluding that the agency was justified in closing them; to say that the Audi Sudden Unintended Acceleration controversy isn’t comparable to the Toyota debate because automotive technology has changed so drastically, and yet lean heavily on the 1989 NHTSA-commissioned report, An Examination of Sudden  Acceleration. Continue reading →

    When Occupant Detection Sensors Don’t Make Sense?

    Posted on | by admin

    On December 17, 2011, Hyundai settled, for an undisclosed sum, in a crash that wouldn’t and shouldn’t have caused a fatality but for a defective occupant seat sensor – a problem that may be more common – across many manufacturers – and more potentially deadly than realized.

    On January 3, 2010, Donna Lynn Hopkins was a front-seat passenger in a 2008 Hyundai Accent, with her husband, Tom, at the wheel. As they approached an intersection on Highway 181 in Bexar County, Texas, another driver failed to yield the right of way. The Hyundai T-boned the other vehicle with sufficient force to deploy the airbags. But only the driver’s airbag inflated. The occupant seat sensor mat in the front passenger seat determined that, Donna Hopkins, a 165-pound woman, was actually a child, and turned off the airbag. Worse, Hyundai’s sensor strategy also turned off the seat belt pretensioner. Like some other manufacturers, Hyundai’s occupant sensor is designed so that the front passenger seat belt pretensioner fires only if the airbag is deployed. Mrs. Hopkins had none of the advanced safety features needed to adequately protect her in that crash, even though she was belted, and weighed 55 pounds more than the regulated cut-off for smart airbag deployment. Her husband, Tom, walked away from the crash; Donna Hopkins died.

    Attorney Stephen Van Gaasbeck, who represented the Hopkins family, says that his research revealed many airbag non-deployment complaints for the Accent and its model twins. In fact, in May 2008, then-Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) wrote to NHTSA on behalf of a constituent who complained about his 2006 Kia Rio. Kia is a Hyundai owned company. In his letter to Dole, the Mint Hill, NC owner wrote: Continue reading →

    A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Car…

    Posted on | by admin

    Has Paula Poundstone been reading our memos to NHTSA about the serious safety problems created by keyless ignition systems? This weekend, the comedienne broke into a spontaneous and funny rant about them during her weekly gig with the NPR news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”

    “You know what my car has that is the worst feature I’ve ever had in a car? Is this damn thing where you don’t put the key in!” she fumes about the systems which allow a driver to exit the vehicle with the key fob and the engine running. “And it’s so frustrating! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten back to the car – oh, Geez, I left it running again! You have no way of knowing that the car’s running!”

    (Listen to Paula Poundstone on keyless ignition — Poundstone’s comments begin at about the eight-minute mark.)

    Timing is everything in comedy, and as it happens, Ms. Poundstone offered her observational bit just a week after NHTSA posted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to “fix” the problems introduced by keyless ignition systems: rollaways and carbon monoxide poisonings. Unfortunately, some people who took their key fobs with them, while inadvertently leaving their vehicles running in an attached garage, died from carbon monoxide poisonings. Rollaways have produced their share of injuries and property damage. These incidents are not so funny.

    Many people victimized by poor designs blame themselves for their forgetfulness. But we think Ms. Poundstone hit the mark when she called it “the worst feature” she’s ever had in a car. We similarly think that NHTSA solution is a work-around and doesn’t serve the intent of FMVSS 114 or consumers, who have to pay – not to mention risk their safety – for industry’s and regulators’ bad decisions.

    Stay tuned. We’ll be submitting our comments to the docket. In the meantime, if you, like Paula Poundstone, have left your keyless ignition car running, but aren’t a regular radio-show panelist, tell NHTSA by submitting a Vehicle Owner Questionnaire.  Or comment directly to the proposal in Docket NHTSA-2011-0174.

    (For more on keyless ignition hazards see Stupid Tricks with Smart Keys)

    Safety Research & Strategies Takes DOT and NHTSA Transparency Battle to Court; Sues for Toyota Investigation Documents

    Posted on | by admin

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – Safety Research & Strategies, a Massachusetts safety research firm that advocates for consumers on safety matters, sued the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today over the release of Toyota Unintended Acceleration investigation documents.

    The civil action, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Civil Action No. 11-2165), alleges that the U.S. Department of Transportation and NHTSA violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding public records involving an unintended acceleration incident reported by a 2007 Lexus RX owner in Sarasota Florida, and requests the court to order their release.

    “One of President Obama’s first acts was to issue an Executive Order on transparency and open government, pledging a commitment to creating ‘an unprecedented level of openness in government,’” says SRS founder and President Sean E. Kane. “The DOT and NHTSA have pledged transparency but have consistently kept vital information from the public.  The agency’s numerous investigations into Toyota Unintended Acceleration have been characterized by continued secrecy, preventing a full accounting of their activities and the complete replication of their analyses by independent parties.  This lawsuit asks the court to compel the release of documents that are relevant to a significant safety recall.” Continue reading →

    Slow Burn: Chevy Volt Fires

    Posted on | by admin

    That DOT Secretary Ray LaHood is always yakking about transparency – at his confirmation hearing, at budget hearings, about airline fees, and business flight plans. During the U.S. House of Representative’s Toyota Unintended Acceleration hearings in February 2010, when Congressman Ed Markey asked the Secretary of Transportation:

    “What do you think about the public in terms of them providing – being provided with more information regarding potential safety defects that automakers tell the department about even before an investigation is opened or a recall is announced?

    LaHood replied: “Need for transparency.  The more information we can give the public, the better.”

    Unless…..the defect is really bad, and the press will be on it like white on rice and it involves a major automaker, whose fortunes are tightly entwined with the government. Yes, we’re looking at you General Motors. (Or, as some would have it, Government Motors.) Continue reading →

    NHTSAball: How the Agency Plays the Game

    Posted on | by admin

    Moneyball has opened in the movie theaters, starring Brad Pitt as the redoubtable Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. Beane had been a future baseball superstar who washed out after three seasons of bench-warming and bouncing between Triple-A and major league teams. He was, however, that rare individual who resisted his own PR, which was certain and glowing, and the perfect foil for the movie’s real subject: baseball statistics and how numbers could guide a poor team like the A’s to the playoffs more regularly than the conventional wisdom said was possible.

    The A’s, as Michael Lewis, author of the book on which it is based describes the team, was populated with Major League’s castoffs – catchers and pitchers who looked more like beer-swilling bowlers, college prospects that the talent scouts had deemed too cold to bother with, and a computer nerd for an assistant GM.  But Beane knew from his own field experience just how wrong Major League Baseball could be in assessing players. He chose, instead, to exploit a different set of metrics developed by a passionate fan who happened to be statistically apt, but shunned by the rest of Beane’s peers. Using this recipe, he cobbles together victory after victory.  The book roughly follows the A’s during the 2002 season, from the June amateur player’s draft to the historic September 4th game, in which the A’s won their 20th consecutive game – breaking a 102-year old American League record.

    Among the book’s heroes is Bill James. James is the quirky inventor of Sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball data, used to better understand success and failure in the game. James had a restless, numerically inclined mind and, it would be fair to say, an obsessive interest in baseball. The marriage of his aptitude and his interests produced a series of abstracts and books on baseball metrics, beginning in 1977. At first, James was ignored by all but a handful of fans. But, eventually, he gained a following. And in 1997 one of them became the manager of the Oakland A’s.

    If the narrative has a villain, it’s Major League Baseball itself. Wholly in the thrall of its own myths, this billion dollar enterprise, when it bothered with data at all, used it incorrectly. Rich teams could skim the obvious cream of talent, but beyond buying wins, hadn’t a clue how it was really done.

    Lewis’s point was that even with huge sums of money at stake, those most vested in the outcome can be utterly blinded by their own subjective biases. Once biases are institutionalized, they become facts, stubborn in the face of new or competing or different information. Those who can’t even identify the data that should be informing critical decisions – let alone using it properly – are bound to make expensive mistakes.

    So what’s The Safety Record’s point? We saw a number of striking parallels to the way NHTSA operates, when it comes to numbers.  The agency is, ostensibly, data-driven and science-based. Hell, it slaps that phrase on everything from Powerpoint presentations to appropriations requests. But there’s plenty of evidence that the agency dismisses – out-of-hand – outside information; that long-held beliefs hamper its data analyses; that it pays way too much attention to data that is not useful and fails to collect data that is.

    Moneyball: For example, here Lewis characterizes James’ assessment of MLB’s metrics:

    “Worse, baseball teams didn’t have the sense to know what to collect, and so an awful lot of critical data simply went unrecorded.”

    NHTSAball: There’s lots of data NHTSA doesn’t collect. For example, the agency has promulgated a recall system for tires that is predicated solely on the Tire Identification Number. Years of rulemaking were devoted to debating the format of the TIN, popularly known as the DOT code, an 11-character, alpha-numeric code that represents the plant, size, date of manufacture molded into the sidewall of a tire. The aim of the TIN was to identify a recalled tire and it is the only definitive measure to do so.  Does NHTSA require tire makers who recall their products to list the range of TINs in the recall population? No, it does not. Some manufacturers report it; others don’t. NHTSA’s good, either way. The DOT code would be a nifty little data point in any tire-related fatality in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The agency could use such data to identify tire failure trends, but it remains information uncollected. And while we’re on tires, NHTSA doesn’t require manufacturers to report tire claims if the tire is older than five years – so no data, no problem for the aged tire issues that took center stage following Firestone recalls in 2000 and 2001 and remain a constant source of catastrophic crashes. Continue reading →

    Tire Known Unknowns: Decoding the Date

    Posted on | by admin

    Human Factors researchers at the State University of North Carolina have recently concluded that consumers can’t read the date of manufacture obscured by the week and month configuration dictated by the Tire Identification Number (aka the DOT number).

    Researchers Jesseca Taylor and Michael Wogalter asked 83 test subjects to translate tire markings as represented by different date configurations, ranging from the conventional month/day/year (12/05/07) to the DOT code’s four-digit week-year (2205). Effect of Text Format on Determining Tires’ Date of Manufacture, accepted by Annual Proceedings of 55th Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, found that when consumers chose to translate the different four-digit representations into a month and year, they consistently failed to understand that the first two digits represented the week of manufacture.

    The DOT number, an alpha-numeric code found on the tire sidewall, has consistently confused consumers and tire professionals. The last four characters of the 11-character code contain the week and year the tire was made. For example, 0302 signifies that the tire was made during the third week of 2002. (Tires made prior to 2000 used a three-digit date configuration at the end of the DOT code.  In those cases, 039 signifies that the tire was manufactured during the third week of 1999 – or the 1989.)  No participant in Taylor and Wogalter’s study correctly identified examples such as 03/01 or 1102. They confused the first two digits with the month itself, for example, identifying “03” as March, instead of realizing that the third week of the year falls in January. Continue reading →