Last week, TMS President Jim Lentz was full of fun facts to know and tell the committee on Energy and Commerce. For example:
“The company has completed more than 600 on-site vehicle inspections and our dealership technicians have completed an additional 1,400 inspections. We have submitted 701 field technical reports to this Committee, including on-site SMART team evaluations. These examinations are giving us a better understanding about the reasons for unintended acceleration complaints. Significantly, none of these investigations have found that our Electronic Throttle Control System with intelligence, or ETCS-i, was the cause.” Continue reading →
Yesterday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Sub-committee rendered its verdict after conducting interviews with key personnel from Toyota and Exponent and reviewing some 100,000 Toyota- and NHTSA-produced documents about the much-heralded “exhaustive” efforts to determine if there was a connection between Sudden Unintended Acceleration and Toyota’s electronic throttle control system: Toyota lied.
While the committee and sub-committee chairs, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) respectively, did not state things quite so baldly, they came darned close in their opening statements:
Ah, to view the world through rose-colored Lentzes. Toyota’s ultra-sincere CEO of Toyota Motor Sales climbed back into the House Energy and Commerce Committee witness chair to utter those words, to which the company has accorded the power of a magical incantation: There’s nothing wrong with our electronics. Continue reading →
When NHTSA went after Toyota with a $16.4 million stick for failing to recall sticking accelerator pedals within the five-day regulatory time limit, Attorney John Kristensen couldn’t help notice the parallels between the automaker’s mañana attitude toward U.S. recalls in the 2010 pedal campaign and in a 2005 recall of defective relay rods.
Today, Kristensen, an attorney with The O’Reilly||Collins Law Firm asked NHTSA administration to launch a Timeliness Query into Recall 05V389 to replace defective steering relay rods in Toyota pickups and 4Runners.
(And the thud you just heard was that other shoe dropping we mentioned back in October. SeeTroubles Mount in Toyotaville.)
According to a chronology of the sticking CTS accelerator pedals campaigns, Toyota launched a silent recall for the in UK and Ireland in June 2009, followed by a full EU Technical Service Bulletin in September. Toyota didn’t announce a U.S. recall of the same component until January 21, 2010. Toyota said that the UK and Ireland got the fix first, due to the unique combination of the British weather and the right-hand drive configuration: Continue reading →
When the auto industry needs America’s best scientific minds to validate a foregone conclusion, they turn to Exponent. As we reported during Toyota Tactics Week, David Michaels called out the Menlo Park, California defense-litigation firm in his 2008 book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health:
“Exponent’s scientists are prolific writers of scientific reports and papers. While some might exist, I have yet to see an Exponent study that does not support the conclusion needed by the corporation or trade association that is paying the bill,” Michaels wrote.
Which brings us to the news: the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has scheduled their second Toyota hearing on May 6 to focus in part on the automaker’s work with Exponent to ferret out any possible electronic root causes of Sudden Unintended Acceleration.
In April 16 letters to Toyota Motor Sales President and CEO James Lentz and Exponent’s Paul Johnson, Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, asked for:
* All contracts or agreements between Exponent and Toyota or an agent of Toyota regarding work related to unintended acceleration or electronic throttle control systems and any amendments or addendums thereto;
* All memoranda or correspondence, including e-mail, concerning the scope of Exponent’s work for Toyota or an agent of Toyota related to unintended acceleration or the electronic throttle control systems; and
* Any documents, including reports, analyses, or other communications, describing the results of Exponent’s work for Toyota related to unintended acceleration or electronic throttle control systems.
The views of Waxman and Stupak on Exponent’s scientific independence were already sufficiently jaundiced in the first go-round. On February 22, Waxman and Stupak sent a letter expressing their extreme irritation with Toyota for dumping a truckload of documents, with nary a piece of paper devoted to systematically investigating whether electronic defects could lead to sudden unintended acceleration – except for the Exponent report. They wrote:
“The electronics testing documents Toyota provided include thousands of pages of
engineering standards; test methods; pre-production vehicle and component evaluations; e-mail correspondence between Toyota engineers about field testing of new features of the company’s ETCS-i system; engineering change instructions; reports on field testing of competitor vehicles; and sketches, diagrams, test engineering reports, photographs, e-mails, and Powerpoint presentations by Toyota and part manufacturers related to proposed fixes for “sticky pedals.”
Except for one recent report, the documents did not include any analyses that purported comprehensively to test and analyze possible electronic causes of sudden unintended acceleration. The only document Toyota produced that claims to address the phenomenon of sudden unintended acceleration in a systematic way is a February 2010 report on testing conducted by Exponent, a scientific and engineering consulting firm located in Menlo Park, California. This report was commissioned in December 2009 by Toyota defense counsel Bowman and Brooke, LLP. Exponent representatives told the Committee staff that Bowman and Brooke requested the report just days before its publication date of February 4, 2010, at approximately the same time that we sought substantiation of your claims about electronics testing. According to Exponent, at the time the report was written, testing was still on-going and an interim report like this one is not customary for the company.”
The Committee has been using electronics expert Michael Pecht, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, and director of the University’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE), and veteran automotive engineer Neil Hanneman to locate the dross in Exponent’s first report.
What treasures might they find in this new cache of documents? Technical revelations? Or a behind-the-scenes view of the science-for-hire business?
Okay, so it didn’t have the impact of a “Tiger: Did you mean Bootyism?” banner floating over the Masters tournament at Augusta National, but retired Irv Miller’s “Come Clean” memo made a splash in the news this month. Miller had been group vice president of environmental and public affairs for Toyota in North America until he retired in late January. About two weeks before he left, Miller gave his Japanese boss Katsuhiko Koganei, Executive Coordinator of Corporate Communications, some straight talk about the automaker’s sticky pedal problems:
“Kogi,
I hate to break this to you but WE HAVE A tendency for MECHANICAL failure in accelerator pedals of a certain manufacturer on certain models. We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean and I believe that Jim Lentz and Yoshi are on the way to DC for meetings with NHTSA to discuss options.
We better just hope that they can get NHTSA to work with us in coming with a workable solution that does not put us out of business.” (Read the e-mail here) Continue reading →
A well-used weapon in the manufacturer’s arsenal is delay. When the guys and gals from the Office of Defects Investigation are pestering you with information requests and you have that sinking feeling that you are going to have to do something to get them off your back, the first order of business is to buy some time. A defect in a component – or worse yet – a design that is integral to just about every model you sell is going to be a major headache. No way are you going to have enough replacement parts to switch out in hundreds of thousands or millions of vehicles all at once. You never want your company name in a headline with the word “million” and “recall,” followed by a news story skewering your product. And then there’s the dollars attached to the labor and parts costs swirling the bowl. Oy.
If you can just whack that big dog down to puppy size, or drag your feet long enough to ramp up your recall response, maybe it won’t be so bad. Of course, denial that the problem even exists is the top-line defense. As the documents trickling from the hands of federal investigators to the press indicate, Toyota was once a master of the art. Continue reading →
Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels is on our nightstands right now, and we cannot shake the feeling of déjà vu. Michaels, recently confirmed as the new head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Assistant Secretary of Labor, writes about the attack, deny and delay tactics developed by Big Tobacco in the 1950s that have been adopted and refined to a fare-thee-well by countless other industries. Michaels is an epidemiologist, so his dizzying catalogue of bad actors focuses on chemical health hazards – tobacco, chromium, lead, beryllium, and the like.
But what caught our attention was his exploration of how manufacturers use science – or the appearance thereof – to raise enough doubt to clog the regulatory machinery and to persuade juries and the public that their products cause no harm by countering scientific studies indicating a hazard with their own bought-and-paid-for-research showing the opposite. Continue reading →
In the innocent days of the distant past, (six weeks ago) Toyota Motor Corporation President Jim Lentz raised his right hand and swore before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Commerce and Energy that Toyota would work with Dr. David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University Carbondale to investigate the conclusion of his preliminary report, that the accelerator pedal position sensor may have faulty failsafe logic.
Perhaps Lentz actually meant to say that Toyota would work over Dr. Gilbert, because, rather than dispatch its technical team to Carbondale for scientific inquiry, Toyota’s corporate counsel Vince Galvin, accompanied by another lawyer and a gas turbine efficiency design expert from Exponent showed up at SIU to cowl university administrators, before treating Gilbert to a preview deposition. Continue reading →
What do you do when bad news about you product gets out? If your highly prized brand is synonymous with reliability, job one is to kill the bearers of the bad tidings. While Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration stories regularly set up shop on the front pages of all national dallies these days, Safety Research and Strategies had been following this story closely for months before it broke through into the mainstream press.
After the Saylor family died in an SUA crash on a California highway in August, and Congress was poised to drag Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before its investigatory committees, SRS decided that a factual accounting of the history of this issue was necessary. We threw the resources of our small company into this project and wrote a lengthy report that gathered the public record into one narrative. We released Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration to the public on February 5, and it became a much used road map for reporters, Congressional staffers, attorneys and interested consumers trying to understand how seven years of complaints, crashes, deaths, injuries and NHTSA investigations could produce so few results. Continue reading →
