Why the Toyota Puzzle Doesn't Fit Together - For Anybody
By Michelle Krebs February 24, 2010It was frustration, not answers, that came out of the House of Representatives Committee on 
Energy and Commerce investigation into Toyota Motor Corp.'s wide-ranging recalls for vehicles alleged, for different causes, to have unintended acceleration.
There were just two definitive take-aways from Tuesday's exhaustive hearing -- neither of which goes anywhere toward explaining whether mechanical, electrical or software faults could be at the root of thousands of consumer complaints of unintended acceleration and the recall of millions of Toyota vehicles.
Those two absolutes:
1. Toyota knew of an unintended acceleration trend -- evidenced in vehicles worldwide -- and now executives essentially are admitting the company underplayed its potential importance.
2. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the governing body charged with riding herd on automakers to assure action in such matters, wasn't doing its job.
Anyone expecting the House hearing to perhaps settle into bipartisan camps either defending Toyota or castigating the company never got that far, because as soon as any fingers looked justified in pointing, the target moved.
Who's Right? How About Nobody?
Energy and Commerce Committee investigators, strenuously led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and committee chairman Henry Waxman of California, mainly asserted that Toyota dragged its feet in acknowledging the problem. They further charged Toyota is magnifying the injustice by not being forthcoming about whether the fixes for the reported unintended acceleration instances are good-faith efforts or cover-ups for a larger, more complex and insidious problem with electronically controlled engine throttles.
Said Waxman: "There is no evidence Toyota or NHTSA took a serious look at the possibility that electronic defects could be causing the problem."
The problem with the faulty electronics/software argument: there is no real evidence.
Toyota says it tested the electronics, but investigators say the company only recently even began to give credence to the possibility of electronic or software causes. Worse still, critics, including Stupak, sharply rebuked Toyota for hiring engineering troubleshooting company Exponent, a California company with a reputation for testing that happens to produce results favorable to its deep-pocket clients.
Toyota said Exponent's testing can't generate any electronic or software problems that cause the electronic throttle to race the engine. Critics counter that apart from Exponent's reputation, its testing processes have been less than exhaustive.
A third-party investigation -- one funded, unfortunately, by lawyers litigating against Toyota -- claims to have produced a potentially serious fault in electronic-throttle circuitry after less than four hours of experimentation.
The researchers, Safety Research and Strategies Inc. founder Sean Kean and David Gilbert, an associate professor of automotive technology at Southern Illinois University, insisted their efforts demonstrate Toyota's army of engineers never were meaningfully deployed to explore a potential electronic or software cause for the reports of unintended acceleration.
Safety Research and Strategies' credibility-busting funding source was unearthed by Indiana's Rep. Steve Boyer, whose questioning was the most explosive exchange of the largely inconclusive day.
In Toyota's Defense
While many lawmakers at the hearing searched for proof of electronic gremlins, they could find nobody -- other than Safety Research and Strategies -- to submit meaningful evidence.
Toyota Motors Sales USA President James Lentz, despite a thorough working-over of an often testy tenor from representatives such as Michigan's John Dingell, admitted he did not have answers for many technically oriented questions and details, but held firm on Toyota's position that problems with electronics or software are an unlikely culprit.
Asked whether the unintended acceleration reports were the result of faulty hardware or software, Lentz said, "Neither."
Unsaid, then, is the only remaining possibility: human error.
Toyota executives, of course, are not going to go there, but Lentz's answer seems to leave no other cause, never mind the earlier, emotional testimony from Tennessee's Rhonda Smith, who said she was captive for an extended period in a runaway Lexus ES 350, effectively a rebadged Toyota Camry, in which she attempted to shut down the engine, shift into neutral and reverse and applied the brakes with both feet.
The subject of brakes -- and their presumed ability to counter even the most rampantly revving engine -- came up in several lawmakers' questioning, but with no conclusive answers from anyone about why, even assuming the potential for an unintentionally wide-open throttle, a vehicle's brakes would not be able to counteract an unintended acceleration event.
Lentz ended up admitting Toyota no longer is ruling out the possibility for an electronic or software cause, saying the company isn't ruling out anything. But as for Safety and Research Strategies' finding that Toyota's electronically controlled throttles could, in fact, be easily disrupted, Lentz said, "It seems a little too good to be true," that Gilbert's research could have uncovered a potentially serious fault after just a few hours of investigation.
But, "We welcome anyone who can find issues with our electronics," he offered.
Partners In Disregard
Lentz - and Toyota president and CEO Akio Toyoda in a statement he will reiterate Wednesday at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - did effectively admit Toyota's initials response to the situation left much to be desired. His remark that "I think we lost sight of the customer" echoes the position Toyoda will deliver at Wednesday's hearing that the company's decades' worth of rapid growth has eroded its famous customer focus.
For NHTSA, which many lawmakers castigated for being asleep at the switch - or worse, ethically compromised - in the Toyota case, changes are certain to be coming.
House of Representatives investigators largely were supportive of famously outspoken Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, although several questioned LaHood pointedly about the NHTSA's inability to drive a more thorough investigative process in the case of Toyota's unintended acceleration reports, some of which date back five years or more.
The substance of many of LaHood's responses, however, centered on a politically expedient "it wasn't on my watch" position; he was appointed the Transportation Secretary little more than a year ago. He promised several times to get to the root of the Toyota situation and even allowed that new legislation and a larger budget might be in order to assure more effective investigative processes in the future.
LaHood reminded that Toyota vehicles are far from overrepresented in terms of recall. He said the agency fields 30,000 consumer complaints each year, but added, "We will not rest until we finally find out if electronics is part of this problem."
LaHood may be in for a tiring tenure, then. - Bill Visnic, Senior Editor
Photo by Edmunds.com's David Greene
Toyota's U.S. chief Jim Lentz was on the hot seat in Tuesday's Congressional hearings, covered by television channels nationwide.
LEAVE A COMMENT
Click here to comment on this entry.I would believe that Toyota also took the economic climate of the last 12 to 18 months into consideration in not initiating any service action or recall sooner. First, to not put another deterent in the way of selling Toyotas and second to perhaps take advantage of the negative situation GM and Chrysler were going through.
Well if Mrs. Smith's testimony is accurate, we now know how a trained state trooper wouldn't be able to stop a similar run-away ES, especially now that some folks are saying they saw the car on the shoulder with the hazard flasher on just before it sped past them.
if Smith was actually telling the truth, shifting the car to neutral would have already done the work. what a lying bunch of usa dumbasses.
and the more i follow the freak show in washington about this matter, the more it shows that american politicans have been staging this whole deal. and from today's testimony, someone said toyota's biz model doesn't work and should learn from the americans, that is just the biggest BS i have ever heard. wake up america.
alman08... Uh, what?
I think the biggest problem here, and the one we Americans can most easily control, is the failure of the NHTSA to effectively follow up on these complaints. We should expect such behavior from corporations because their motivations are economic, not social. The NHTSA, a government organization with SAFETY in its name, should absolutely be held accountable for overlooking what has amounted to a big safety risk. I expect some significant changes at the NHTSA.
alman08,
Well, if Neutral was so much the answer, why wouldn't a trained driver like Saylor not just do that? Are you a Lexus mechanic? Please explain exactly how the ES's shifter works if so. If not, please tell us exactly how you can be so sure that Smith was in fact NOT in Reverse.
maybe Saylor was busy doing something else, who knows? I have tried it on the exact same model Lexus before by going 85 mph and keep my foot on the accelerator while I shifted it into neutral and use my left foot to brake. Guess what? Engine rev like crazy and the car stopped. There! try it yourself.
and I held the accelerator down just enough so the car would not hit the rev limiter (the red line), if there is one.
and IF there is such problem with the so called unintended acceleration, why not the rest of the whole not reporting such problem by Toyota cars?
"maybe Saylor was busy doing something else, who knows?" Exactly. We don't know. You don't; I don't. Could be if you hit the rev limiter, something happens. Could be a whole set of electronic factors must be present. Maybe Smith and Saylor were just confused. But neither of us were there and you have no basis for saying you know Smith is lying. You don't know.
exactly my point about the rev limiter... if I'd have let it be hit, gas would cut off
The notion that NHTSA has a "purer" motive than a private corporation's economic interests is naive. NHTSA is a government agency created by politicians of the past, and staffed by bureaucrats with little real accountability. A great many of our current politicians are motivated by power, not social justice. That's just a myth they've been using for generations to get the nation's citizenry to give up more of its autonomy and liberty. Such politicians want people to be uninformed, in order to enrich their own positions of power.
Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made by Toyota, it's taking a beating in the market. That is reason enough for them to want to prevent future incidents of this nature. We don't need a more powerful NHTSA that will cost us all even more money. But that is exactly what we're going to get because not enough of us know any better. Has anyone ever questioned the value we're getting now for all the money that is sucked up out of the private sector?
Unlike NHTSA and our now national government in Washington, Toyota cannot involuntarily confiscate as much of its customers' earnings as it desires and unilaterally enact more oppressive regulations that they *have* to accept, whether one likes it or not. There is a natural balance in a free market. Too many Americans don't understand this, due to their lack of foundational education in economics.
"third-party investigation - one funded, unfortunately, by lawyers litigating against Toyota"
If tort lawyers weren't investigating Toyota, this mess would have been swept under the rug a few months ago for good. I rather have the sharks looking out for the consumers - it's obvious that the industry and the regulators aren't.
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