What this demonstrates, in the age of YouTube and Wikileaks, is how hard it is for multinationals and their in-house counsel to keep a lid on their companies' internal data.
Many of the documents are marked "secret" and "confidential." They were provided by Betsy Benjaminson, a translator who has worked for several agencies that translate Toyota documents from the Japanese (and who translated several of those quoted in this article). She says that these shops work for law firms hired to assist the company in litigation.
Benjaminson provided these and many more documents last year to Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who then wrote a letter to NHTSA expressing his concern that questions about electronics have not been resolved. Corporate Counsel showed Toyota the complete documents from which quotes were excerpted for this article; read the company's response here.
Benjaminson is revealing her identity for the first time here. She decided to go public because lives are at stake, she says. "Up to now," she adds, "the corporate PR megaphone has completely drowned out the victims."
Four experts agreed to review the documents independently and share their impressions. Keith Armstrong, Antony Anderson, and Brian Kirk are based in the United Kingdom; Neil Hannemann lives in California. All of them have decades of experience. The documents they reviewed date from as early as 2000; the most recent were written a few months after the congressional hearings in February and March 2010. They include many emails along with spreadsheets, flow charts, and diagrams.
On one important point the experts agree: There is no smoking gun that shows that Toyota identified and concealed an electronic defect that was responsible for crashes. But numerous documents, they say, undermine the corporation's repeated attempts to reassure the public, as exemplified by the testimony of Jim Lentz, the CEO of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. In February 2010 Lentz told a House subcommittee: "We are confident that no problems exist in our electronic throttle systems in our vehicles." He went on to testify, "We have done extensive testing on this system, and we have never found a malfunction that caused unintended acceleration."
The documents seem to tell a different story. An email written by Hiroshi Hagiwara, a Toyota vice president in Washington, D.C., and sent to executives in Japan a month before the hearings hints at the turmoil beneath the surface. Hagiwara and Chris Tinto, a V.P. for technical and regulatory affairs and safety, had been talking about the U.S. investigation and an earlier one in Europe that also involved unintended acceleration (UA).
"Tinto is extremely pessimistic," Hagiwara wrote, "and is saying (public hearings, someone will go to jail, I can't completely take care of the pedal problem, etc.)." Tinto's primary concerns (according to Hagiwara): "For NHTSA, we said that our investigations in Europe found that the pedal return is a little slow at a slightly open position, and that there were no accidents, but this is not true. Last year's situation in Europe (many reports of sticking pedals and accidents, and a TI TS9-161 was filed on October 1, 2009) was not reported to NHTSA." That failure, Tinto said, "may be a violation of the TREAD Act"—the federal law that requires car manufacturers that conduct recalls in foreign countries to report these to U.S. regulators.
Still speaking of Tinto, who worked for NHTSA in the 1990s before he was hired away by Toyota, Hagiwara continued: "He appears to question how Toyota has grasped and handled the overall UA problem (mat, accelerator pedal, ECU [electronic control unit], and electronic throttle systems, etc.)."
Hagiwara reminded the executives to be careful what they put in writing. He asked them to fax any investigative reports related to Europe. "It is OK to write various things to me in emails written in Japanese," he advised, "but as much as possible only send materials that would not be controversial if disclosed (namely, things that have been reviewed), and it is best, I think, to discuss things orally."
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Toyota Lottery Winner
This morning March 26, 2013 I experienced the FIFTH OCCURANCE of sudden acceleration. Each time I was STOPPED either at an intersection or waiting for a red light when the engine revved to over 8,000rpm's. My foot was on the brake and no I did not have floor mats other than factory supplied. The dealer has been sympathetic but since he "Can not duplicate" the event then "Obviously" there is nothing wrong with my Avalon.
I am a statistic waiting to be reported!
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BruceAHz
Ok... if the electronics were a significant part of the problem, then why have the reports of sudden acceleration in Lexus models stopped? Has the press lost interest? Have the attorneys stopped picking up the phone calls from affected owners? Has Toyota actually fixed an EMI problem on the sly, coming to all owner's homes at night with a repair kit?
While the article may document bad policies, procedures, and perhaps ill-will at Toyota, nothing in my scan of the article suggests that Toyota has successfully covered up a problem with the electronics, unless, of course, one of the options above applies.
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Timothy D. Naegele
This is a truly excellent article. David Hechler deserves great credit and congratulations for getting the story right.
I am a lawyer, but I do not represent either side. I have worked on these issues since late 2009; and I have dealt with many of those who have tried to ferret out the truth, which Toyota has done its best to bury.
See http://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/toyota-and-lexus-vehicles-are-unsafe/ ("Toyota And Lexus Vehicles Are Unsafe") (see also the extensive comments beneath the article)
What Toyota has done is a travesty. The company has engaged in probably the biggest cover-up in global business history, and it deserves to pay a very heavy price for it, including a worldwide boycott of Toyota and Lexus vehicles. Nothing less will suffice.
The lawyers on both sides of this fight have enriched themselves, but they have not ferreted out the truth nor served the public good!
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L..S. Sherman
There are some 300 product liability law suits waiting to be tried or settled. It will be interesting to watch this lengthy process unfold as these cases are moved forward by the Courts. Which will Toyota settle and which will they try? What information about the company and their revenue or costs, related to this defect, will be revealed?
No matter how it all concludes, the questions about how our society will deal with the clash of commerce and advancing science linger. When money is at stake regarding valuable scientific discoveries, who is responsible for the deaths that result? What is to be done for the uninformed consumer who is the victim? How important are people when great amounts of business and therefore money, clash, resulting in human sacrifice?
Questions for the ages and still no easy answers...but these questions keep coming up.
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Ben Kelley
In this excellent and comprehensive examination of problems related to Toyota's SUA failures and NHTSA's questionable treatment of those problems, Ford Motor Company is quoted as follows:
"NHTSA has investigated alleged unintended accelerations many times over many years and has concluded that driver error is the predominant cause of these events/"
The key phrase in this statement is "predominant cause." By using it, Ford acknowledges the existence of other causes, including flaws in the vehicles' incredibly labyrinthine electronics systems. Drivers have no control whatsoever over defects imbedded in their cars' designs. The simplistic "driver error" catch-all, a favorite with manufacturers and even NHTSA when vehicle defects are at issue, simply won't wash.
As long as doubt exists as to the role of electronic-system glitches in causing crashes and their injurious outcomes - and as this article makes clear, doubt abounds - NHTSA is duty-bound to continue its investigations and refrain from declaring, as DOT Sec. LaHood did of the Toyota SUA issue, "The verdict is in and there is no electronics problem."
The verdict isn't close to being in and the problem can't be made to go away by wishful thinking or semantics sleight-of-hand; LaHood, who will shortly leave DOT, has bequeathed it to his successor, whoever that may be.
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