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.

This story touched off an interesting and intelligent discussion among readers, generating more than a thousand responses. While there were a few of the “loose nut behind the wheel” and “evil trial lawyers” variety, the majority of comments appeared to come from readers with technical backgrounds who were well-versed in the headaches caused by tin whiskers, a longstanding issue in the electronics industry.

Mr. Michels effort to beat back a challenge to Toyota’s preferred narrative, however, is rife with mischaracterizations and falsehoods.

Mr. Michels says that the engineers at the National Aeronautics and Safety Administration (NASA) have been “clear and unequivocal” in their conclusions. They have not. The February report, Technical Assessment of Toyota Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) Systems and Technical Support to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the Reported Toyota Motor Corporation Unintended Acceleration Investigation, written by the NASA Engineering Safety Center (NESC) actually said:

“Due to system complexity which will be described and the many possible electronic software and hardware systems interactions it is not realistic to prove that the ETCSi cannot cause UAs. Today’s vehicles are sufficiently complex that no reasonable amount of analysis or testing can prove electronics and software have no errors. Therefore, absence of proof that the ETCSi caused a UA does not vindicate the system.”

Mr. Michels said that there are no real-world scenarios in which Toyota electronics can cause unintended acceleration. That is not true. The NESC team, which found tin whiskers in every potentiometer pedal it examined in a very small sample, studied one from a Camry that had experienced unintended accelerations. The owner described the pedal as “jumpy” and the car as “completely undriveable.”

Further, in May two NHTSA engineers witnessed, videotaped and captured data from a 2003 Prius that had multiple UA events in their presence. Yesterday, the agency conceded that there was no evidence that these UA events were linked to the” known causes” of floor mats, sticking accelerator pedals or driver error. This suggests that the culprit is to be found in the software or electronics.

Mr. Michels says that the National Academies of Sciences laid to rest “this discredited theory,” concluding that all the data available indicated that there was no electronic or software problem in Toyota vehicles and that NHTSA was justified in closing its investigation.

The NAS panel did not actually examine the tin whiskers phenomenon. It devoted one paragraph in a 158-page report to the subject. As for clearing Toyota, the NAS report actually said:

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Mr. Michels also cited the affirming pronouncements of “respected independent experts,” such as Edmunds.com and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Edmund’s.com sells cars. Ray LaHood is a politician who taught high school social studies before winning public office. Neither are automotive electronics experts.

Mr. Michels says that Toyota’s systems are designed to reduce the risk that tin whiskers will form in the first place and that “multiple robust failsafe systems” detect faults, illuminate the malfunction indicator light and put the vehicle into ‘limp home’ mode.

Neither is true.

In August, some actual electronics experts from the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) published an analysis of the potential for tin whisker growth in Toyota vehicles. The scientists performed a physical analysis of an engine control system from a 2005 Camry XLE, V-6 and an accelerator pedal assembly from a defunct 2002 Camry. The 2005 engine control system included the ECM, an accelerator pedal unit, throttle body, electrical connectors and electrical connecting cables. The tear-down of the accelerator pedal position sensors (APPS) in both Camrys revealed tin whisker formations. In addition, the CALCE researchers found the potential for tin whisker formation in the ECM, which contained surface mount electronic devices connected with tin-lead solder to a multilayer PCB; interconnect terminals of the perimeter leaded devices plated with tin. And tin plating on terminal pins of the edge connections. The CALCE scientists concluded:

“In our analysis, a significant number of tin whiskers were found. Using the calceWhiskerRiskCalculator (CALCE Tin Whisker Risk Calculator, 2005) to assess the failure risk posed by observed tin whisker formation on the conductor pairs, it was determined that the potential for a tin whisker shorting failure was 140/1 million. Considering the number of vehicles on the road, it is expected that this would present a significant safety hazard.”

Other automotive electronics experts, such as David Gilbert at Southern Illinois University have demonstrated that Toyota’s fail-safe strategy is not robust and under certain circumstances fails to detect faults that can lead to open throttle.  In an August 2010 recall intended to correct stalling in 2005-2008 Corolla and Corolla Matrix vehicles, Toyota submitted field technical reports on the problem, many of which noted that diagnostic trouble codes were not set, even when the technician could duplicate the problem. Toyota’s fault-detection system does not always function properly and does fail to detect abnormalities and set trouble codes.

Mr. Michels asks: “Why, then, is Toyota continuing to be subjected to unwarranted speculation in the news media about an issue that has long since been put to bed?”

Well, it’s not due to the fanciful conjecture of plaintiff’s lawyers and its paid consultants or a frenzy of non-news news. It’s because Toyota’s customers continue to report unintended acceleration incidents that cannot be credibly blamed on floor mats, driver error or sticky pedals. NHTSA alone fielded 330 complaints from Toyota owners who experienced a UA event in 2011. Some 247 customers have complained to the agency about events that occurred after they had their floor mats and accelerator pedals remedied through the recalls.

Toyota’s problem is that it has treated unintended acceleration in its vehicles as a public relations dilemma, rather than a technical issue.

If Toyota wants the public to stop discussing Unintended Acceleration in its cars, why don’t they just fix them?

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.”

To recap: Joseph H. McClelland, an electrical engineer who heads the of the Office of Electric Reliability at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, reported to NHTSA in May that his 2003 Prius had experienced multiple UA events. The agency sent out two engineers to investigate. In a sworn statement McClelland described how the engineers witnessed his Pius accelerate five times without floor mat interference, a sticking pedal or a driver error. With great excitement, they videoed it and downloaded real-time data onto their computers, showing that the engine was racing, uncommanded by the driver.

They told McClelland that they might want his vehicle for research, and in the meantime, to park it and secure it. Three months later, they got back in touch: Thanks, but no thanks, they said, your vehicle is too old and worn out. The agency did not put McClelland’s complaint in the Vehicle Owner Questionnaire database until September, at the request of Safety Research & Strategies. We FOIA’ed for the videos and data, but the agency turned us down. Yesterday we sued them in U.S. District Court, alleging that NHTSA has improperly withheld the information.

As the news was reported by SRS, The New York Times, and Rhode Island CBS and FOX affiliate WPRI, NHTSA issued a written response, so as to sidestep troublesome follow-up questions, such as:

If the UA event, witnessed, videoed and captured on computer by NHTSA wasn’t caused by “known causes” why did the engine of McClelland’s Prius “race wildly” with no mechanical interference or command from the driver?

One more, if we may:

Is NHTSA saying that it is acceptable for a vehicle to have an uncommanded acceleration as long as there are some flashing lights and the vehicle is controlled by the brake (or in this case, was able to shift into Neutral)? What about all the drivers too surprised by the complete unpredictability of their Toyota to effectively apply the brake or shift in time? Or the drivers who don’t have enough time and distance to bring the vehicle to a safe stop? What about the instances in which the throttle opening is larger, and control of the brakes much harder than it was in the McClelland vehicle?  If this sort of vehicle behavior is acceptable, what, exactly, is considered unacceptable by this taxpayer-funded, federal, safety agency?

Well, we don’t want to hog the whole imaginary press conference, but we definitely have more questions. Or better yet, release the videos and the data, and we’ll take it from there.

Finally, in its canned response, NHTSA aimed its pea-shooter at SRS, alluding to us as “some groups that are continuing to raise the specter of potential electronic issues around unintended acceleration.” That specter bit is clever – a little “ghost in the machine” echo, eh?

Actually, the group raising the issue are Toyota owners who continue to experience unintended acceleration events that are “not linked to known causes,” i.e., electronics.  The agency fielded 330 complaints for UA events in 2011. These consumers have been turned away by the automaker and the regulatory agency charged with protecting them. When they contact us we will continue to share their stories and study this complex technical issue.

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.

[NOTE:  SRS’s systematic review uses a combination of keyword searching and manual review to identify consumer complaints describing UA incidents in Toyota vehicles. We define UA as any uncommanded torque to the wheels of a vehicle or incidents in which drivers report uncommanded engine RPM increase when the vehicle transmission is in the Park position. Our manual review decreases the likelihood of including complaints unrelated to UA. We also acknowledge that this method introduces subjectivity into our characterization of the complaints. We reduce that bias via agreement by multiple readers that a complaint should be included.]

Teresa Young, Pasadena, California

On May 26, Teresa Young, a biologist from Pasadena, Calif., was early for her morning class at the Shan Tung Kung Fu martial arts center in the Roosevelt Place shopping center.  She spotted a space right in front of the studio and turned left. She had her foot on the brake of her 2005 Prius and was cruising slowly toward the low concrete parking stop. She was about to shut down the car, when the engine started to race. Young had her foot on the brake, but the Prius continued to move forward. She pushed the brake harder, but the vehicle engine revved, continuing on its path, over the concrete stop, the sidewalk and through the plate glass window of the martial arts studio. The Prius was in the martial arts studio when Young shifted the vehicle into neutral and tried to turn the engine off.  The Prius did not respond to Young’s repeated attempts to shut it down. At this point, Young’s feet were on the floor pan – not on any pedal, and the Prius continued to move forward, but in the leftward direction of the wheels. The Prius drove right into a wall. In a small panic, Young grabbed her key fob and her purse, and exited via the passenger side door.

“My thought was: ‘I’ve got to get out of this car,’” she recalled.

By this time, her martial arts instructor and security guard were on the scene. The passenger door was still open, the Prius engine was still revving, but stationary, and still in neutral.

“The security guard decided to get everyone out of that side of the building. He feared my vehicle and he had every right to fear that vehicle,” she says.

A tow truck driver attempted to pull the vehicle out of the wall, but after 20 minutes of futile effort, the police handed him the key fob. The tow operator put the vehicle in reverse and backed it out. The vehicle was never examined by Toyota as far as Young knows. It sat, covered at the Pasadena dealership, until she agreed to sell it for research, and replaced it with a Chevy Volt.

Young had been the sole owner of her Prius. She bought it out of environmental concerns and kept it well-maintained. She was aware of the Toyota unintended acceleration controversy, but didn’t pay it much mind. Young did make sure that she took her vehicle in for all of the UA recall remedies. The Prius never gave her a day’s trouble, but about month before her spectacular entrance at Shan Tung Kung Fu, she does recall not being able to shut off her Prius one day. The vehicle did not respond to depressing the ignition button. It took several tries and prolonged push to finally shut the engine down.

“I just thought it was weird,” she says.

Tanya Spotts, Hamilton, Virginia

Tanya Spotts had only owned her 2011 Lexus ES350 for six months, when she experienced an unintended acceleration event on December 26. She was pulling into a second-floor space in parking garage in Reston Town Center, with her foot on the brake. With about three feet to go before coming to a complete stop, her vehicle surged and slammed into the concrete wall in front of her. Spotts, a Realtor, looked down and saw her foot firmly on the brake. In fact, she was braking so hard that she sprained and bruised her foot, requiring treatment.

While her car sustained minor damage, Spotts’ confidence in her Lexus was completely shattered.

“I honestly loved the car,” she says.

Spotts had been a dyed-in-the-wool Toyota fan, who had always owned Toyotas. She spurned her husband’s advice to buy a Jaguar last spring. The Lexus ES350 was her dream car, and while Spotts knew about the unintended acceleration controversy, it did not dissuade her, either.

“I really dismissed it, because the government was involved and they concluded there were no other problems,” she said.

Spotts promptly reported the incident to her insurer and to the dealership, Pohanka Lexus of Chantilly, Virginia. Toyota has scheduled an inspection to read the EDR data. But Spotts does not expect the EDR to reveal anything, since the airbag did not deploy. Nor does she hold out any hope that Lexus will take back the sedan. Her Lexus remains parked and Spotts now finds herself in the dilemma of many Toyota owners before her.

“Thank God, there was nobody in front of my car. My biggest fear is that I carry so many people in my car. If this had happened at my office, there are so many pedestrians. I could not live with myself if I took this car and continued to drive it after an unexplained acceleration,” she says. “I feel like I’m held hostage by this car. I can’t drive it and I can’t sell it.”

Russell Damsky, Cragsmoor, New York

Russ Damsky experienced two unintended acceleration events in his leased 2011 RAV4 within three days of driving the SUV.  Damsky was another Toyota fan who was not put off by the unintended acceleration news stories.

“I thought, obviously this is something they are going to fix so I didn’t give it a second thought when I went in for the 2011 RAV4.”

In January 2011, he leased a new RAV4. Two days later, on January 12, he experienced his first incident. He was in the midst of a right-hand turn into a shopping center, travelling well under 20 mph.

“I thought, ‘That’s funny. I’m stepping on the brakes, but the brakes aren’t working. I put all of my weight and stood on the brake. The car was roaring,” Damsky recalled. “I instinctively put it into neutral and kept my foot on the brake. In a moment, the car went back to idle.”

Damsky immediately called the dealership in Newburgh, New York, and made an appointment the next day to have the RAV4 inspected. On the way to the dealership, about 30 miles away, Damsky experienced a second unintended acceleration. Again, Damsky had his foot on the brake, slowing for a red light, when the SUV’s engine began to accelerate. The former actor employed the same strategy, throwing the vehicle into neutral, and it returned to idle.

Dealership personnel were skeptical, Damsky said. The general manager was “brusque.”

“He went into the rhetoric: ‘This was going to be a problem; that doesn’t happen, the RAV4 has never had that problem.’ I told him: ‘I’ve been driving well over 40 years and it wasn’t driver error. This car has a problem.’”

When Damsky learned that Toyota was sending a tech to inspect the vehicle, he asked the dealership if the technician could wait until he got there. Damsky wound up missing the test drive by a few minutes, but he never had to get in that RAV4 again. During his field test, another vehicle rear-ended it and pushed the SUV into a guardrail. The insurance company totaled the vehicle. Damsky got a different RAV4, which he intends to drive until the lease expires. But, his affection for Toyota is gone:

“I wouldn’t buy another Toyota,” he says. “Not because I didn’t like the car, but because of the way they handled it.”

Don Oxley, DeSoto, Kansas

On January 23, 2011, Don Oxley intended to wash the road salt off of his 2004 Camry. Instead, he added some scrapes to the Camry’s hood, windshield pillar and roof in an unexpected encounter with a rising carwash door. Oxley was stopped in front of the door of the automated car wash, and had punched in the code to initiate the sequence. The light turned green and the door began to open, so he shifted the Camry out of “Park” and into “Drive” to inch forward. As soon as he let off the brake pedal, the Camry suddenly accelerated forward, hitting the car wash door before it could fully open.

“I thought I was going to sail right through the whole car wash,” he recalled. “It freaked me out real bad. I slammed on the brakes with both feet and put it in park and shut it off and it was normal after that.”

Oxley estimates he traveled about 15 to 20 feet before he successfully stopped the Camry.

“I took it into the Toyota dealer, they checked and found nothing, but blamed it on the floor mats. I’m not quite dumb enough to believe the floor mat jumped on the accelerator and stomped it to the floor, but that’s what they want people to think.”

Larraine LeBlonde, Mt. Prospect, Illinois

Larraine LeBlonde was thrilled last October to make the final payment on her 2006 Corolla, when her vehicle began to behave erratically. She has an easy commute from her home in the Chicago suburbs to her job at a retail outlet in an area mall. And her first unintended acceleration event occurred when she was at a stop light at a highway entrance ramp. Her Corolla attempted to surge forward, up an incline. LeBlonde was able to hold it into place with her foot on the brake.

“I thought, ‘Oooh, this is different,’” she recalled.

The surge eventually stopped, the light changed and LeBlonde continued on her way. But that wasn’t the last of it. From mid-October to the first week in December, the Corolla had dozens of similar surges. The scenario was roughly the same: the UA occurred when her foot was already on the brake, at a light or stop sign or while parking. She was able to control the vehicle by firmly pressing the brake – the surges didn’t push the engine beyond 2,500 rpms – and moving the transmission to neutral. A few times, when the engine refused to return to idle, she would turn off the Corolla and re-start it.

LeBlonde’s Corolla was part of the Toyota’s August recall for 1.3 million Corolla and Matrix vehicles to replace the Engine Control Module for an unexpected stalling condition. And although she never had that problem with her Corolla, she tried twice unsuccessfully to bring it into an area dealership for the remedy.

Her surging condition, however, sent her to the Internet in search of information about Unintended Acceleration, and she called Toyota’s customer service line looking for an answer.

“I thought I could call them and be advised about what to do, so I wouldn’t go into a mystery situation,” she said. “I thought that if they had heard about it before, they would be able to name a part. I’m not very car savvy and I didn’t want my car to spend a ton of time at the dealership while they tried one thing after another. The representative was pretty much skeptical. She said that the Toyota mechanic would need the car to replicate the behavior, and I told her that could be quite a while, because it’s unpredictable.”

LeBlonde hung up, dissatisfied. The next morning, she got a call from the local dealership, saying that they had an opening for her to bring her car in.

“They said, ‘We hear that you are having a problem with your brakes,’” she recalled. “I did not take them up on this because it made me feel that they weren’t interested in the actual problem. I lost confidence in Toyota as being able to understand or admit what was really going on.”

LeBlonde was once a loyal Toyota customer. She can remember the day she bought the Corolla:

“I just marched right in on a July 4^th weekend and bought it. Not a second thought. I was constantly convincing friends to buy a Toyota.”

LeBlonde sold the Corolla. She now drives a Honda Civic.

William O’Brien, Cincinnati, Ohio

Bill O’Brien’s 2009 Corolla appears to be a more extreme version of the condition that plagued LeBlonde’s 2006 Corolla.  With a background in science, O’Brien made an Excel spreadsheet of his numerous vehicle unintended accelerations for easy reference. It details the date, time, mileage, weather conditions, road grade, duration and rpms of the event. O’Brien began dealing with engine surges in his 2009 Corolla in March 2010 and has experienced a total of 15 events through January 2012. His 2009 Corolla was recalled for the accelerator pedal shim; and the change from CTS to a Denso component. None of the recall remedies have made a difference in his vehicle’s performance. The incidents typically happen at low-speed, with his foot on the brake, upon cold start. Initially, the engine surged to about 2500 to 3,000 rpms during the UA event. O’Brien would hold firm on the brake, shift the vehicle from drive to neutral and back to drive again, and the engine surge would cease.

“The first time is happened was Easter Sunday, 2010, a month after recall to remove and trim the accelerator pedal,” he said. “The way the recall notice framed it, it occurred in vehicles with high mileages. I had 6,000-7,000 miles on my car. I didn’t think anything was going to come of it. I do know that I didn’t hit the wrong pedal.”

The last several events occurred in November and January in O’Brien’s driveway. These were the most extreme events, with the engine revving to 6,500 rpms.

Toyota and the dealership personnel have examined the vehicle and found nothing, O’Brien says.

“I’ve been through an arbitration and it was evident that it wasn’t going to make a difference. I can produce up to four witnesses to these events. But, none of it matters unless a Toyota technician sees it.  I guess I’ll have to have someone from Toyota riding with me fulltime. Then they would have to move in with us, and God knows how much they eat,” he joked.

That a large corporation would conceal a deadly problem to protect its interests is hardly news – although the systemic and exacting strategies Ford employed in this case are notable. What makes this story important is how Ford also re-wrote the history on this issue and helped to shape the agency’s thinking about an ongoing problem for decades hence. We have only the public record regarding Toyota UA at our disposal – and precious little of that has actually been made public – so we can’t know how Toyota has assessed its own UA problem; if and what parallels in corporate misdirection might be drawn between Ford and Toyota. But one can see how Ford’s actions back in the 1980s still resonate with the agency today and how it has kept NHTSA from advancing its knowledge in electronic causes of UA that are not already detected by the vehicle diagnostics.

The Emergence of a Defect in the Age of Audi SUA

As recounted in the Judge Swigert’s order, the history of Ford and unintended acceleration goes back to 1973, when Ford’s cruise control was under development. Ford Engineer William Follmer “warned about the risk posed by electromagnetic interference, and cautioned that ‘to avoid disaster’ it was imperative to incorporate failsafe protection against EMI in the system’s design.” In 1976, two Ford engineers obtained a patent describing a design for the cruise control system’s printed circuit board to reduce the risk of a sudden acceleration posed by EMI.

But, in that same year, the company’s Electrical and Electronics Division determined that electromagnetic interference did not pose a significant risk and, therefore, “No special consideration was given to designing in electromagnetic compatibility.”

The switches in the cruise control system Ford developed and installed in millions of vehicles, such as Stimpsons’ Aerostar, were vulnerable at gear engagement to a current spike from electromagnetic interference that can bypass the control logic and induce the servo to pull the throttle wide open. The judge suggested that Ford had considered this possibility in 1979, putting $75 million in reserve to cover a recall for UA.

But the problem really blossomed in1984, after Ford introduced an advanced version of its engine electronics: EEC-IV. Where UA complaints before the introduction of this new technology were few, they began to increase rapidly once the 1984 models entered the fleet. During the 1980s, field investigations into UA complaints were documented in Service Investigation Reports, or SIRs, that were forwarded to Ford headquarters in Dearborn. This flood of complaints moved a Safety Office manager named Edward I. Richardson to begin informally reviewing the SIRs, in anticipation of a NHTSA investigation.

Richardson’s staff found a fact pattern in these UA complaints: “sudden accelerations from a standstill invariably began at gear engagement; drivers frequently reported that braking during the event was ineffective; field engineers often identified the cruise control electronics as the cause; field engineers frequently recommended replacing the cruise control servo; and there were no field reports identifying driver error as the cause of a sudden acceleration.”

On September 30, 1985, NHTSA opened the first of several investigations involving Ford. But the automaker kept its fact patterns to itself, and told the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) that its “vehicle systems are not defective.” NHTSA closed the investigation in August 1986, because no component-related root cause could be determined.

Having skirted one NHTSA investigation, a manager in Ford’s Customer Service Division Alan Updegrove, met with Ford counsel and the office that employs in-house litigation experts to express his dismay over the inflammatory opinions found in the SIRs. At that September 1986 meeting, he recommended a new format for investigating UA complaints and assembled a team to develop a new investigative approach.

What was the source of Updegrove unease? The legal decision focuses only on the events that concern Stimpson v. Ford. But one need only consider what was happening elsewhere in the industry regarding what was known back then as Sudden Unintended Acceleration to understand Ford’s desire for pre-emptory action – namely Audi.

By September 1986, Volkswagen was had already recalled Audi 5000 vehicles with automatic transmissions from the 1978-83 model years in the U.S. and Canada twice to resolve drivers’ complaints of SUA from a standstill, with ineffective braking. The recalls, to secure the floor mat and prevent pedal interference, however, did little to squelch the complaints. Volkswagen was seemingly trapped in a public relations nightmare featuring injuries, deaths and hundreds of crashes trumpeted to anyone who would listen, by a group of well-organized, articulate and highly vocal owners.

On March 19, 1986, the founder of what would become the Audi Victims Network teamed up with the New York Public Interest Research Group, NY Attorney General Robert Abrams and Center for Auto Safety to hold a press conference demanding that NHTSA investigate Audi SUA.  Sales of the once-popular make were plummeting and despite Volkswagen’s launch of a service campaign to move the accelerator and brake pedals of the 1984-1986 Audi 5000′s, the agency decided to open a formal defect investigation into SUA involving 1978-86 Audi 5000s. In August 1986, after the agency launched its probe, Volkswagen announced that it would install a brake to shift interlock in the troubled vehicles. By November 1986, CBS would air its infamous segment on Audi SUA, which drove down vehicle sales even further.

The Ford Problem Grows

As Audi thrashed in the spotlight, Ford was receiving a steady stream of “malfunctioning cruise control servos under warranty for which no cause could be identified” complaints. In October 1986, Ford’s Electrical and Electronics Division documented for senior management “the reasons behind the rapid rise in undiagnosed failures in electronic components. The report identified six components, including the cruise control servo, whose undiagnosed failure rate had experienced the greatest increases. According to the report, prior to 1984, the cause of servo malfunctions had been identified 80 percent of the time, while after 1984 the rate plummeted to 20 percent. The EED report specifically identified ‘electromagnetic influences in the vehicle environment’ due to ‘the increasing complexity of electrical system’ as the root cause of this quantum increase in undiagnosed servo malfunctions; and since servos removed by field engineers investigating sudden accelerations were testing normal in Ford’s laboratories, it was clear that ‘electromagnetic influences’ were also the cause of the findings contained in SIRs the Safety Office was reviewing at the time.”

NHTSA wasn’t done, however. In December 1986, the agency notified Ford that it had identified 439 reports of “unexpected vehicle acceleration” that had resulted in “193 accidents, 106 injuries, and 5 fatalities … in 1983-1986 Ford vehicles” that could result in a safety recall. Ford would tell the agency in 1987, that they could find nothing amiss with any components.

Internally, however, Ford was working on solving the problem, as it tried to conceal it.

On January 12, 1987, Ford created a multi-disciplinary task force to study “how interactions between the engine and cruise control electronics were contributing to sudden accelerations.” The EED’s recommendation explicitly recognized that malfunctions involving the cruise control servo were caused by system level interactions, and not by detectable failures in individual components of the interacting systems.”

In March 1987, Ford began working on the flip side of the coin. The company assembled about 200 field engineers in Dearborn to receive new marching orders that would help Ford obscure the data. The old SIR format was discontinued and Updegrove’s new approach to UA investigations would take its place. All sudden acceleration related-SIRs would now be purged in the year they were generated. (Federal law requires that safety-related records have a five year retention period.)

Ford presented a very different face to NHTSA. As the NHTSA defect investigation wound on, Ford scratched up only 38 SIR reports – with only 21 relating to UA from a standstill. (In his decision, Judge Swigert agreed with the plaintiffs that the paucity of SIRs had more to do with the new retention policy than a lack of complaints.) In March 1987, Ford told the agency that an electronically-rooted SUA “would be expected to reveal physical evidence of causal origin,” even though the SIRs and the EED report said otherwise.

As it tried to hold off the agency, Ford continued to work on solving the problem.  A February 1988 memo from Stephen Hahn, a senior electrical engineer and leader of Ford’s SUA task force lent support to the conclusions of previous internal studies showing the problem was rooted in the system-level interactions between the cruise control and the engine.  He observed that “only when the vehicle speed control function is integrated into the EEC-IV system does the EEC system have the potential to produce a wide open throttle acceleration.” That fall, Ford engineers assembled the factors that could cause an unintended acceleration into a fish-bone schematic known as an Ishikawa diagram, “which identified electromagnetic interference on the output side of the cruise control electronics as a potential cause.”

Alan Updegrove’s investigation into sudden acceleration claims produced a detailed database of incidents, analyzed by a team that included representatives from the Powertrain Electronics Unit, the Automotive Safety Office, and the Customer Service Division. Their task was to “guide the investigation into key areas that included the engine control electronics, underhood linkages, wiring and speed control … and an extensive interview with the operator of the vehicle and any available witnesses to the event.”

One of the engineers on Updegrove’s team, James Auiler, testified that the “Updegrove database was a special study to get premium factual information so that we could do engineering analysis and due diligence and understand what was really going on.”

The foundation of the database was a questionnaire to be used by field investigators “to record facts and information indicating the likely cause of the occurrence.” The questionnaire was quite detailed, including information about driver behavior, direct observations from witnesses to the event, braking effectiveness; physical evidence, such as tire marks, and how the event terminated. The results were divided into six possible categories relating to causation and three categories identifying the engine behavior during the event. Updegrove’s team gathered a total of 1,900 cases in which the UA occurred upon gear engagement. The summaries of those cases determined that less than one percent were classified as pedal misapplication, and for 99 percent “the evidence collected logically supported the driver’ claim of an uncontrolled acceleration, but no physical explanation for the event was found during the vehicle inspection.”

Yet, in a December 1989 response to NHTSA’s sticking throttle investigation of Thunderbird and Mercury Cougar vehicles, Ford told the agency that “the Updegrove results supported the agency’s conclusion that driver error was the “most plausible cause” of sudden accelerations.”

Managing the Experts

Swigert ruled that keeping this information in-house required Ford to misdirect its own go-to electronics litigation expert, Victor Declercq, manager of the Ford Electromagnetic Compatibility Laboratory. DeClerq has been frequently dispatched to testify for Ford that there is “no evidence that Ford’s electronics are susceptible to an EMI-induced sudden acceleration.” But Judge Swigert added up a number of his pre- and post-trial assertions and determined that Declerq was not privy to any of the internal studies and memos outlining how electronic malfunctions in the cruise control could result in a wide-open throttle.

- Declerq admitted in post-trial testimony that a lawyer from the automaker’s Office of General Counsel denied that there was any engineering summary of the Updegrove results.

- Declerq acknowledged that “no Ford model with the cruise control electronics at issue here had been tested following a sudden acceleration; and that no testing replicating EMI on the output side of the cruise control had been performed.”

- In a 1999 in-house video, DeClerq could be seen using a table-top model of Ford’s cruise control system to demonstrate that five failures would have to occur simultaneously before a UA was possible.

- Declercq acknowledged “that he has frequently cited [the 1989 NHTSA study, An Examination of Sudden Acceleration,] to juries as support for his opinion that multiple, simultaneous, and detectable failures are prerequisites for a sudden acceleration.”  As the following section details, Ford misdirected the agency about the causes of UA as NHTSA gathered string for this study.

Tarnishing The Silver Book

One of the most riveting portions of Judge Swigert’s decision was his take down of An Examination of Sudden Acceleration, the 1989 study known within NHTSA as The Silver Book, in reference to the color of its cover.

In the wake of the Audi case, NHTSA commissioned the Transportation System Center to conduct an independent, industry-wide study of sudden unintended acceleration. It announced its intention in October 1987, just before Ford’s Electronics Reliability Study Team pegged EMI and the lack of uniform procedures for circuit analysis as contributory causes to the electronic problems plaguing Ford vehicles. As part of the information-gathering process, NHTSA had asked manufacturers to provide to the agency “all reports, studies, or investigations that might assist the TSC study.” Ford did not produce any of its internal studies showing the effect of EMI on its cruise control servo, it did not disclose the Ishikawa analysis or the Updegrove study.  The judge determined that Ford’s fraud in unintended acceleration had extended to misleading NHTSA in the preparation of this study.

When An Examination of Sudden Acceleration was finally published in January 1989, the researchers concluded, based – in part – on representations from manufacturers, like Ford, that “EMI was not a contributing factor to sudden accelerations; that at least two simultaneous and detectable faults would have to occur for the cruise control electronics to cause a sudden acceleration; and that, in the absence of such detectable faults, the most ‘plausible explanation was driver pedal error.’”

Ford knew from its own investigations that this was not true. But in October 1989, when NHTSA opened Preliminary Evaluation 90-001, asking Ford for studies or investigations that could explain a “failure of the throttle control system to properly control vehicle speed in 1988-1989 model year Thunderbird/Cougar models,” Ford cited The Silver Book to buttress its argument that, like NHTSA, it has been diligently searching for causes, but can’t find anything beyond driver error:

“Ford has received and investigated reports alleging sudden acceleration incidents, both with and without explicit allegations of brake failure, on virtually all vehicles it produces including the vehicles which are the subject of this inquiry. Ford’s investigations, like those of NHTSA and others encompassed numerous components, systems, complex interrelationships, and human factors. The typical scope of such analysis is manifested by

the diverse studies documented within the Transportation System Center CTSC) report; similar efforts continue at Ford, as exemplified by a schematic diagram, provided as Attachment 1, which was formulated by Ford engineering personnel to structure sudden acceleration-type incident analysis.”

In view of Ford’s decision to keep its knowledge about the causes of UA to itself, Judge Swigert was particularly critical of the underlying assumptions on which An Examination of Sudden Acceleration was based. He pointed to depositions of Richard Schmidt, a human factors expert, former Exponent scientist and co-author of driver error studies on which NHTSA relied to deny a 2000 petition to re-open an investigation into the phenomenon of UA, in which Schmidt was unable to explain the empirical starting point that led to the conclusion that most UA events are caused by driver error. Swigert first observed that Schmidt’s theory about the events that create a pedal-misapplication UA-crash is at odds with his working definition of UA.

Schmidt defined UA as: “A full, uncommanded full throttle situation from a stop or near stop after shifting from park or a drive gear with a perceived brake failure.” He further testified that in his view, drivers misposition their feet, mistakenly depress the accelerator instead of the brake, simultaneously as they shift into gear. But Schmidt conceded that he had not done any baseline research to determine what drivers typically do during vehicle start up – when and where they place their feet. And Schmidt said that in his view, the move to a full-throttle event is gradual, rather than immediate.  He believed the UA crash occurred when drivers lightly depress the accelerator pedal, thinking it’s the brake. When the car starts to move upon gear engagement, the driver presses a little harder still under the assumption that his foot is on the brake. As the vehicle continues to move, the driver gradually applies more pressure to the brake, until the vehicle movement is arrested by a crash.

“Since it is undisputed that in a classic sudden acceleration the throttle rapidly goes to wide open at gear engagement, Schmidt’s hypothesis is obviously inconsistent with this generally accepted description of a sudden acceleration. The core question, however, is whether there is a scientific or empirical basis for Schmidt’s hypothesis that pedal errors cause most sudden accelerations,” Swigert wrote in his decision.

Then, the judge attacked Schmidt’s scientific rigor. In examining Schmidt’s deposition testimony, Swigert found:

“It is apparent that Schmidt assumed that if no tangible or detectable evidence of a malfunction is found in the vehicle, the cause must be the driver. However, when Schmidt was pressed to explain the basis for this assumption, he conceded that: (1) he was unaware of any research showing that drivers occasionally misposition their foot on the accelerator pedal at start up; (2) he never consulted with an electrical engineer regarding his assumption that two detectable faults at least that ‘fix themselves’ were necessary for a sudden acceleration; ‘(3) that he had heard about Ford’s Updegrove investigation, but knew nothing about the results; (4) he has done no research regarding brake pedal force needed to stop an open throttle acceleration;’ and (5) when confronted with the fact that many sudden accelerations had been terminated by the driver disengaging the engine before a crash occurred, he said he would be ‘surprised’ if that were the case.”

Ancient History?

This decision tells a story that resonates beyond whatever Ford shoveled at NHTSA in the 1980s. In all that compost, Ford’s decision to withhold what it knew about the connection between EMI, its cruise control servo and unintended acceleration, were the seeds of thought that have taken root, and flourished at the agency.  These opinions continue to be expressed 30 years later. Even as late as 2003, the agency was using An Examination of Sudden Acceleration, as a reason to dismiss complaints of UA in Toyota vehicles. In a Federal Register notice denying a defect petition from a Lexus owner who experienced three UAs in his vehicle, NHTSA cited its 1989 study as part of the supporting evidence. The 1999 Lexus at issue, however, was equipped with a new electronic throttle control system; the Silver Book examined mechanical throttle control systems.

Take for example, a particularly striking e-mail from Toyota manager Chris Tinto recounting a June 2004 meeting with NHTSA ODI investigator Robert Young on the subject of unintended acceleration in Toyotas:

“Mr. Young was shown all of the failure modes of the ETC [Electronic Throttle Control] system, and was clear in expressing that none of the modes felt ‘unsafe’ to him, and he felt that the modes were unrelated to sudden acceleration. Mr. Young also drove the vehicle in such a way that he was able to apply both the accelerator and the brake pedal at the same time. He referred to this as “Dual Pedal Application.” He expressed his opinion that the complaints that the agency has received were most likely dual pedal application (i.e. not vehicle malfunction related). He also stated that it was very difficult to achieve this dual pedal application condition because the Camry has utilizes a wide (i.e. good) spacing between the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal.”

If Tinto’s retelling is accurate, this belief in driver error is so unshakeable that one of the agency’s most experienced investigative experts was ready to conclude that the complaints were due to dual pedal application even though the data – which showed a 400 percent increase in UA Camry complaints after Toyota went to electronic throttle controls – and his own direct observation – that the pedals had good spacing and that it was hard to actually hit both pedals at once – told him the exact opposite.

(Young was once similarly confident that a high-profile 1998 fatal crash involving a Ford police van in Minneapolis was a case of driver error, until he learned months later that an aftermarket device often used by police to keep brake lights flashing disabled the shift lock. This allowed the vehicles to surge forward upon gear engagement without touching the pedal.  The story of this crash and the agency’s subsequent findings are detailed in a Wall Street Journal article from November 1, 1999:  “A Simple Case of Sudden Acceleration – Or So It Seemed at First to Bob Young.”)

This assumption in the primacy of mechanical causes in Toyota UA incidents snakes it way through several subsequent NHTSA investigations – regardless of the absence of evidence or contradictory evidence. It’s woven into a conversation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, trying to make sense of the January 2004 deaths of George and Maureen Yago in their 2002 Camry XLE.

Two witnesses following the Yagos into a casino parking garage said that they saw the vehicle pull slowly into a space and come to a stop (observing that the Camry’s brake lights were lit), when the vehicle suddenly took off, and shot off the fourth floor.

NHTSA never investigated this death. Nonetheless, ODI investigators speculated about causes with the police. According to the police report, ODI investigator Steve Chan carefully explained that “in the past two years there have been numerous complaints about a problem with the 2002 and 2003 model year Toyota Camrys. The complaint stems from a sudden acceleration problem, supposedly, operators of this type of vehicle have been slowing down or stopping, and suddenly, the car accelerates. In the previous complaints, some of the incidents had resulted in a collision, this was the first death. Chan explained how in 2002, Toyota went to a new type of accelerator. In the previous years, a gas pedal was connected to the engine via some type of cable or linkage. In 2002, the gas pedal is now connected to some type of a pedal position sensor, this sensor is in turn connected to wires, these wires connect to the cars computer, there are more wires which connect to some type of a servo or actuator. This connects to the engine to control the engine RPMs. After this change is when these type of incidents started to occur.”

But, then the conversation turns to pedal misapplication, and that is where it is left:

“Although, it does need to be brought up, there may have been other changes which coincided with this modification, changes such as pedal or seating position changes. We spoke about misapplication, being a possible cause of these types of collisions, misapplication is where a person goes to step on the brake, but is actually pushing on the gas. As the vehicle accelerates forward, the driver panics, and pushes down harder because the vehicle is not stopping, the vehicle only accelerates more, so until the driver realizes what is going on and lifts off the gas, or what happens more often is, they hit something. Although I do not have any current statistics, the type of case where a collision results predominantly occurs with the elderly. Plus their reaction times are slower and by the time they realize what is occurring a collision has occurred. [Chan] did not have any information on the ages of the drivers involved in their complaints, during my inspection of the gas pedal, locations of this vehicle, it seemed to me the pedals were extremely close. Furthermore, they appeared to be at the same height. It seemed to me a person could easily push on both pedals at the same time, and not know it. This would lead to a driver accelerating while braking.”

It shows up in the agency’s decision to deny a 2008 petition from William Kronholm, a Tacoma owner who experienced two brief UAs in his 2007 truck. Kronholm said that NHTSA investigators pushed pedal misapplication as a cause, because he was wearing ski boots at the time. An attempt to hit both pedals at once showed Kronholm, just as it showed Bob Young four years earlier, that he would have to move his foot into an unnatural position. For Kronholm, this was evidence that dual pedal application was not a cause.  Investigators, however, took pains to mention dual pedal application in their denial of Kronholm’s petition.

It culminated in the denial of an April 2009 petition from, Jeffrey Pepski, a Lexus ES 350 owner from Minnesota. Pepski asked the agency to re-open its probe of UA in Lexus vehicles equipped with electronic throttle control, and criticized it for focusing narrowly on all-weather floor mat interference. Pepski’s incident occurred at high speed in a vehicle that was only outfitted with a standard carpet mat. Although he had tried pumping and pulling up the accelerator with his foot, he could not stop the acceleration. Pepski requested “an additional investigation of model years 2002-2003 Lexus ES 300 for those ‘longer duration incidents involving uncontrollable acceleration where brake pedal application allegedly had no effect.’”

On May 5, about a week before Toyota would send an official response to NHTSA, one of Toyota’s Washington staffers, Chris Santucci sent an investigation status report to colleague According to Santucci, NHTSA was looking for help in crafting a denial:

“For background, NHTSA did inspect the petitioner’s vehicle. While they did not see clearly the witness marks of the carpeted floor mat on the carpet in the forward, unhooked position, they do suspect that the floor mat was responsible for the petitioner’s issue.”

“I have discussed our rebuttal with them, and they are welcoming of such a letter, They are struggling with sending an IR letter, because they shouldn’t ask us about floormat issues because the petitioner contends that NHTSA did not investigate throttle issues other than floor mat-related. So they should ask us for non-floor mat related reports, right? But they are concerned that if they ask for these other reports, they will have many reports that just cannot be explained, and since they do not think that they can explain them, they don’t really want them. Does that make sense? I think it is good news for Toyota.”

Jeff Pepski is adamant that the carpeted floor mat played no role in his incident. In an e-mail to SRS he said:

“My incident occurred on February 3, 2009. My petition to NHTSA was dated March 13, 2009 and I met with the NHTSA reps [Bill Collins and Stephen McHenry with the DOT] and Toyota rep [Mike Zarnecki, the Field Technical Specialist from the Lexus Central Area Office] on May 1, 2009. Since no chain of evidence existed, the possibility of any observable witness marks as of May 1 would be remote and the level of reliability would be non-existent. All three parties were present when I asked Mike Zarnecki to demonstrate how the floor mats could have possibly caused the accelerator pedal to become entrapped. After much manual manipulation of the floor mat, he was able to show how it may occur. At my request he pulled up and pushed down on the gas pedal; the floor mat immediately became free. I explained that the SUA that I experienced did not cease after I had done the same while driving on February 3. If the floor mat had entrapped the accelerator pedal as all three claimed, the vehicle would have stopped accelerating after dislodging the floor mat. The SUA I experienced continued as the floor mat was not the cause.”

Once again, NHTSA investigators were confronted with a direct observation that floor mat interference was not a probable cause of this incident. Toyota had never identified carpeted floor mats in Lexus vehicles as a cause of UA; nor had it ever recalled carpet mats in Lexus vehicles. Yet, months after the incident, ODI still wanted to believe that Pepski’s event was just another case of mechanical interference, and was uninterested in receiving information that challenged that belief.

Systematic and scientific metrics to determine what to investigate remain undeveloped. Instead, ODI relies on a system of “feelings.”

Since the agency never developed its own knowledge base of automotive electronics, it is wholly dependent on the representations of manufacturers. While automakers are always going to know much more about how their vehicles work than any outside entity, NHTSA appears ill-equipped to challenge even the falsehoods that are easy to detect. During the early Toyota investigations of 2003 and 2004, the automaker insisted that the UA events showing up in consumer complaints could not be electronic, because the failsafe system had not detected them, and set a Diagnostic Trouble Code. This was the gospel according to the Silver Book – at least two simultaneous and detectable faults would have to occur for the cruise control electronics to cause a sudden acceleration; and that, in the absence of such detectable faults, the most ‘plausible explanation was driver pedal error.

Toyota knew that errors could occur without setting a DTC. (For example, in an unrelated investigation into unpredictable engine failure in 2005-2008 Corollas, Toyota submitted multiple field technical reports showing problems that the ECU did not catch and record.) In a matter of hours, Dr. David Gilbert, an automotive electronics professor from Southern Illinois University and Toyota owner, showed that the accelerator pedal position sensor’s circuitry could allow the vehicle could go to a wide open throttle without the ECM catching the error. Automotive techs know that a vehicle can have a problem with no code and a code with no problem. Yet NHTSA readily accepted Toyota’s representations about the infallibility of its system.  The agency remains far behind in its understanding of complex vehicle electronics engineering and diagnostics, unable to refute or fruitfully examine potential malfunctions.

It can also be seen in the agency’s hiring decisions – ODI is still the province of mechanical engineers. Only after it was shamed in Congressional hearings about its lack of electronics expertise did it move to acquire a little. And because it doesn’t understand what it is supposed to be investigating, NHTSA doesn’t seem to understand what it should be regulating. Or is it the other way around? In either case, we are still awaiting the resumption of rulemaking around FMVSS 124 accelerator controls, written in 1972.

When Ford decided to bury evidence of the electronic root causes of UA, within the company and without, it helped to freeze the agency’s understanding of how to diagnose and remedy this difficult defect. This legal decision is as good an explanation as any for why, when it comes to automotive electronics, the agency isn’t even in the ballpark, let alone the ball game.

Researchers Bhanu Sood, Michael Osterman and Michael Pecht studied a pedal assemblies performed a physical analysis of an engine control system from a 2005 Camry XLE, V-6 and an accelerator pedal assembly from a defunct 2002 Camry. The 2005 engine control system included the ECM, an accelerator pedal unit, throttle body, electrical connectors and electrical connecting cables.

This tear-down of the accelerator pedal position sensors (APPS) in both Camrys revealed tin whisker formations. Tin whiskers are crystalline structures emanating from tin solder that can produce electrical shorts and current leakage, and have been associated with numerous electronic failures.  The trio of researchers did not have access to the vehicles’ history, so it was not known if the presence of tin whiskers was associated with any malfunctions during the life of either car.

“We were looking at the overall manufacturing of assembly circuit and looking for what level of construction had the potential for defects throughout the entire engine control system,” says Osterman, Senior Research Scientist and the director of the CALCE Electronic Products and System Consortium.

CALCE’s analysis, published in the current issue of the international journal Circuit World, lends support to the work of NASA scientists who found tin whiskers growing in the accelerator pedal unit of every potentiometer they examined. The February report, Technical Support to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the Reported Toyota Motor Corporation Unintended Acceleration Investigation, was unclear on the subject of the total sample; NASA found tin whiskers growing in the APPSs of either three or four Camrys. One was associated with a vehicle in which the consumer reported that her pedal was ‘jumpy” and that the vehicle was “completely undriveable.” However, based on an analysis of warranty data which was performed by Toyota’s defense expert, Exponent, NHTSA concluded that the presence of tin whiskers did not represent a safety hazard. (see How NHTSA and NASA Gamed the Toyota Data)

On this point, the CALCE scientists sharply diverged. CALCE researchers have been examining the tin whisker phenomenon since 2002, looking at mitigation strategies, growth patterns and tin whisker failures. In addition, they have published widely on the subject of intermittent failures in automotive electrical environments and the difficulties manufacturers face in isolating their root causes. On this study, researchers found as many as six tin whiskers growing on one APPS. Unlike NESC, which used warranty data (secret, time-limited, and otherwise unreliable) as the basis for determining the prevalence of tin whiskers in the fleet and its effect on safety, CALCE used its algorithm and came up with the opposite conclusion:

“In our analysis, a significant number of tin whiskers were found. Using the CALCE Whisker Risk Calculator (CALCE) Tin Whisker Risk Calculator, 2005) to assess the failure risk posed by observed tin whisker formation on the conductor pairs, it was determined that the potential for a tin whisker shorting failure was 140/1 million. Considering the number of vehicles on the road, it is expected that this would present a significant safety hazard.”

In addition to tin whisker formation in the APPS, the CALCE researchers found the potential for tin whisker formation in the ECM:

“The ECM contains surface mount electronic devices connected with tin-lead solder to a multilayer PCB. … Interconnect terminals of the perimeter leaded devices were found to be plated with tin. In addition, tin plating was found on terminal pins of the edge connections. As previously discussed, tin-finished leads can grow tin whiskers which can lead to unintended electrical shorts.”

“We know whiskers can form on tin finished terminals,” Osterman said. “In this case, Toyota has tin plating in a rather sensitive area, where the system relies on changes in resistance to provide a signal for acceleration.”

In their discussion about the printed circuit board manufacturing processes of Toyota Camrys, CALCE scientists questioned the lack of a safety standard regarding automotive electronics, given broad range of whisker-induced failures. They were openly critical of NHTSA’s lack of action.

“It is highly likely that tin whiskers could induce a failure that is later undetected. For this reason, best practices for electronics design stipulate that tin not be used as a plating material. It is very questionable why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with a stated mission to ‘save lives, prevent injuries and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards, and enforcement activity,’ has not come out with a requirement that no electronics use pure tin as a material component, since the potential for tin whiskers presents an unreasonable and unnecessary risk.”

Alice and Randy Whitfield of Quality Control Systems Corporation, ever the assiduous students of NHTSA’s statistical and informational folkways, went for broke. Shortly after the reports were released, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for non-redacted versions of the reports and supporting material that was missing from the record. In response, NHTSA publicly released some of the information in the form of less redacted versions of Technical Assessment of Toyota Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) Systems and Technical Support to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the Reported Toyota Motor Corporation Unintended Acceleration Investigation, but continued to withhold other information.

In April, NHTSA rejected a QCS FOIA request for an unredacted copy of the NESC report, its appendices and other unpublished reports mentioned in the footnotes. The agency subsequently denied the Whitfields’ appeal for some of the materials because “the Agency properly determined that the currently redacted materials are entitled to confidential treatment under FOIA Exemption 4.” Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act is industry’s best friend, permitting the removal from the public record information containing confidential business secrets. NHTSA apparently is Toyota’s second best friend, because it has rarely denied the automaker’s requests for confidentiality on this basis – even when the information doesn’t qualify. The Whitfields noted that they had already found former redactions that had nothing to do with business secrets, like “production counts of Toyota Camrys which had been available on NHTSA’s own website for years.”

But what the government withholdeth, the Google giveth.

Alice and Randy Whitfield have posted a new brief report about their adventures in NHTSA information mining, Keeping Secrets about NASA’s “Toyota Study” of Unintended Acceleration. The Whitfields found via a Google search unredacted portions of the documents they sought. They were struck by the redaction in one sentence of the NASA report’s Appendix A about data losses on the Controller Area Network (CAN):    “Occurrences of CAN data loss are recorded in SRAM and remain available until the battery is disconnected. According to Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) 292 instances were reported of CAN data loss by dealers for cars brought in for any problem. REDACTION.”

So what was so critical to Toyota’s ability to maintain its competitive edge that neither its rivals nor the great unwashed could see? Here’s the rest of it:

“Possible correlation of these incidences with UA cases was not checked.”

This discovery is of a piece with the general Swiss cheese-like nature of the NHTSA-NASA reports. Scratch the surface and you find:

- NHTSA relied on Toyota’s defense litigation experts, Exponent, for a warranty analysis used to dismiss the significance of physical evidence of an electronic cause of UA in some Toyotas. This conflict of interest was not disclosed.

- NHTSA and NASA based analyses on miscoded data and unsupported assumptions while failing to record and maintain the original data it was based on, preventing replication.

- NHTSA/NASA withheld from public view pieces of their report that are not related to Toyota’s confidential business.

That’s strike three. How many are yet to be discovered? We’ll all keep scratching.

In his withering decision, Senior Judge William T. Swigert of the Fifth Judicial Circuit in Sumter County, Florida ordered a new trial in which the jury would only consider compensatory and punitive damages in Stimpson v. Ford. The post-trial order is a victory for Attorney Thomas J. Murray, of Murray & Murray based in Sandusky, Ohio, who represented the Stimpson family.

The case concerned an October 28, 2003 crash which left Peggy Stimpson permanently paralyzed. Her husband alleged that he was unable to stop the couple’s 1991 Ford Aerostar, when it suddenly accelerated from their carport as he put the van into gear. The Aerostar hurtled more than 100 feet, and crashed into a utility pole.

In his 51-page decision, Judge Swigert excoriated Ford for systematically concealing a long history, stretching back to the 1970s, of studying the problem of electromagnetic interference and unintended acceleration, working to resolve it, but nonetheless finding many instances of it in the real world. Swigert enumerated each step Ford took in achieving a high level of corporate malfeasance – among them, lying to NHTSA, systematically destroying field technical reports that identified electromagnetic interference with the cruise control servo as a cause of unintended acceleration and misleading its own experts, who have repeatedly testified in other cases that driver error had to be the cause of such events.

“The proofs introduced at trial include various patents owned by Ford showing that electronic malfunctions in the cruise control system can cause sudden, unintended acceleration, in addition to reports from Ford’s engineers, including SIRs and CQIS reports, diagnosing sudden acceleration as a problem with the cruise control system. Ford’s Ishikawa engineering diagram likewise shows that EMI is a cause of sudden unintended acceleration.”

Swigert’s decision also rapped Ford’s Counsel J. Randolph Bibb for accusing the Stimpson’s attorney of lying and withholding the results of expert witness tests conducted to show what caused the tire marks left by the Stimpson’s Aerostar as it rocketed out of the carport. Both sides agreed that testimony regarding the tests would not be introduced, since they had not been recorded. But at trial, Ford’s attorney brought them up in a cross-examination and in his closing arguments, suggesting that the results had been withheld from the jury because they were unfavorable to the Stimpsons’ theory of the case.

We will recount the history of Ford’s concealment in all of its ignominious detail in a future blog post, and its implications for the much-relied-upon conclusions of the1989 An Examination of Sudden Acceleration, known within NHTSA as “The Silver Book.” Manufacturers, such as Ford, have been waving this tome in front of juries in UA cases, as proof positive of driver error. Judge Swigert, weighing it against Ford’s knowledge of electronic causes of unintended acceleration, as sketched by the internal documents and Ford employee testimony that the plaintiffs introduced at trial, was not impressed. He found it was based on false information and untested assumptions, for which no empirical evidence existed.

Stimpson V. Ford:  Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Memorandum Decision

Stimpson V. Ford: Order on Plaintiffs’ Motion for Relief from Judgement, Partial Final Judgement in Favor of Plaintiffs on Liability, and Order Conditionally Granting New Trial.

In April 2010, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hired the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s NASA Engineering Safety Center (NESC) to conduct a hunt for possible electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles. The two agencies’ final reports, released in February, declared that it was unlikely that electronics were at the root the many unintended acceleration complaints. In May, Safety Research & Strategies published its response to the federal government effort in a special edition of The Safety Record: An Examination of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Engineering Safety Center Assessment and Technical Evaluation of Toyota Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) Systems and Unintended Acceleration.

SRS’s report noted that the most remarkable discovery of the NHTSA-NASA Toyota Unintended Acceleration investigation was the presence of tin whiskers on every potentiometer-type accelerator pedal they examined. Tin whiskers are crystalline structures, many times thinner than a human hair, which form on the tin solder used on printed circuit boards. They are mighty inconvenient for electronics manufacturers, having been known to produce all kinds of varied and unpredictable electronic malfunction such as shutting down nuclear reactors, satellites and medical devices – to name a few examples.

They proved to be mighty inconvenient to NHTSA-NESC team, too. Not only did they discover the presence of tin whiskers on every potentiometer pedal examined, the researchers actually found them on a pedal tied to a vehicle that had experienced multiple instances of UA. With one promising root cause right there on the lab bench, most scientists who practice their vocation with rigor might have expanded their sample beyond several pedals to determine incidence in the field. They might have looked for tin whiskers in the throttle bodies or ECMs – other components of the engine system that could lead to a throttle malfunction. Instead, NHTSA turned to Exponent, the science-for-hire firm Toyota’s legal team retained to defend the company in class action lawsuits.

Neither agency disclosed this conflict-of-interest. NHTSA claimed that it performed the warranty analysis.

The Whitfields, unpacked the data supporting the alleged Trouble-Not-Found conclusions and they were particularly struck by this:

“It is also extraordinary that the NASA-NESC team, as safety experts, would look upon secret, warranty data reported by a manufacturer’s litigation experts as evidence of the lack of corroboration of an electronics cause of unintended acceleration. This is especially true because the compromised, safety-critical, electronic circuitry was discovered in an accelerator pedal sensor assembly examined in a NASA laboratory… Only NASA’s and NHTSA’s analysis of the complaint data in relation to the secret, warranty data is cited to support the lack of relevance of these findings to public health and safety… It is difficult to imagine NASA itself accepting assurances from a manufacturer of its own spacecraft that similar problems in important safety systems should be regarded as inconsequential. Yet it is the NASA-NESC report on which NHTSA relied to close its investigation,” the Whitfields wrote in their report.

The Quality Control Systems Corp. report also lays bare the extraordinary approach NHTSA and NESC employed when looking at the numbers. Simply put, government researchers postulated that an electronic malfunction that could cause a UA not detected by the engine’s diagnostic system would most likely be the result of two simultaneous faults. A single fault in the electrical system would most certainly be noted by the engine control module and set a Diagnostic Trouble Code (DTC). They further postulated that single faults would be more common that double faults. There are many driving conditions under which drivers have reported UAs, but this study focused on large throttle openings, accompanied by degraded or ambiguous braking.

Then, they looked at two pools of data – consumer UA complaints lodged with NHTSA via its Vehicle Owner Questionnaire (VOQ). This data represented the double-fault, no DTC scenario. The second pool was composed of warranty claims. This represented the single-fault, DTC-set scenario.

The NHTSA-NESC team established a rule for their analysis: if the number of warranty claims was greater than the number of VOQs, this would indicate that electronics was a root cause. But if more consumers complained to NHTSA about Toyota UA than received a warranty repair for an accelerator pedal-related problem, then that would be proof that electronics was not a cause.

Neither agency looked at reporting rates, which would have given context to summary counts. Since this rule was a straight-up computation exercise using raw numbers, the amount that accumulated in each data pool was critical to the result.

The Whitfields attempted to examine the specific VOQ dataset NHTSA used in this analysis. But, only five months after publishing what was billed as the most exacting defect study the agency has ever performed in its history, NHTSA responded to the Whitfields that they didn’t retain the set of Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) numbers assigned to each VOQ. The agency did agree to try to replicate it for the Whitfields, and an examination of the VOQs provided yielded an interesting observation: NHTSA inflated the pool of VOQ complaints by including VOQs in which braking was reportedly effective.

The Whitfields also questioned agencies’ use of consumer narratives to determine precise throttle openings and they raised doubts that throttles could have been wide open, when drivers report no problems bringing their vehicles to a stop with the brakes.

So, we have inflated complaint counts. What about the warranty claim counts? Here is where everything comes full circle. In April 2010, when Toyota was crouched in a defensive posture while U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman and the press ensured that Toyota had a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, every day, The Safety Record Blog published a week’s worth of posts (see Manufacturing Doubt in Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration) based on OSHA director and Assistant Secretary of Labor David Michaels’ book: Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. We wrote admiringly of Michaels documentation of industry artfully draping its interests with science’s mantle. How they use firms like Exponent to come up with “scientific” results to help corporations and entire industries beat plaintiffs in lawsuits or cowl the government into dialing back regulation. Michaels wrote:

“Their business model is straightforward. They profit by helping corporations minimize public health and environmental protection and fight claims of injury and illness. In field after field, year after year, this same handful of individuals and companies comes up again and again. The range of their work is impressive. They have on their payrolls or can bring in on a moment’s notice toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors the work has one overriding motivation: advocacy for the sponsor’s position in civil court, the court of public opinion and the regulatory arena.”

“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.”

Toyota has followed the playbook well. What remains stunning is NHTSA and NASA’s participation in the process and their willingness to co-opt their own reputations.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the full report.

And son of a gun if Toyota didn’t release its long awaited quality report on the same day! (A little awkward, we know.) This panel of Very Serious People outside of the company was charged with the task of evaluating just what went wrong:

“The Charter directs the Panel to conduct a thorough and independent review of the soundness of these processes and provide its assessment to Toyota’s senior management.”

The 60-page result, A Road Forward: The Report of the Toyota North American Quality Advisory Panel was pretty much a re-hash of everything that has already been reported, and largely air-brushed at that.

The panel did find some room for improvement, and we liked the part about Toyota’s response to outside critics: “First, while it is clear that Toyota applies the TPS [Toyota Production System] process and the Toyota Way to problems or flaws found internally, Toyota does not appear to treat feedback from external sources, including customers, independent rating agencies, and regulators, the same way.” SRS must have been dropped from that list.  “For example, it doesn’t appear that Toyota applied genchi genbutsu [go and see] as quickly and thoroughly as it could have in investigating and seeking out the root causes of customer complaints regarding issues such as UA.” Instead it reacted to customer complaints with “skepticism” and “defensiveness.” Would hiring a well-connected public relations firm to smear SRS count as skepticism or defensiveness? What about charging down to Southern Illinois University to scare the begeebers out of Professor Dave Gilbert’s bosses? (This stuff was no doubt edited from the final version.)

We personally had a lot of fun reading the footnotes – 160 of them – to see what heretofore unknown documents contributed to this deep dive into the quality problems plaguing the world’s number one automaker.  Let’s see: A lot of Toyota press releases, some NHTSA press releases and news clippings; a few books about the Toyota company culture you can buy on Amazon and the NHTSA and NASA reports.

The panel was positively cheerful about the last two. It cited them as the number one reason to feel optimistic about the quality of Toyota vehicles: “..extensive testing and analysis by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have revealed no electronic problems or software errors that could have resulted in unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.”

Geez, we know that a lot of scientific words can be off-putting, but did anyone read that NESC report? We mean the whole thing. We read it and re-read it, and it doesn’t inspire confidence in Toyota’s electronics.

At least one panel member, Brian O’Neill, former president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, might have read it. In a story by Bloomberg News about the report, O’Neill averred that perhaps the safety of Toyota’s electronics had not been so definitively settled.

“There’s still a serious debate as to whether these were serious safety problems,” O’Neill said.

It was written amid cocktails and at more sobering and highly-scripted venues inside the Newseum, the 250,000 square-foot monument to journalism in Washington DC.  If Edmund’s is going to author the new chapter on safety, consumers beware.

In the conference brochure, Edmund’s CEO Jeremy Anwyl tells participants that the Toyota Unintended Acceleration crisis was the impetus for the meeting: “Edmunds.com watched as a shallow conversation made international headlines. We felt uneasy about the lack of real discussion taking place among smart people with the power to change laws, introduce technology and educate drivers.”

We have felt that same unease. Alas, the Truly Safe conference did nothing to dispel the queasiness. In fact, the event made the hair at the back of our necks prickle with alarm – particularly the portion devoted to understanding the facts and what are purported to be the facts about Toyota Unintended Acceleration. Suggestions that electronics may have played a role were quickly dismissed. Instead, Anwyl reiterated his belief that driver error was the predominant cause. Neither he nor the conference’s roster of believers discussed or introduced any scientific data. For example, the “smart people” at the conference ignored the data which show that the complaint rates for the Camry, Tacoma, and Lexus ES skyrocketed in the same year those vehicles switched from mechanical to electronic throttles – before, after, and during the intense media coverage.  How can this be explained? Anwyl singled out this specific question for scorn.

Also absent was any discussion of the actual NASA findings – not Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s reductio ad absurdum claim that the reports exonerated Toyota’s electronics.  There was no science, no evidence, no statistical analyses, no discussion of the details or nuances of engine management system design, validation, and vehicle mitigation testing. In other words, Edmunds presided over yet another shallow conversation – at, no doubt, premium prices. (Who did foot the bill for that conference?)

Driver error was the theme of the day. Indeed, driver behavior is a wild card in auto safety. But allow us a moment to adjust our tin-foil hats and get serious.

The two biggest auto safety crises in the last decade were Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Ford/Firestone tire tread separation rollovers.  Both grew to mammoth proportions as public safety issues in an environment of antiquated and non-existent safety standards. They serve as a roadmap for the auto safety crises that inevitably erupt when there are no relevant safety standards.

You may recall that the most popular and best-selling SUV, the Ford Explorer, equipped with their original equipment Firestone tires, was prone to rollovers after tread separations, killing its occupants. The Firestone Radial ATX and Wilderness radial tires met all of the federal regulations at the time. Unfortunately, the standards belonged to another era of tire technology, when bias-plies were the norm. As for the controls on the Explorer side of the equation, well, there were no federal standards for occupant protection in rollovers. There was no minimum stability standard for Sport Utility Vehicles, a new breed of station wagon with a high-center of gravity based on a truck platform.  Industry fought off any regulations, even as the rollover death tolls in light trucks rose to epidemic levels.  (Rollovers accounted for 8 percent of light vehicle crashes, but accounted for 31 percent of all occupant fatalities.[1])

A series of gruesome high-profile crashes and some pointed news stories about the safety of Ford Explorers and Firestone tires compelled NHTSA to begin investigating. After Ford’s secret overseas tire recalls came to light, the automaker launched a series of campaigns to replace the Firestone tires. Ford insisted that the tires bore all the blame. NHTSA insisted that there were no reasons to examine the role of America’s then-best selling SUV in these tire-related fatal crashes. But the problem was more complex than NHTSA or Ford cared to admit. After all the tires were replaced, Explorer tire-related rollover deaths and injuries did not abate. In fact, independent analyses of crash data shows that the recalls and replacement campaigns by Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone did not achieve long-term effectiveness in eliminating tire-related deaths in the Ford Explorer fleet. ( http://quality-control.us/explorer_tire_fatalities.html)  If the tires were the only problem, what explains the post-recall death toll?

A decade later, the lack of a regulatory framework laid the foundation for an eerily similar scenario. Complaints of unintended acceleration dogged Toyota for six years, but NHTSA’s defect investigators can find nothing wrong. Toyota vehicles meet the federal accelerator controls standard, FMVSS 124 – only it was penned in 1972 when throttles still had cables. In the 1990s, many safety-critical mechanical automobile control systems moved to electronics systems, which rely on sophisticated sensors, computer processors and software, interpret the demands to deliver outputs needed in a driving environment. The agency attempted to upgrade the standard, but again, industry fought off any changes. In a federal rulemaking, NHTSA summarized their arguments:  “In general, the comments of vehicle and engine manufacturers did not address the specific questions in the notice. Instead, they voiced a preference for rescinding the standard altogether, suggesting that market forces and litigation pressure are sufficient to assure fail-safe performance without a Federal motor vehicle safety standard.”[2]

Then, a high-profile crash kills California Highway Patrolman and his family. The media questions the safety of Toyota’s electronics in some of the most popular vehicles produced by the number-one automaker in the world.  NHTSA investigates and finds causes no more complicated than errant floor mats, sticky pedals and driver error. And after all the floor mats and pedals are replaced, problems continue.  Two occupants died in a November 2010 unintended acceleration crash in Utah, after the two surviving witnesses in the vehicle report that the driver tried repeatedly to disengage the cruise control and apply the brake as he exited a highway off ramp. There was no floor mat interference.  This is but one of many incidents that can’t be adequately explained by NHTSA or Toyota under their pet theories.

The lack of safety requirements set the stage for both the Ford/Firestone and Toyota UA crises. Rulemaking is the process by which NHTSA develops its institutional understanding of vehicle technology and functional outcomes. Without that critical step, automakers are left to their own devices; the agency is left behind the technological curve. And when bad design and manufacturing processes kill and injure, and NHTSA is called upon to ferret out a defect, it is ill-prepared to do so. The more widespread the defect and more expensive the remedy, the more likely it is that the agency will settle for a fix it thinks it can get – whether it solves the full problem or not.

These crises involved popular, high-volume models made by companies who actively opposed the regulatory structure that could have prevented the damage to their reputations and bottom lines and to their customers. In both cases, solutions are complex and expensive. How do you prevent or minimize the loss of control crashes that follow tread separations on an Explorer?  How do you prevent unwanted events that find their way through an electronic architecture lacking robust failsafe design?  Both are economically prohibitive for the wealthiest corporations.  What is more tenable?  Put the money into fighting a small defects office in a government agency ill-equipped to independently understand the issues and build your campaign around fighting the litigation and building good public relations.

Unfortunately, high-drama defects siphon NHTSA’s resources from planned injury reduction priorities.  Absent regulation and investigators with detailed understanding of current technology, the crises will continue to occur, starting the cycle anew.

If Edmund’s had any desire to start a real conversation about auto safety, first it would educate itself about regulatory history, automotive design and defect investigation, instead of announcing silly contests. If Edmund’s wanted to host a serious discussion about improving auto safety, its CEO would actually entertain opposing points of view, instead of shutting them down with Kennedy assassination conspiracy zingers. If Edmund’s wants data-driven discussion then how about actually discussing some data?

It doesn’t. Edmund’s wants to sell cars. And, as any good salesman knows, you gotta make the customer think you care.