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.”

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.

Why did you buy back Tim Scott’s 2007 Lexus RX? We mean, really? You gave him a bunch of different reasons, but he doesn’t believe you. (We’re finding it a little hard to swallow, too.)

Awaiting your reply,

SRS

Here’s Tim Scott’s story. In early December, as NHTSA and NASA were putting the finishing touches on their reports saying that there is nothing wrong with Toyota’s electronics or software, Scott experienced an unintended acceleration event in his 2007 Lexus RX350, on his way home from the gym. Here’s the narrative that Scott, 46, the chief financial officer for the International Union of Police Associations, wrote:

“At approx. 8:05 am on Thursday, December 2nd I was stopped behind a school bus that was picking up children at the intersection of Sarasota Square Blvd and Crockers Lake Blvd in Sarasota, FL. After the bus cleared the intersection (1-2 min wait) I gave the car enough gas to make the right hand turn onto Crockers Lake Blvd. which is only approx. 150-200 ft in length. I estimate the speed was between 10-15 mph when I began braking to make the left hand turn into the Citation Club Apartments when I noticed the vehicle was not slowing. I pressed the brake pedal harder and the car continued to pull against the brakes. As I approached the end of Crockers Lake Blvd I had both feet on the brakes and the car was slowing, however the engine was “screaming” and the tachometer was approaching to “red-line”. I managed to make the left hand turn and as the car slowed I shifted it into park to stop it. The engine was screaming so I turned the ignition to the off position. I attempted to restart the vehicle and it immediately red-lined again; I immediately turned the car off. At this time two employees of Citation Club approached me on the passenger side in a service golf cart and asked what was wrong. I indicated I didn’t know but they should “hear this” at which time I started the car again and it again red-lined. I immediately turned the ignition off. One of the Citation Club employees told me they would push me out of the entrance area to prevent my vehicle from being struck should someone attempt to enter the complex. Once safely parked, I exited the vehicle and immediately checked to be sure the floor mats were still secured by the anchors; they were. I looked for any type of obstruction near the accelerator and found none.”

The dealership, Wilde Lexus, however did find a problem – they found three different problems. Or, rather, one problem that changed three times. First, they told him that his vehicle was equipped with the wrong carpet mats. Then they told him that the floor mats were the right size, but that they were “bunched up” around the accelerator. Then they told him that the driver’s side floor mat appeared to dislodge a section of molding that obstructed the accelerator. So – wrong-size floor mats, bunched up floor mats, then dislodged molding. Are you with us?

About a week later, the dealership informed him that even though they had isolated the problem to a carpeted floor mat, Lexus was sending a team of engineers to examine the vehicle. When the engineers arrived, they called Scott to ask if the accelerator was 25-percent or 50-percent depressed. The accelerator was zero-percent depressed – Scott was braking at the time the UA occurred.

Back to the narrative: “Late in the afternoon of December 20th I received a call from Lexus (Corporate) stating that the engineers had determined they ‘didn’t want to take any more chances with the vehicle on the road and that they wanted to purchase my vehicle back if I was interested.’ ”

Scott was interested – and stunned.

“I never anticipated hearing that out of the blue,” Scott told SRS. “It was supposedly a floor mat issue. I remember telling the service manager, ‘I find it hard to believe Toyota buys back cars because of a floor mat problem.’ ”

And today, the mystery deepened. Toyota announced more floor mat recalls and under-the-floor-mat and trim interference recalls!

First, Toyota added three more models to its earlier all-weather floor mat recalls (also see Toyota All-Weather Floor Mat Entrapment) to address the potential for unsecured or incompatible floor mat entrapment of the accelerator pedal: the 2003 through 2009 4Runner; 2008 through 2011 Lexus LX 570; and the 2010 RAV4.

Second, it announced a new safety recall of approximately 20,000 2006 and early 2007 Model Year GS 300 and GS 350 All-Wheel Drive vehicles to modify the shape of the plastic pad embedded in the driver’s side floor carpet, which apparently can be moved during a service operation, and interfere with the gas pedal.

Third, it announced a recall of 372,000 2004 through 2006 and early 2007 RX 330, RX 350, and RX 400h vehicles, and 397,000 2004 through 2006 Highlander and Highlander HV vehicles, to replace the driver’s side floor carpet cover and its two retention clips, because “if the forward retention Ilip used to secure the floor carpet cover, which is located in front of the center console, is not installed properly, the cover may lean toward the accelerator pedal and interfere with the accelerator pedal arm.”

And the freaky thing is – Toyota had already recalled the 2004-2005 and early 2006 Highlanders and 2004 – 2005 Lexus RX 330 and 2006 RX400h center console to replace the forward retention clip used to secure the floor carpet cover in front of the center console. In 2006 (06V253)!  The campaign warned: “The two Retaining Clips for the driver’s side forward Center Console (Floor Carpet Cover) can become loose. If both clips separate from the Floor Carpet Cover, the cover may lean toward the accelerator pedal, causing interference with the accelerator pedal rod. In the worst case, this condition may interfere with the accelerator pedal returning to the idle position and thus may increase the possibility of a crash.”

So is this a re-notification? The forward retention clip Toyota replaced five years ago is already breaking and they are worried about the rear clip, too? So many questions.

Now, Scott is no little old lady. He’s a strapping guy of 250 pounds who, as an RX owner, had been following all the Toyota news. The first thing he checked when he stopped his vehicle was the state of his carpet mats. They were secured, in place and nowhere near his accelerator.

“I don’t scare easy, but that scared the s—t out of me. If it had happened three minutes earlier, I would have plowed into the back of a school bus. I had all my weight on those brakes. The engine was screaming. And when I got the car to stop, I almost jumped out, because I thought it was going to explode,” he says “It’s a travesty what they are trying to do. The fact that there’s another massive round of recalls just underlines that there’s a problem. I don’t like that large corporations can get way with putting people’s lives in jeopardy.”

Obviously, Mr. Scott did not get the memo from Ray and his band of rocket scientists: all mechanical causes of unintended acceleration have already been identified and remedied. There are no electronic or software problems with Toyotas.

P.S. Toyota, we don’t know if truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction sure is more work to maintain.

Our database consists of incidents from the following sources:

- Consumer complaints to NHTSA through January 5, 2011

- Toyota-submitted claims from several NHTSA investigations into unintended acceleration

- Incidents reported by media organizations

- Consumer contacts made to our organization and others that are reporting incidents that they have received.

Every effort has been made to identify duplicate records and combine them.  However, often the reports do not provide enough detail to link incidents to other reports.  There are likely some duplicates among our records – if there are, they are few.

SRS’s database consists only of incidents reported from 1999 to the present (regardless of model year).  We have defined unintended acceleration as any incident in which the complainant reported an engine acceleration that was unintended – regardless of whether the car was in gear.  We understand that this is a broader inclusion than others have considered; however, it is important to review these in context of identifying trends.

Note that the incidents we are reporting only represent those that are in the public realm.  According to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in response to the Committee’s January 28, 2010, request for Toyota internal documents, Toyota produced a representative sample from a larger set of claims.  The Committee noted that 37,900 customer contact reports were identified by the company as “potentially related to sudden unintended acceleration.”

Fatalities and Injuries

We should note that we have taken a very conservative approach to the fatality count.  It is based on an assessment of the incident reports and represents deaths potentially related to unintended acceleration. In order to be included in the fatality count of 54 (up from 48 last reported by SRS on October 25, 2010), there must be surviving passengers from or witnesses to the crash, or investigations of the incident must have ruled out any medical conditions or crash characteristics that would have likely contributed to the incident and/or concluded that the crash was the result of a defect related to SUA. Incidents that are noted as simply loss of vehicle control or unexplained single vehicle crashes with no indication that a UA event occurred have not been included in this count. These criteria were used in our October 25 analyses, but are modified from our previous examinations, and are intended to provide as accurate a fatality count as possible. However, it is important to acknowledge that some incidents not included in this count are still potentially relevant to SUA.

It should be noted that from January 1, 1999, to January 5, 2011 an additional 82 crashes were reported, resulting in an additional 70 injuries and 98 deaths that have been excluded from our tally. These additional incidents represent crashes that speculate SUA; primarily these are crashes for which there are no witnesses or surviving passengers, or incidents that have not yet been investigated thoroughly.

The Post-Recall Problem

In order to examine the relationship between recall status of vehicle and reported incidents, we reviewed each complaint and coded whether or not the recall remedy had been conducted on the subject vehicle. Of the 6,496 reported incidents we reviewed, 384 were reported as occurring post-recall remedy – 6 percent of all complaints. Note that this is likely a conservative count since it is likely some of the reported incidents that do not note recall status occurred in post-recall vehicles.

The Media Effect

Recent reports have highlighted the drop in reported SUA events in Toyota vehicles during the second half of 2010. To examine this decrease in reported events, it is important to consider the factors that contributed to an increase in reporting in November 2009 and February 2010, and to examine the characteristics of the incidents that were reported during that time.

To gain insight into the decline in reported incidents, SRS examined a subsample of the data used in the analysis above. Specifically, SRS examined the relationship between date of report and date of incident in 5,547 consumer complaints to NHTSA, for which the agency had coded a precise incident date.

The figure below provides a breakdown of number of incidents, by calendar year of incident and calendar year reported, for complaints reported from 2004 to 2011. There is a clear increase in reporting in 2009 and 2010. What is notable about the reports in 2010 is how many involve incidents occurring in previous years.

The next figure illustrates the number of incidents, by calendar year of incident and month reported, for complaints reported in 2009 through 2011. Note that a large number of complaints submitted in February and March 2010 are incidents that occurred in previous years.

This demonstrates the effect of the media and NHTSA announcements of defect investigations on reporting. Rather than dismiss this media effect as creating events that otherwise wouldn’t exist, it is valuable to consider why reporting is so influenced by media reports, and why previous incidents went unreported prior to SUA media coverage. It seems likely that, without the media coverage about SUA, some consumers would never have heard about NHTSA’s consumer complaint hotline or NHTSA’s online systems for complaint intake or would not have known how to reach either. Compounding that factor is the dismissal of SUA claims by Toyota at the dealership and corporate levels.

Further, long before Toyota Unintended Acceleration problems were a staple of daily news headlines, SUA complaints among Toyota vehicles with Electronic Throttle Controls were significantly greater than among Toyota vehicles without ETC, according to a scientific analysis from Quality Control Systems Corp. (QCS).  (see “What NHTSA’s Data Can Tell Us about Unintended Acceleration and Electronic Throttle Control Systems” Oct. 11, 2010)

QSC released its first analysis in February 2010 (see “Electronic Throttle Control Systems In Toyota Consumer Complaints to NHTSA” Feb. 3, 2010) and presented it with new data in October to the National Academy of Sciences panel studying unintended acceleration. QSC tested the hypothesis that there is no indication of a throttle or electronic control system malfunction in Toyota models, recalled or not, in the NHTSA complaint data. The authors, Randy and Alice Whitfield, deliberately excluded complaints reported to the agency after the highly publicized August 2009 Saylor crash, which killed all four occupants in Santee, CA.

Toyota has insisted that there is no reason to believe that there could be an electronic cause of these sudden acceleration events.  However, QCS’ analysis finds that the proportion of consumer complaints related to vehicle speed control in the Toyota models studied – Camry, Tacoma, and Lexus ES – vehicles is substantially higher in those models with Toyota’s ETC system than it is for the same models without it.  The report also finds the proportion of reported speed control failures among complaints in the non-recalled Toyota Camry vehicles with ETC compared to the recalled Camry vehicles with ETC particularly troubling.

In the NAS presentation, Whitfield also examined the effect of publicity at various points that coincided with NHTSA investigations before the Saylor event.  For each of the vehicles studied, non-recalled vehicles with electronic throttle control show SUA complaint rates that are greater than those same vehicles without it.  The difference was statistically significant for the Toyota Camry and the Toyota Tacoma.

The February QCS report was supplemented by the new NAS presentation in a number of ways. Instead of relying strictly on the component coding of speed control related complaints, the narratives of the complaints were searched for key words and phrases indicative of unintended acceleration. The new analysis controlled for years in service by limiting the data to complaints about vehicles in the first calendar year after the production model year. Total numbers of unintended acceleration complaints were normalized based on vehicle production numbers reported by Toyota to NHTSA.  The data were not restricted to complaints with decodable VINs, and certain assumptions were used about engine design (with and without ETC) based on documents produced by Toyota to Congress for its investigation.  Like the February analysis, the new one was restricted for the period prior to the Saylor crash.

With these methodological changes, the association of electronic throttle control systems with unintended acceleration for the Toyota Camry, the Lexus ES 300 series, and the Toyota Tacoma appeared to be even more pronounced. Whitfield believes the assertion that “all” vehicles demonstrate unintended acceleration is very misleading because “all” vehicles don’t have the same rates of unintended acceleration.  Whitfield says that, “rate-based comparisons of unintended acceleration are helpful when they are based on theories related to actual differences in vehicle design.  This is because differences in rates of UA may be important clues in focusing engineering analyses on specific problems in design, manufacturing, and testing.”

The QCS presentation acknowledges that floor mat interference, sticky gas pedals, and driver error have played a role in some sudden acceleration events involving Toyota vehicles. This is based on the fact that some of the complaints frankly state owners’ opinions that these were causes for some of the incidents.  However, many other owners’ reports were adamant that these were not the causes of the unintended acceleration events, for example, in vehicles in which floor mats had been removed.  Since Whitfield looked at the effect of electronic control systems separately by model, he believes that electronic throttle control systems likely explain the disparity in complaint rates for the three models studied, to the extent that driver, environmental, and other vehicle-related effects can be ruled out by the study’s design.

This tough stance on recall timeliness is welcome – but does not resolve the larger issues raised by Toyota unintended acceleration – namely how defects are defined in the era of automotive electronics and how such defects are investigated when they are rare, multi-root-cause, and potentially deadly?

The dribble of documents released by the Multi-District Litigation and Congress so far show that UA has been duplicated by Toyota technicians and, contrary to attempts by Toyota advocates and agency investigators to pass off all incidents as driver error, sticky pedals, big shoes and floor mats, there are instances when reliable technical personnel take the vehicle for a test spin and experience UA with no pedal involvement. In fact, we have discovered that Toyota techs were able to duplicate UA in one of very public and widely debated case – but lied to the consumer about it. (We’ll feature that story in a future post.)

The root cause – or causes – of such instances remain obscured, for the moment. There are multiple possibilities. (We suspect that Toyota execs and technical staff in Japan have a much better idea of why these instances occur.) We know that Toyota has bought back vehicles that have experienced a UA event in front of dealership personnel for further testing. Independent testing and vehicle inspections continue to show Toyota’s fault detection software has some serious flaws – flaws that allow unwanted events to occur undetected and without activation of the failsafe features.  There are no regulations that govern the layers of safety need in today’s sophisticated vehicle electronics.  While some manufacturers follow strict multi-tiered safety strategies that catch inevitable (and sometimes rare) occurrences, Toyota appears to be missing some core layers.  How and whether this gets addressed will set the foundation for the future of motor vehicle defect investigations and recalls.

Eventually, this knot will be untangled – but by whom? The National Academy of Sciences is still working on its report. But the panelists aren’t experts in vehicle electronics and have an incredibly broad mandate to review everything from electronic controls design and reliability to environmental factors to cyber-security of automotive electronic control systems.  We don’t expect any revelations there. The Inspector General is looking at NHTSA’s investigatory process, and this work may yield some insight and suggested improvements. The joint NASA-NHTSA effort is scheduled to conclude in 2011.  NHTSA still has an open Recall Query, RQ10-003, to determine if Toyota too narrowly defined the defect in its two UA-related recalls.

And that takes us back to our first question. ODI investigators have traditionally been broken parts guys and gals. What happens if the defect is a line of code or a faulty detection strategy made of digital Swiss cheese? The agency itself may have to broaden the concept of defect to address the evolution of vehicle computer systems and electronics and whether rare events with serious consequences are safety-related defects under their mandate.

To our second question about investigations into a rare, random, and yet potentially deadly defects – the agency isn’t going to get anywhere until it catches up to today’s engine systems. Some of the agency’s public efforts to date, such as the “study” of SUA events using Event Data Recorders, showed how far NHTSA has to go. The agency mischaracterized the data and failed to address the many discrepancies in the readouts. Further, it omitted any context about the questionable reliability of Toyota’s EDRs and about the incidents it included.  The “results” didn’t add much of anything to the discussion other than blaring headlines that alleged NHTSA exonerated Toyota of electronic defects.

Toyota SUA has also exposed more regulatory fissures. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 124 Accelerator Controls has pretty much lost its relevance. Its purpose is: “to reduce deaths and injuries resulting from engine overspeed caused by malfunctions in the accelerator control system.” In 2005, NHTSA proposed amending it. But, the industry sought to rescind the standard, arguing that market forces and litigation pressure were sufficient to assure fail-safe performance without a safety standard. The agency terminated the rulemaking.

And, while these broad questions beg for answers, automakers are experimenting with even more sophisticated and integrated electronics.

ABC News got a hold of the amended complaint in the Multi-District Litigation and is reporting that Toyota bought back two of its vehicles after its own technicians replicated the SUA events, which were not caused by floor mats, driver error or sticky pedals. According to the ABC story, Toyota bought a 2009 Corolla in Texas and a 2009 Tacoma in California, urging the owners to keep quiet about it.

The source of these revelations is a legal foot-breaker of 725 pages. The discovery process has begun to peel back Toyota’s high-priced public relations veneer. And the complaint continues to fill in the outlines of an electronics problem SRS sketched months ago, using nothing more than the truncated public record. (Our most recent report “An Update of Toyota sudden Unintended Acceleration” is available on our website. It also documents Toyota buybacks that consumers who had experienced an SUA event had reported to us.)

Courtesy of the MDL, here are a few of the interesting tidbits to be found in the amended complaint:

An unidentified tech reports:

After traveling 20-30 feet the vehicle exhibited a slight hesitation then began to accelerate on its own. Engine speed was estimated to have gone from 1500 rpm to 5500 rpm at the time of the occurrence.

From an April 2006 field technical report on a 2007 Camry:

“Vehicle lunges forward when coming to a stop.

Diagnostic Steps:

• Drove vehicle at 55mph, got vehicle to go into 5^th gear, when slowing down and coming to stop, right at 5 mph the vehicle would lunge forward

• Drove vehicle in 4th gear, and when coming to a stop, once the vehicle reached 5mph, vehicle would lunge forward

• Drove vehicle in 3rd gear, and when coming to a stop, when the vehicle reached 5mph, vehicle would lunge forward

• Each of these test were complete with the A/C on and off, no change

Probable Cause

Unknown.”

Here’s a May 2007 note from a technical supervisor:

“(I) Have recently purchased a 2006 Avalon LTD and have experienced the hesitation problem. The situation is dangerous … not so much the hesitation as the lunge after the hesitation. Toyota had better get going quick as I predict this will result in numerous accidents and possible deaths. I have talked with my service manager and he said,

“they all do it.”

Regards,

Mike

Mike Robinson

Technical Supervisor, Quality Assurance Powertrain Group

Toyota/Lexus Product Quality & Service Support

“They all do it.” Hmm. That’s very different from some of Toyota’s confident public announcements. Why just recently, Steve St. Angelo, chief quality officer for North America, was telling reporters: “Toyota has not found a single case in which electronics would lead to sudden unintended acceleration.”

According to ABC, NHTSA didn’t find out about either of these instances until recently. Toyota technicians were witnessing and documenting SUA events from 2003 onward – malfunctions that set no DTCs. All the while, Toyota is touting its never-fail fault detection system to the agency, chatting up non-existent carpet floor mat witness marks in one petitioner’s Lexus to ODI investigators, claiming it had never heard of an instance of SUA that couldn’t be blamed on a floor mat, a pedal or an old lady.

We know that SUA is an emotionally charged issue, an investigatory black hole, a can o’ worms nobody at ODI really wanted to open, but one wonders: At what point does the agency get tired of being played?

[Note:  Corrections to this blog post can be found at the following:  The Corrections]

Today, NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation Division Chief Jeffrey Quandt stood before the National Academies of Sciences panel looking into electronic throttle controls and told the room that Kevin Haggerty’s SUA event was caused by a sticky accelerator pedal. His incident is one of the flies in Toyota’s ointment, because the service technicians witnessed the vehicle racing in neutral. (Actually, Toyota service technicians have observed and – at times – replicated other SUA complaints – Haggerty’s incident has just been the most public.) To recap:

Kevin Haggerty, owner of a 2007 Avalon, experienced SUA multiple times; he did not have accessory floor mats, and the OE mats were secured in place.

Haggerty reported five SUA events. Several times, the vehicle accelerated without his foot on the gas pedal. The engine would return to idle after driving a few miles or after the Avalon shut down and restarted or was stopped and put into park. Haggerty’s vehicle was checked at the dealership, but they could find nothing wrong. According to his NHTSA complaint:

“Then on 12/28/09 I was driving to work on a major highway. The car began to accelerate without my foot on the gas pedal. As I pushed on the brake, the car continued to accelerate. At that time I was not able to stop my vehicle by pressing hard on the brake. The only way I was able to slow the car down was to put the car into neutral. I took the next exit, which was the exit for the Toyota dealership. I called the dealership and told the service manager to meet me outside because I was experiencing acceleration problems. I drove approximately 5 miles by alternating from neutral to drive and pressing very firmly on the brakes. As I pulled into the front of the dealership I put the car into neutral and exited the car. With the brakes smoking from the excessive braking and the car’s rpm’s racing the manager entered my car. He confirmed that the mats were properly in place and confirmed the rpm’s were very high.”

The Haggerty incident was notable because Toyota technicians witnessed the vehicle engine racing at full-throttle, in neutral, and found no mechanical causes of the incident were found.  Subsequent interviews with Mr. Haggerty revealed that the Toyota dealer contacted Toyota’s regional representative in Caldwell, NJ who later inspected the vehicle.  The details of this inspection were not provided to the owner.  However, Toyota Motor Sales authorized replacement of the throttle body and accelerator pedal assemblies and sensors and paid for the $1700 repairs and rental car costs. The owner was told by the Toyota dealer that the vehicle’s computer had stored no error codes and they were unsure whether the repairs would fix the vehicle.

Haggerty had what’s called a long duration event at high speed. A sticky pedal is a pedal that is slow to return to idle. Vehicle speed doesn’t suddenly increase with a sticky pedal – as Haggerty’s did.  In fact, on February 23, Toyota Motor Sales President Jim Lentz told the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that sticky pedals don’t cause high-speed events. Here’s the exchange between Rep. Bart Stupak and Lentz:

“REP STUPAK: Do you have any analysis, any evidence that sticky pedals can cause a sudden, unintended acceleration?

MR. LENTZ:  It depends on the definition of “sudden.”  If it means that you can be depressing a pedal, take your foot off the pedal and the car continues its speed, it does cause that.

REP. STUPAK:  Quoting your counsel, “typically does not translate into a sudden high-speed acceleration event” — sticky pedals.  So sticky pedals really isn’t doing anything about sudden high-speed –

MR. LENTZ:  Not for high speed.”

After Haggerty had his last SUA experience, ABC News spoke with the service manager at Muller Toyota in Clinton, New Jersey. Today, ABC News confirmed for the Safety Record Blog that the service manager stated that the pedal on Kevin Haggerty’s vehicle was examined and was not stuck or out of position.  The service manager also affirmed that he provided that information to NHTSA.

So why would Quandt say such a thing? Under Quandt, eight investigations were opened and quickly closed with no findings or a conclusion of pedal interference. There has been no serious, science-based examination of the potential for other non-mechanical causes. Unfortunately for NHTSA, the public record is fairly littered with examples of the agency re-arranging facts or misrepresenting data or persuading vehicle owners that what happened didn’t really happen.

When the agency denied the last Toyota SUA petition, it misrepresented owners’ complaints to buttress its belief that floor mat interference was to blame. In April 2009, Lexus Owner Jeffrey Pepski, asked the agency to re-open its investigation into SUA in Lexus ES350s. He experienced an SUA event while driving at high speed, in which the vehicle accelerated to 80 mph. Pepski tried pumping and pulling up the accelerator with his foot – to no avail.  Pepski’s Lexus was equipped with a standard carpet mat, not the all-weather variety said to trap accelerator pedals, and his efforts to pull up the pedal would have dislodged the floor mat. In the Petition Denial, NHTSA created a table of 10 consumer complaints that Pepski had submitted as evidence that other Lexus owners were experiencing SUA at high speeds for sustained periods.  However, the agency claimed that six of the complaints (Vehicle Owner Questionnaires – VOQs) were in fact related to floor mats.  NHTSA stated:

“Contrary to the petitioner’s contention, six of the VOQs were related to floor mat interference (four of the five that petitioner singled out as unrelated to floor mats were related to floor mats).”[1]

Because the VOQs actually suggested the opposite, Safety Research & Strategies submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to NHTSA in November 2009 requesting any additional documentation the agency might have to establish its conclusions that these were floor mat-related incidents. On January 28, NHTSA replied, referring SRS to the same information, now currently on its publicly available website:

“..we searched for and found no supplementary information regarding the ten complaints you cited on unwanted acceleration. If you want to view these ten complaints, go to the website identified above.”[2]

So, let’s look at the VOQs, here are three examples:

In its entirety, VOQ 10199857 says:

“I purchased 2007 Lexus ES 350 in December of 2006. Sometime in last month, when I was driving the vehicle on a highway, its brake stopped working all of a sudden, and started accelerating by itself. I looked at my foot wondering if my foot was on gas pedal, instead of brake pedal, but it was on brake pedal. I was in a total panic, but managed to drove [sic] the car away to the shoulder of the highway by putting the car in park mode. I thought I was dead at that moment. I am trying to sue the Lexus. I honestly believe that car will kill someone. Before starting a legal proceeding, my attorney sent a letter to Lexus headquarter, and was told that the vehicle had no problem, and that the cause was the floor mat. But, it was not. As I said earlier, I looked at my foot when the vehicle did not stop, and after I stopped the car, I carefully looked at both gas pedal and brake again. I am not blind. Have you seen any other complaints for similar problems? Please let me know. It will be really helpful for me to win the case. I am not trying to make money by suing Lexus, but trying to have Lexus recall all of its ES350 since it will kill someone. *jb”[3]

In NHTSA’s table it appears as: “Unsecured floor mat discovered and corrected during dealer inspection.”[4

In its entirety, VOQ 10203221 says:

“On two prior occasions the vehicle accelerated from speeds between 20-30 mph, to speeds up to 50-60 mph. On 9/11/07, the vehicle accelerated at speeds up to 80-90 mph. We are aware of the Lexus notification of floor mat interference, so we removed the mats after the first two times, but the last and most frightening, occurrence happened without the mat in the vehicle. The car had to be forced into park in order to slow it down to a halt. My wife was driving the vehicle at the time and she states she almost had several multiple car accidents while trying to stop the vehicle. I had the vehicle towed to the dealer and they said it's the floor mat, before even driving the car. We won't drive the car again until someone other than Lexus determines what the problem is. *tr”[5]

In ODI’s table, it appears as: “All-weather accessory floor mat improperly stacked on top of carpet mat.”[6]

In its entirety, VOQ 10230929 says:

“Reported: 27-may-2008 (incidence Memorial Day weekend 25 may 2008) problem: runaway acceleration: evidence of malfunctioning cruise control car was nearing end of 200 mile trip. Cruise control had been engaged on and off for last hour. Driver stopped at entrance onto old-designed fast-moving highway rte4) with old-fashioned short access and no breakdown lanes. Cruise control green light on, but system supposedly disengaged. Car began to exhibit strong engine noise and runaway acceleration. Driver shut off cruise control, passenger observed the light go off and then back on several times. Driver firmly stepped on brakes. The brakes smoked and smelled of burning. When car slowed down, driver pulled to small indentation at side and pressed ignition button for several seconds. Car stopped with jolt. Driver started car in park. Engine made same loud blow-out sound. Re-shut down car. Driver restarted car to move to exit about 50 yds ahead. Car began run-away acceleration again, driver repeated steps pushing hard on brakes (smell and smoke) and shutting car off by pressing ignition button. Off-duty police (chief of force) smelled brakes and said loud engine noise made car a hazard; tow driver would also testify to loud engine noise when car turned on again to be placed on his truck. Because spill of ice-coffee during incident, mats were inspected by both driver and passenger before car was towed. Both noted that mats were intact and in their proper place. Driver noted clips were in place. (the car was in compliance with Lexus recall of mats having been serviced two months prior to incident.) Improper mats are still Lexus stated cause; however, driver and passenger say this is not case. Cruise control malfunctioning seems likely cause of runaway-acceleration. While our dealer is responsive, national Lexus has been most neglectful; agent does not return calls; and this is almost three weeks after incident. *tr see also 10228954 &10229189 *dsy”[7]

In ODI’s table, it appears as: “All-weather accessory floor mat improperly stacked on top of carpet mat.”[8]

On May 5, 2009, about a week before Toyota would send a point-by-point response to Pepski’s detailed petition, one of Toyota’s Washington staffers, Chris Santucci sent an e-mail to colleague Takeharu Nishida. Santucci’s correspondence alerted Takeharu of his progress in the behind-the-scenes horse-trading with the agency. As characterized by Santucci, NHTSA was looking for a way out of yet another Lexus SUA investigation:

“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.”[9]

“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,” Santucci wrote in his e-mail. [10]

(Jeff Pepski recently responded to this email at SRS’ request: “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 do 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.”)

This summer, NHTSA presented Congress with a preliminary report on Toyota EDR data, which purported to show that 60 percent of the incidents were the result of driver error. SRS recently obtained a copy of this report through a Freedom of Information Request. The data is rife with contradictions and inconsistencies; the sample incidents were assembled by convenience, rather than any scientific method. No seasoned crash investigator could conclude anything from these data – certainly not that Toyota electronics are exonerated.

We could go on and recount interviews with consumers who told us that NHTSA investigators dismissed their accounts of SUA incidents and suggested that they were confused, or their shoes were too big.

The agency continues to make assertions that contradict the public record without offering any additional, objective evidence in support. Investigators apparently believe that if they say it in public and put in a Powerpoint presentation, it becomes true by virtue of their status as employees of a federal agency. Show us facts, please. Explain your process. Proffer your evidence.

[1] DP09001; Denial of Defect Petition; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; October 27, 2009

[2] RE: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request, 5 U.S.C. 552; Stanley Feldman; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; January 28, 2010

[3] ODI 10199857; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; July 3, 2007

[4] DP09001; Denial of Defect Petition; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; October 27, 2009

[5] ODI 10203221; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; September 11, 2007

[6] DP09001; Denial of Defect Petition; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; October 27, 2009

[7] ODI 10230929; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; May 25, 2008

[8] DP09001; Denial of Defect Petition; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; October 27, 2009

[9]Re: Defect Petition; Christopher Santucci; e-mail; Toyota;  May 5, 2009

[10] Re: Defect Petition; Christopher Santucci; e-mail; Toyota;  May 5, 2009

Did that help?

Number One Automaker Toyota has hypnotized NHTSA in several sudden unintended acceleration investigations by chanting that phrase. Its fault detection system could not be breached, Toyota said, and therefore drivers who reported SUA were nuts or incompetent.

In March, as it attempted to fend off Preliminary Evaluation 09-054 – a new NHTSA investigation into Corollas that would unexpectedly stall out, sometimes while the vehicle was in motion – Toyota invoked the magic words (formerly) guaranteed to make Bad Things go away:

“Toyota does not believe that anyone would have prior warning that the alleged defect was occurring or that the subject component was malfunctioning. However, a malfunction indicator would illuminate if a malfunction did occur,” (emphasis ours) Chris Santucci, Toyota’s Manager of Technical and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in his March 2 response to the agency’s request for information.

But that claim fell apart as the technical field reports began to trickle in.

Here’s one from Kerry Toyota in Florence, KY:

“Vehicle towed into dealership with a crank, not start condition. Technician confirmed engine would not start and MIL [Malunction Indicator Lamp] does not illuminate. The scan tool would not communicate with the ECM. Power and ground connections to the ECM were confirmed good.”

Here’s another:

“Customer mentioned that his vehicle stalls intermittently.

We confirmed this problem took some time to correct as it was hard to duplicate.

It happen while driving and also when idling. After stalling it would start up again and run fine. Then it will run fine for several days before stalling again. Complete inspection of entire fuel and ignition systems passed. No DTCs stored or pending.”

And another:

“Customer states vehicle dies while driving down the road…Technician verified the customer’s complaint and upon further diagnosis found the vehicle dies while driving. Vehicle restarts with no codes.”

And another:

“The Customer states: that the engine will crank but will not start.

The customer called AAA; the AAA staff confirmed the condition and tapped on the fuel pump module and the vehicle engine started. A few days later the customer encounter the problem again, at this time the vehicle was towed into the dealership. FTS inspection result of 8/27/04.  The customer complaint could not be duplicated. Engine starts fine (about 1 sec cranking is needed to start the Engine). Test-drove the vehicle about 3 miles in the city, no abnormalities were found. No DTC memorized in ECM.”

Is it just us, or does anyone else see a pattern here?

On Aug. 26, when Toyota rolled out its Recall-of-the-Week for nearly 1.3 million 2005-2008 Corollas prone to unpredictable engine failure, the company was forced to take a baby step toward the truth. From its FAQ to customers:

“Are there any warnings that this condition has occurred?

In most of the cases, the check engine light will illuminate if this condition occurs and the vehicle may experience harsh shifting.  However, there may be some cases where the check engine light does not illuminate and harsh shifting does not occur.”

This is first public crack in Toyota’s fortress of defense and it may go a long way to explaining why Toyota went so hard after Dr. David Gilbert’s test showing that its fault detection system – far from being infallible – is actually rather weak.

Toyotas go when you tell them to stop, stop when you tell them to go and the engine control module is none the wiser.