The most significant finding from Dr. Gilbert’s preliminary study is that there are conditions in the Toyota and Lexus models tested in which the failsafe redundancy of electronic circuitry in the ETC can be lost – particularly in the APPS – without detecting an error code or employing a failsafe mode.  Once the redundant failsafe is lost and it is not detected as an error, the vehicle is in an unsafe condition.  The purpose for setting an error code and putting the vehicle into a failsafe mode is to protect the driver from any further potential scenarios in which the ETC behaves in a manner inconsistent with driver input.

Quite simply, Dr. Gilbert’s findings prove that Toyota’s assertion that its electronics are infallible is incorrect and they form the basis for further study of potential electronic failures that might lead to Sudden Unintended Acceleration.

Dr. Gilbert’s findings further showed that once the failsafe is lost and undetected by the vehicle computer as an error, various scenarios can be introduced in which the Electronic Control Module (ECM) can read a wide-open throttle condition without any input from the driver, again without setting any error codes. Simply increasing the voltage to the APPS while in a compromised state can induce an uncommanded wide-open throttle condition, again resulting in no detectable codes. These scenarios can occur because the Toyota failsafe parameters are broad – the design allows a wide window of opportunity for problems to occur that are not seen as abnormal.

Prior to Dr. Gilbert’s findings, Toyota consistently argued that its ETC design and failsafe systems were built with multiple redundancies and that the electronic throttle cannot malfunction without its diagnostic system catching the error and employing one of four failsafe modes. In response to NHTSA the company flatly rejected the very concept of unintended acceleration stating:

“With regard to allegations of unintended acceleration, Toyota does not believe that uncontrollable acceleration can occur without the driver applying the accelerator pedal … If an abnormal condition occurs, such as the ETC sending the signal to the throttle body to open the throttle without applying the accelerator pedal due to a failure of a component or a malfunction of the system, or if the throttle simply were to open on its own, the system goes into failsafe mode.”

These findings provide an important baseline for understanding a potential electronic root cause of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.  While Dr. Gilbert’s testing demonstrates that vehicles can react to sensor errors in ways that appear consistent with consumer complaints of unintended acceleration, it will take additional research to determine whether there is a connection between the two.

Toyota, through their outside experts at Exponent Failure Analysis Associates, claim that the scenario Dr. Gilbert describes in his report “would be highly unlikely to occur naturally” and that other makes and models responded in a similar manner.  Exponent goes on to claim, “[T]hese findings illustrate the artificial nature of Dr. Gilbert’s demonstration and its inability to explain reported incidents of SUA.”

In general, Exponent’s report mischaracterizes Dr. Gilberts findings, but it does validate his primary findings – Toyota’s failsafe system does not always detect critical errors or go into failsafe mode as the company has claimed.  Further, once in this non-failsafe mode the introduction of a voltage spike can cause wide-open-throttle without driver input and again, undetected as an error.

Dr. Gilbert’s preliminary findings, which were detailed to Toyota technical staff a week before the Congressional hearings, are a step toward better understanding areas for further study.

According to Safety Research & Strategies president, Sean Kane, “These preliminary findings are critical because they demonstrate that the Toyota’s electronics can fail to detect significant errors – including uncommanded wide-open-throttle.  This serves as a bookend – the other bookend is the consumer complaints which continue to allege uncommanded wide-open-throttle and subsequent inspections by Toyota find no error codes.  Whether they are connected still needs to be determined.”

• Consumer complaints to NHTSA through February 25, 2010;

• Toyota-submitted claims to NHTSA investigations into SUA;

• Incidents reported by media organizations;

• Consumer contacts made to our firm and other firms who are reporting incidents that they have received through March 2, 2010. (Note:  Most of these complaints are also part of the NHTSA complaint data as we have encouraged owner’s to report their problem to the agency.  Duplicates have been removed.)

Our data 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, because we are still at a stage of trying to understand the incidents we believe this inclusiveness will help us discern vehicle years / models and incident types that we may want to investigate further.

We have reviewed all Prius complaints and excluded from our analysis those that are related to the Prius braking issues. In many cases it is very clear that the complaints relate to the known braking defect. In some cases that describe the sensation when braking as “unintended acceleration,” we exercised our best judgment about the nature of the defect. Overall, if the complainant described a frequent, repeatable, and brief unintended acceleration, particularly in conjunction with braking and/or rough road surfaces, we excluded the record from this analysis. That process resulted in the exclusion of 585 Prius complaints.

We have identified 3306 total unintended acceleration incidents involving Toyota vehicles reported from 1999 to the present. These incidents have resulted in 1159 crashes (just over 35 percent of all incidents), 469 injuries, and 39 deaths. [Note: Our fatalities count is relatively conservative, and we have not included fatalities reported as speculation. To see the fatalities we have included, visit our interactive map.

Note that the incidents we are reporting only represent those that are in the public realm. According to the 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.”

On February 24, the president of Toyota Motor Corporation, Akio Toyoda, raised his right hand before an investigative congressional oversight committee and swore: “I’m absolutely confident that there is no problem with the design of the ETC system.”

A day earlier, Toyota Motor Sales President Jim Lentz began his testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s government oversight sub-committee by flogging Toyota’s confidence in the mechanical causes of SUA and the efficacy of the recalls.

Then, Lentz blinked.

Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts admonished Lentz for insisting that electronics played no part in the automaker’s SUA problems, while Toyota installed a brake to idle override in some recalled models:

“But you can’t have it both ways,” Markey said.  “You can’t say there’s no problem but you’re trying to find a way to override something that’s not a problem.  It leaves people with the impression that there must be a problem.”

“But that’s why you have to continually test and test and test,” Lentz said, “in the event that something develops.  It could be – it could be a change in EMI.  It could be a number of different things that we have to continually test and verify.”

Within five days of Toyoda’s assurances, several consumers offered a little anecdotal evidence to NHTSA. Here are four new complaints all generated in February, shortly after Toyota “fixed” the vehicles.

A 2009 Matrix owner had already had three SUA events while braking at a stop sign, when the recalls were announced. A little more than two weeks after Toyota performed the recall fixes she reported:

“On February 26th, I was driving about 5 mph in a parking area with my son. I put my foot on the brake and I felt the car push forward. I put my other foot on the brake as well. My son said ‘It’s doing it again mom!’ I put it in neutral and we both heard the engine wind out like I had pushed the gas pedal to the floor. This obviously means the recall ‘fix’ isn’t working! I contacted my dealer and am getting a loaner car. I am very concerned what this means in terms of future safety and my monetary investment in this car.”

The owner of a 2008 Avalon reported this post-recall-fix Feb. 25^th incident:

“A few days later, the car was in reverse and was slowly backing out of a residential carport when it accelerated on its own and the car did about 3 loops around the garage area of the home causing damage to the car, benches, tree, bushes, lamp post, etc. This happened after the recalled defect was repaired. Owner of vehicle put in claim to her own insurance company, put in a call to the 800 Toyota number and had car towed to where she purchased the car. Everyone seems concerned, but only wants to repair the damage to the car rather than get to the root of the problem. We thought Toyota had the fix, but apparently not since accelerating and going out of control on an accelerated pace.”

The owner of a 2010 Camry filed this complaint:

On 2/12/10 my 2010 Toyota Camry received an acceleration fix. In addition I was informed a fail-safe computer program was put in. On 2/17/10 as I was entering my parking slot, the car did an unintended sudden acceleration without my foot being on the accelerator. I was pressing the brake. I jammed both feet into the brake. After 3 seconds, as my car was climbing up a snow bank, it stopped. The engine was idling while my gear shift was in drive. This is the second level on the fail-safe system. This means that: “If both accelerator position sensors fail, or if one throttle position sensor fails, the ECM will…return the engine to idle speed. Had the incident happened one minute earlier, I would have been in a high car/pedestrian area and would not have been able to avoid an accident. The whole event took 5-6 seconds before the car suddenly stopped. The fix done by Toyota is not the fix for the acceleration problem.”

The driver of a 2007 Camry XLE says that five days after getting the recall fix, this happened on Feb. 27:

“The contact states that his wife was driving when she was coasting to a stop sign at 10mph or less when she notices that her RPMs starting going up. The contact states when she took her foot off the brake the vehicle immediately accelerated on its own. The contact states that she was able to get to her friends house nearby. The contact also states that they lifted the accelerator up and then watched it immediately go back down on its own. The dealer was contacted about this issue and the vehicle is there now.”

Let’s see, not the floor mat, not a sticky accelerator pedal. What ever could be causing these incidents? We think Lentz was on to something, when he told Michigan Rep. John Dingell:

“We never rule out anything that could cause sudden, unintended acceleration.”

More on Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration

“When this lawsuit was threatened, no one was surprised. This issue [sudden unintended acceleration] had been the subject of a number of meetings and the exchange of a number of documents between TMS and TMC, (did anyone ever gather and organize all those documents and memorialize the “meetings”? If so, were [sic] are the documents and information about the meetings?) [emphasis indicates Biller's comments] and the possibility of a class action lawsuit was used as one way to try to get TMC to work on a series of proposed countermeasures.”

E. Todd Tracy, of the Tracy Law Firm in Dallas, who quickly withdrew a motion to re-open 15 cases that were settled in the last six years, covering issues ranging from roof crush to restraints to rear seats, after getting a preview of the Biller documents, says that the Books of Knowledge are useless – general best practices manuals of test protocols and specifications that are not platform-specific:

“They are basically the FMVSS provisions. It’s just Biller selling more snake oil” Tracy said. “These have been produced in litigation many times. I wish there were something more sinister than that. They are not hot documents and everyone has already has access to them.”

Biller left Toyota in September 2007 with a severance package totaling nearly $4 million in wages, legal expenses, a $2.3 million lump severance payment for emotional distress. In addition, Toyota forgave a loan in an unspecified amount that it made to Biller in 2005.

Read the Towns letter here.

Mrs. Grossman was still conscious, and in the days before she succumbed to her injuries, she kept telling her family: The car ran away on me. The car ran way on me. These statements and the placement of both feet on the brake – verified by two independent witnesses at the scene of the crash – did not rouse the curiosity of Toyota or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which was in the midst of an investigation into Toyota’s electronic throttle control system when ODI investigators learned of her death.

How do you slam into a building with both feet mashed on the brake? Nobody knows, because neither Toyota nor NHTSA investigated her fatal crash.

Steve Ray, Mrs. Grossman’s son-in-law and a vice president of sales for an aerospace company, told SRS that Mrs. Grossman’s 2003 Camry was subjected to a visual inspection by insurance adjusters and Toyota’s Technical Analyst Manager Robert Landis, who came all the way out to Evansville, Indiana from Toyota’s U.S. headquarter in Torrance, Calif., with his camera to determine what went wrong.

On May 5, 2004, in the presence of the Grossman family attorneys, Landis photographed the vehicle engine and the accelerator pedal and blamed Grossman for the crash saying that she obviously has abused the accelerator pedal on her way into the Statewide Realty offices, Ray recalled. (Mrs. Grossman, 5’2”, weighed 125 lbs. at the time of her death.)

“He didn’t bring a computer,” recalled Ray. “He just came and looked at the car. He said the gas pedal was bent. Everything he said was it was her fault; she was slamming on the gas pedal versus the brake pedal. She was sharp as a tack and also the type of person, if she would have done it and she would have known it and she would have admitted it. She was very insistent that she did not cause that accident. From what I saw, they were just defending Toyota.”

The Grossman family’s attorneys summarized Landis’s two-hour inspection. It noted that Landis performed no diagnostic testing of the components, including the engine computer unit, the body computer unit, or the transmission computer unit. Instead Landis focused on the accelerator pedal, which “showed signs of being bent,” he said. Landis theorized that those signs were caused by someone pressing hard on the accelerator, and he took multiple pictures of the pedal. Neither the attorneys who were present at the inspection, nor the technical expert hired by Grossman’s insurer, State Auto Insurance, saw any significant bend to the pedal.

Landis inspected the engine compartment and put the vehicle on a lift to examine the brakes and found nothing wrong with the brakes. He told the Grossmans’ attorney that all of the engine diagnostics would have been erased when the battery was disconnected, nor would the airbag sensor tell him anymore than the speed at the time of the crash. The summary noted: “Mr. Landis further indicated that there was no sensor that would have preserved information regarding the accelerator and brake positions at the time of impact.”

According to the summary, Mr. Landis told the attorney: “if a person would apply the brake when the accelerator was stuck, the brakes were powerful enough to stop the vehicle. In other words, the brakes were more powerful than the accelerator. He stated that this was true of all vehicles. He then commented that it would require a double malfunction for this accident to have occurred the way it had been theorized. It would require a stuck accelerator and a brake malfunction. He stated that this was highly unlikely particularly if there had been no prior complaints by Mrs. Grossman regarding the brake or accelerator systems.”

The summary raises more questions than it answers, but it does tell us a few things:

One, Toyota had a defense of its defective system down pat by the time Juanita Grossman died: brakes always overcome an open throttle and there was zero possibility of a simultaneous failure of brake and accelerator. Toyota would repeat this line to many others who complained of an SUA event in which the brakes failed to stop the vehicle.

Two, the Event Data Recorder in the vehicle – the magical black box that some members of Congress were so fixated upon at Tuesdays’ House government oversight sub-committee – according to Toyota, isn’t going tell anyone what they want to know about the brake and accelerator pedal position in an SUA crash.

Three, no one followed up on the observation from the emergency medical technicians that Mrs. Grossman’s feet were on the brake. No one examined the brake light filaments, no one searched for any witnesses who might have observed the crash. No one determined the speed of the crash.

And now, the rest of the story: Ray first called NHTSA on April 20, and spoke to ODI investigator Scott Yon, several times. Ray informed Yon about the upcoming Camry inspection, but nobody from NHTSA showed up. That could have been because even though it had an active investigation into Camry throttle control electronics, NHTSA had already specifically excluded crashes like Mrs. Grossman’s — longer duration sudden unintended acceleration incidents in which the brakes didn’t work –from Preliminary Evaluation 04-021. On March 23, 2004, a day after Juanita Grossman died, Yon wrote a memo to the file of PE04-021 saying that the agency had decided to only look at short-duration SUA incidents.

“I thought they would be more aggressive, because there was a death,” Ray said. “It just went into the stack. And that surprised me.”

By the time Ray reached NHTSA on April 20, NHTSA knew of two other Camry deaths in which SUA was alleged: the Las Vegas crash in January that sent George and Maureen Yago rocketing off a fourth-floor parking garage in their Camry. By the time NHTSA closed PE04-021 in July 2004, the agency was aware of seven deaths in early-model Camrys in which SUA was alleged. None were included in the investigation’s official data count. As far as we can determine in the public record, none were investigated.

Ray recalled that Yon listened sympathetically, and told Ray that Toyota was not cooperative in any investigation.

“We discussed the procedure of what happens at the NHTSA after a complaint is filed. He said Juanita’s complaint was in stage one, a Preliminary Evaluation, and information would be requested from Toyota which would take four to six months He said it would then go into stage two, Engineering Evaluation, which could take one to one and a half years and would need evidence to go further,” Ray said in an email to SRS.

Yon offered no more than to put the Grossman crash on file. PE04-021 closed in four months. It was never elevated to an Engineering Analysis.

How do you slam into a building and wind up with both feet on the brake? Nobody in a position to do anything about it cared to find out.

The attorneys dropped the case because Indiana law limited damages in a product liability case to $300,000. On June 15, 2004, Berger & Berger wrote to the Grossman family:

“Based upon the information we have obtained in the matter, our law firm does not believe that further investigation would be beneficial, particularly given the expense involved in doing such an investigation. In addition to the Three Thousand Dollars ($3,000.00) for the salvage of the vehicle, plus the storage fees, it would be necessary to obtain the services of an expert to do an analysis of the vehicle. This would be quite costly and of unlikely benefit.”

“We didn’t have the money to go up against a big company like Toyota, so we had to drop it.” Ray said.

Juanita Grossman’s Camry was presumably sent to salvage, because no one wanted to pay the storage fees. A confused old lady mashed the accelerator, when she meant to press the brake. Case closed.

In light of recent events, this week, Ray was back in touch with Yon and Toyota. He said that Yon was still complained about Toyota’s lack of cooperation with NHTSA. A customer service representative on the automaker’s 800 number said he would forward Ray’s claim on.

Last week, Toyota Motor Sales CEO Jim Lentz once again took his place in the hot seat, this time before Congressional interlocutors. Again, he expressed his confidence that the problems in Toyota are not electronic. Mr. Lentz, Mr. Toyoda, anybody, anybody at Toyota, please explain to us:

How does one slam a vehicle into a building with both feet on the brake pedal? Nobody knows.

More on Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration

Toyota made this startling admission in denying a claim by Michael Teston, an unfortunate Toyota customer from Maaumelle, Arkansas.

On December 13, Teston was driving his 2006 4-Runner into a small town with the cruise control on. He had disengaged the cruise control and the vehicle began to slow, with his foot on the brake as he approached a parking lot for a convenience store. He turned into parking lot at approximately15 mph, still coasting with his foot on brake. As his speed dropped to about 3 mph, Teston heard the ABS brakes activate, followed by clicking sound when the engine raced to full-throttle. The vehicle surged forward, hit a pole about three feet in front of him. There the vehicle came to rest, with the rear of the vehicle hopping as the rear tires continued to spin. Teston placed the vehicle into Park and the engine maintained wide-open-throttle until the ignition was turned off.

Teston’s 4-Runner was fitted with OE carpeted floor mats, secured in place. North Point Toyota, in North Little Rock, inspected the vehicle over a three-week period, but found nothing wrong with the vehicle.  A Toyota Technical Specialist also took a look on January 4, and here was the result: there were “no codes stored in the computer to indicate any product concern or failure.” However, “Our Technical Specialist noted that aftermarket pedal covers were installed on the brake and accelerator pedals that increased the length of the pedals, which could have contributed to the accident described.”

Gee, Teston purchased the “aftermarket pedal covers” from a Toyota dealer as a Toyota accessory and these parts were installed by that same Toyota dealer.

Since Toyota said that the increased the length of the pedals could have contributed to the crash, seems like Toyota has a duty to recall these parts too.

More on Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration

We will concede that Buyer is an expert on ethics violations. According to reporting by the good folks at the Indianapolis Star, he is resigning at the end of his term amid a scandal over the Frontier Foundation, which Buyer founded in 2003 to provide college scholarships. The foundation, headed by Buyer and his immediate family members, has yet to award its first scholarship, but has handed out $10,500 in charitable grants, to a man whose house burned down, the National Rifle Association and a cancer fund run an Eli Lilly and Co. lobbyist, the Star has reported. Almost all of the $880,000 raised via charity golf events in luxury locales came from large corporations which have interests before the Energy and Commerce Committee (including Eli Lilly), the Star has reported.

The congressman didn’t want Kane to give complete answers – that would dry up Buyer’s hard rain of insinuations right quick. So, we thought we’d take the time to shed light on what we do and why we do it.

Safety Research & Strategies is a research and advocacy consulting firm. We are not expert witnesses and do not provide testimony in litigation. We are researchers. In the simplest terms: we collect the facts. We collect as many of them as we can find and then we analyze what those facts mean. We do this work for government, industry, and yes, plaintiffs’ lawyers – men and women who represent ordinary people who have suffered death and grievous injuries from defective products and have no other voice or means to seek justice.

We go where those facts take us. And when we see that the facts point to a defect trend, we use them to advocate for change. That might mean an amendment to an outmoded or inadequate regulation or to push for a recall. Safety Research & Strategies is a small company, yet our successes are many. This is because each and every one of us takes pride in our research work. But we are most proud of the times we can turn the information we’ve collected into a meaningful social change that makes all of our lives safer.

At the beginning of our Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration report, we thanked five lawyers who sponsored some of our initial research into this widespread defect. We wanted to acknowledge that someone paid us to get started. But we undertook the report and gave it out to anyone who wanted to read it, because we felt that this was an important safety issue which had been ignored and a factual accounting of what had happened was needed. For the same reason, we traveled to Washington to appear before Congress at our own expense.

We are in the research and advocacy business and we stand behind our work.  Read it.  Feel free to alert us if you can find any factual errors – if you do, we’re glad to address them immediately.

But we’ve been looking back – specifically at eight deaths that occurred during a six month window in 2003 and 2004 that alleged unintended acceleration. These all occurred in Toyota Camrys during the time that NHTSA, after meeting with Toyota, narrowed the scope of its investigation (PE04021) of Camry and Lexus ES vehicles for throttle control and vehicle surging to exclude the very scenarios that were alleged in some of these fatal crashes.  But the lost lives of eight people were apparently horse-traded out of investigatory view.

On March 22, 2004, Mrs. Juanita Grossman died from her injuries in a crash that rocketed her out of a pharmacy parking lot, into another vehicle, then into one building and finally, the offices of Statewide Realty. (They still remember the crash very well.) The EMTs who extracted Mrs. Grossman noted that both feet were “jammed” on the brake pedal.

Remember: Toyota says the brakes always work and its electronic throttle system never fails unless the computer records it and the vehicle goes into limp-home mode.

So, how does one slam at full throttle into a building with both feet on the brake? We’re very curious. Toyota and NHTSA? Not so much.

We’ve taken a closer look at the public record on these incidents and we’re posting our analysis. Read our addendum.

- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s unsuccessful efforts to identify all the causes;

- Toyota’s ineffective and conflicting responses;

- Who knew what and when.

Click on the image below to download the report:

The report, written by Randy and Alice Whitfield, tested Toyota’s conclusion that there is ‘no indication’ of a throttle or electronic control system malfunction in the recalled vehicles as an hypothesis using data taken from consumer complaints made to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr. Whitfield stated: “On the basis of the consumer complaint data, we believe there is evidence both to question and to reject this hypothesis for the recalled vehicles in our study.”

The study was limited to the period beginning in 1999 until just before the well-known Santee, California crash so that the publicity surrounding the crash would not affect the study’s results.

The report adds new information about the actual differences seen in complaint patterns for specific models with ETCS-i in their engines compared to the same models without ETCS-i. Even among vehicles that were not recalled, speed control related complaints were reported at a higher rate for all three models with ETCS-i.

Differences in the reporting of speed control related complaints are also shown in the report for the recalled vehicles with ETCS-i compared with the non-recalled vehicles with ETCS-i. The Whitfields found that proportion of complaints related to speed control for the unrecalled Camrys with ETCS-i was 29%, compared with 25% for the recalled Camrys with ETCS-i.

Important questions have been recently raised asking whether accelerator pedal entrapment or stuck accelerator pedals fully explains many incidents of sudden, unintended acceleration. The report adds new data about the role played by electronic throttle control systems in the complaints to NHTSA by consumers.

Click here to download a copy of the report.