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.

The streak continues. We’ve noticed a dribbling of press releases from Toyota dealerships touting the NHTSA interpretation of the Toyota black box data as proof that there is nothing wrong with their products. These headlines and sub-heads left us gob-smacked:

“Fort Myers Toyota Announces Release of U.S. Study of Toyota Crashes; Fort Myers Toyota is pleased to report that a study done by U.S. Transportation Department officials’ points to the driver error in many of accidents involving Toyota vehicles.”

And

“Toyota Dealer in Georgia Verifies New Reports that Blame Driver Error for Crashes; Athens Toyota dealership, Heyward Allen Toyota, serving Atlanta Toyota drivers, has confirmed that a study done by U.S. Transportation Department officials points to the Toyota driver as the culprit for the crash.”

There are three problems here.

Numero Uno: Equating Toyota Event Data Recorder (EDR) data with incontrovertible evidence. As we have said many (sigh) times: any Toyota black box data comes with a big caveat from the automaker itself. Toyota has long argued in the courtroom and to the media that its EDR is a prototype tool, whose results have never been validated. Toyota is still making statements to this effect. All manufacturers know that EDR data is not infallible and its results must be read along with other physical evidence of the crash. For example, a recent EDR readout from a single-vehicle, run-off-the-road crash involving a Toyota Tundra showed that the driver was travelling at 177 mph. That’s faster than a Tundra can actually go.

Two: Even if we were to accept this data on its face – 60 percent showed no evidence of braking. What does that say about the causes of the other 40 percent of the crashes? What happens when you multiply those percentages obtained in the study of 58 incidents times the 37,900 complaints Toyota says it has received? That’s a whole lotta SUA that can’t be blamed on drivers.

And that brings us to the Big Three:

Don’t Blame the Customer. How do you sell cars to people while calling them jackasses who can’t drive a sedan properly? That might work for Toyota corporate, which deals with consumers through the disembodied voices at the other end of a toll-free number. Selling cars and maintaining customer loyalty is a full-contact sport. Free advice: Leave consumers with some dignity, and go with the classic: it’s not you, it’s me.

So what’s up with the dealerships pushing this line? Although the headlines were a little different, the bodies of the press releases were identical. This smells like SMART Team spirit to us, and any dealer who is thinking about taking the bait ought to think twice.

For one, many dealerships across this great country of ours have directly confronted Toyota and Lexus vehicles exhibiting unintended acceleration that cannot be explained by floor mats, driver error or sticky pedals. We have heard from consumers who have reported to SRS that long before the issue became a daily news staple, when they took their vehicle in for servicing after an SUA event, mechanics made remarks along the lines of: we’re seeing a lot of this. We’ve heard from consumers who’ve reported that the techs at the dealership observed the phenomenon themselves, or found fault codes, but told the customer it was the floor mat.

Second, dealerships may have their own legal claims against Toyota for lost business resulting from the automaker hiding defects and then failing to fix them properly.

Fort Myers Toyota: Are you really “pleased” to report that SUA complaints can be blamed on your customer base? Hey, Heyward Allen Toyota do you want kill your future compensation claim in its crib by agreeing to shovel Toyota-corporate’s shinola?

We’re just asking.

The WSJ in a subsequent story identified George Person, recently retired head of the recall division at NHTSA, as the source.  (see No Black Box Exoneration for Toyota and Lawsuits Fill in Outline of Toyota Sudden Acceleration Cover-Up)

Person’s leak appears to have prompted the briefing and, based on the briefing memo, Person accurately described the findings.  But what is missing from the WSJ – and most other reports about the data – is context.

(And while we’re on the topic of Person, we failed to mention that we do appreciate Mr. Person’s concern about government transparency – Person told the WSJ “When I asked why it hadn’t been published, I was told that the secretary’s office didn’t want to release it.”  But he lost us when he claimed “The agency has for too long ignored what I believe is the root cause of the unintended acceleration cases … It’s driver error.  It’s pedal misapplication and that what this data shows.”  Sorry George, but, we still hold fast that your statement tells more about your bias than it does the facts.)

Let’s start with the data, what is it and what has NHTSA disclosed about it:

NHTSA claims it conducted 58 field inspections and the vehicles it selected for inspection were crashes in which:

“There was an allegation of unintended acceleration or the possibility of unintended acceleration based on preliminary incident information; the vehicle was still available with the EDR intact; the vehicle contained an EDR with pre-crash data; and the owner of the vehicle was willing to allow NHTSA to read the EDR.  It is also important to note that most Toyota models manufactured before 2007 were not equipped with EDRs capable of pre-crash data.”

NHTSA noted that it gleaned the following breakdown from the data in the 58 cases:

35 showed no brake application

14 involved partial braking

9 involved braking late in the crash

3 involved early braking

2 involved mid-event braking

1 event was said to have involved pedal entrapment

1 event showed both brake and accelerator application

1 case the EDR contained information related to a separate incident

1 case NHTSA is still working to resolve inconclusive data from the EDR

5 cases resulted in no EDR activation at all

How has NHTSA characterized these findings:

“At this early point in its investigation, NHTSA officials have drawn no conclusions about the additional causes of unintended acceleration in Toyotas beyond the two defects already known – pedal entrapment and sticking gas pedals.”

NHTSA made it clear that these data are only a small piece of the puzzle, and while driver error is a likely cause of some SUA events, the EDR data don’t make for a compelling case that this is all that’s happening – particularly as independent experts and Toyota continue to document events in which the vehicle diagnostic systems fail to detect unwanted acceleration events.

NHTSA has included in the 58 cases events that have “the possibility of unintended acceleration based on preliminary incident information.”  How many is not known.

We have examined many possible SUA crash events too, and those “possible” SUA events tend to involve single vehicle run-off-the-road crashes with no explanation and no witnesses.  While these events need to be investigated, they are far from the more typical events in which no EDR is activated, the driver, passengers, other witnesses, or in some cases Toyota dealers report first hand engines racing that can’t be explained by mechanical interference or driver error.  Some of these cases were detailed in the Multi-District Litigation complaint against Toyota which cited dealer reports produced by Toyota.  (see Lawsuits Fill in Outline of Toyota Sudden Acceleration Cover-Up)

The NHTSA EDR data don’t address pre-2007 Toyota / Lexus model vehicles as those vehicles are not equipped with EDRs that capture pre-crash data – yet many of the pre-2007 vehicles (including the Camry and Tacoma) have the highest SUA complaint rates and are not part of any recall.

Safety Research & Strategies has already addressed the murkiness and accuracy of Toyota’s EDR’s (see EDR: Toyota’s Electronic Doubt Receptacle).  And since most of the news reports failed to mention it, we would like to remind you again of an important bit of context: Toyota has always stated that the accuracy of the black boxes has never been scientifically validated. In fact, the company fights to keep the data from being used in litigation because it says the EDR data aren’t reliable.

Now, NHTSA’s briefing yesterday noted the agency has done its own EDR validation testing on two 2007 Camry’s and one 2008 Highlander and they have found “Toyota EDR data the same as the data produced by the NHTSA test equipment.” So, what’s the take-away from this set of data:  The Toyota EDRs report accurate information when the vehicle is functioning properly.  What happens when a vehicle experiences an unintended event, sets no error code, and a crash ensues?

In summary, upwards of 95 percent of the SUA reported incidents don’t involve EDR activation.  The recent NHTSA EDR data summary is interesting and worth further examination, but it clearly cannot be extrapolated to the thousands of incidents of SUA in which an EDR didn’t activate and witnesses report racing engines without driver input or mechanical interference.

Interesting fact: A raft of academic and industry studies show that customers who complain and have their complaint successfully resolved bring in more money to the company than it costs to fix the problem.

In the topsy-turvy Toyota World, however, it’s the customers who are already happy that get the red carpet treatment and big bucks. Have you heard about Nick and Sharyn Davis, from Parker County, Texas? You will soon. According to The Weatherford Democrat, the Davises are among the lucky winners in a Toyota advertising campaign, touting “real people with real stories about their Toyotas. And, the Davises are part of those real people.”

A crew of nearly 100 from an LA ad agency and a catering truck descended on the Davises’ remote ranch. And, after signing the couple up to the Screen Actors Guild, and a 12-hour shoot, the checks started rolling in.  By keeping it real for Toyota, the Davises have made $23,000 and counting.

Gee, we’ve got real people with real stories about Toyotas and we didn’t have to pay them a dime. They keep calling us, frustrated because after they’ve suffered a crash after their Toyota took off on them, or merely a very frightening experience or multiple events with different drivers, same car, Toyota writes them a nice letter explaining that nothing is wrong with their vehicle and to please pound sand.

These are the inconvenient real stories – the ones that can’t be explained by floor mats, driver error, or sticky pedals. Check them out (more to come…)  These Toyota and Lexus owners are out of considerable cash, afraid to drive a vehicle with a dangerously unpredictable streak and conscience-stricken about selling the vehicle to another victim of Toyota’s decision to roll the dice on SUA.

Unlike the Davises, there’s no check in the mail.

The MDL, filed this week on behalf of Toyota and Lexus owners alleging that the automaker’s SUA defect has caused their vehicles to lose value, shows that Toyota has known, at least since May 2003 that its Electronic Throttle Control had a “dangerous” unintended acceleration problem with an unknown cause. That civil action, and a second one claiming damages for Toyota and Lexus owners who were injured or killed in crashes alleged to have been caused by SUA, cite six incidents which occurred between 2003 and 2010, witnessed by Toyota technicians, dealers and others. The e-mails also show that Toyota spent considerable energy trying to divert NHTSA from looking too closely at the issue. Here are some highlights from the class-action complaint:

“On May 5, 2003, in a ‘Field Technical Report’ Toyota acknowledged the fact that “[s]udden acceleration against our intention,’ was an ‘extremely serious problem for customers.’ The technician reported a UA incident and stated: ‘We found miss-synchronism between engine speeds and throttle position movement.” The probable cause was unknown, but ‘(e)ven after replacement of those parts, this problem remains.’ The author requested immediate action due to the ‘extremely dangerous problem’ and continued: ‘[W]e are also much afraid of frequency of this problem in near future.’

“In May 2004, a 26 Forensic Technologist and MSME examined a vehicle in New Jersey that had experienced a UA event. The report was forwarded to Toyota on January 13, 2005. It concluded that the vehicle’s ETCS was not operating correctly. This report was not provided to NHTSA.

“In a February 27, 2007 email sent by Michiteru Kato to Christopher Santucci, Mr. Kato decided against sending his most knowledgeable ECU (Engine Control Unit) engineer to an ECU demonstration being conducted for NHTSA, in order to avoid questions regarding ECU failures: ‘…I thought that 3 guys from TMS is too many (two at most), and if the engineer who knows the failures well attends the meeting, NHTSA will ask a bunch of questions about the ECD. (I want to avoid such situation).’

In a Field Technical Report dated December 12, 2008, a technician stated: ‘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…Probable Cause =Unknown.’

The examples cited in the MDL complaint are similar to many of those reported to Safety Research & Strategies by Toyota owners. (see Toyota Real Stories)

George Person, erstwhile chief of the Recall Management Division, who just retired after 27 years at the agency, has no reservations about the causes of Toyota SUA. He opined that DOT officials had withheld a report, showing that EDR data in 23 crashes showed a wide-open throttle and no evidence of braking before the crash, out of embarrassment.

“It has become very political. There is a lot of anger towards Toyota,” Person said in a subsequent WSJ story published on July 30. Transportation officials “are hoping against hope that they find something that points back to a flaw in Toyota vehicles.”

“The agency has for too long ignored what I believe is the root cause of these unintended acceleration cases,” he told the WSJ, as his head disappeared into the hole George was digging. “It’s driver error. It’s pedal misapplication and that’s what this data shows.”

Person lobbed what looked like a boulder three weeks ago, when the WSJ reported that NHTSA had Event Data Recorder (EDR – aka, “Black Box”) from “several dozen” crashes and that all of them showed accelerator application with no braking at the time of impact:

“The Toyota findings appear to support Toyota’s position that sudden-acceleration reports involving its vehicles weren’t caused by electronic glitches in computer-controlled throttle systems, as some safety advocates and plaintiffs’ attorneys have alleged.”

The front-page story was picked up, with some outlets blaring headlines of the “Toyota-is-Exonerated” variety. The pushback was swift: NHTSA said that it was in no way close to drawing any conclusions about what has caused tens of thousands of Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration complaints. (The agency is currently examining Toyotas with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is awaiting a report it commissioned a National Academies of Science panel to write about SUA.)  And, after a spate of such stories, USA Today captured the entire charming episode under the headline: “Feds, Toyota, deny they said what nobody said they said in acceleration fracas.”

First – while we are deeply disappointed that this bears repeating, we repeat – Toyota EDR data alone is unreliable, by the automaker’s own admission. Second, there are so many details of these 23 crashes still not public. How were these crashes selected? Are these single-vehicle, run-off-the-road fatal crashes with no witnesses that someone has surmised could have been SUA related?  If they are how relevant are these crashes to the SUA problem? (See No Black Box Exoneration for Toyota) Most of the Toyota SUA events have not triggered the EDRs. They are low-speed events that may have little or nothing to do with the higher-speed crashes.  Further, those much more frequent, lower-speed events have had many witnesses.

The e-mails submitted as exhibits in the MDL make Person’s boulder look like a pebble.

Today, the automaker released – via a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange – the news that a federal grand jury in New York had subpoenaed the company on June 29 for documents regarding relay rod failures.

Toyota said:  “The company and our subsidiaries will cooperate with the investigation with sincerity.”

So far, Toyota is the only one saying much of anything. Attorney John Kristensen, who represents the family of an Idaho man who died in a 2007 crash related to a relay rod-failure, and who alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to Toyota’s delay in recalling the defective components, says he can’t comment on any grand jury proceedings. The agency says that Secretary Ray LaHood had nothing to do with the subpoena to Toyota and referred all questions to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

But the dots connect rather nicely.

In May, the agency opened a Timeliness Query (at Kristensen’s request) into Recall 05V389 to replace defective steering relay rods in Toyota pickups and 4Runners, based on a one-year leg between a U.S. and Japanese recall for the same component in a sister vehicle sold overseas.

In October 2004, the automaker disclosed to NHTSA that it had recalled Hilux and Hilux Surf vehicles sold in Japan for defective relay rods – but not its U.S. counterparts, Toyota 4Runner, the Toyota Truck and Toyota T100. The rods had a tendency to snap, leaving the driver with no steering controls. But Toyota blamed it on driving conditions unique to the Japanese market:

“TMC has received field information from the Japanese market, but no similar information from the U.S. market has been received. In addition to the different steering linkage design between the right hand drive and the left hand drive vehicles, TMC believes that the unique operation conditions in Japan, such as frequent standing full lock turns, such as for narrow parking spaces and close quarters maneuvering, greatly affects the occurrence of this problem.”

(The Hilux recall was a scandal in Japan; with police referring three Toyota executives for criminal prosecution. Top managers avoided jail time. Instead, the Japanese government publicly criticized Toyota and ordered the company to reform its recall practices.)

On September 6, 2005, Toyota finally recalled the defective steering relay rods on 977,839 1989-1995 Toyota pick ups and 4Runners in the U.S. The repair rate was so low, Toyota took the unusual step of issuing an owner re-notification, but it came too late for 18-year-old Michael “Levi” Stewart of Idaho, who died in a September 2007, after the relay rod on his 1991 Toyota pickup fractured. The Stewart family received a recall notice two months later.

Kristensen, an attorney with The O’Reilly||Collins Law Firm, found, in the course of litigation, that Toyota’s claim in October 2004 that it had no reports of relay rod failures in the U.S. was false. Toyota had actually received at least 44 reports in the U.S. since as early as 2000, including crashes involving rollovers and injuries.

“We think that it’s fairly obvious,” Kristensen said. “The documents and the evidence speak for themselves. We’ve had numerous people testify that they lost their steering 2004, prior to the recall in the United States. And Toyota has known since 1992, 1993 that they were having problems in the U.S. with relay rods.”

“Just as a curious lawyer, I’m wondering if this prosecution is under 49 U.S.C. 30170. That’s the real question.”

Currently, Toyota is trying to quash Kristensen’s subpoena to depose one of the three company execs recommended for prosecution in Japan.

“It now it appears we know why,” he says.

Section 30170(a)(1) of the TREAD Act establishes criminal liability for a “person who violates section 1001 of title 18 with respect to the reporting requirements of [49 U.S.C.] section 30166, with the specific intention of misleading the Secretary with respect to motor vehicle or motor vehicle equipment safety related defects that have caused death or serious bodily injury to an individual. . . .”

The rule set a pretty high bar for criminal prosecution, requiring the guilty party to have “knowingly and willfully” concealed facts or made false statements. The “safe harbor” provision lets the auto executive off the hook, if, at the time of the violation, such person does not know that the violation would result in an accident causing death or serious bodily injury; and (2) the person corrects any improper reports or failure to report within a reasonable time. The Final Rule adopted in July 2001 designated 30 days as the “reasonable” time period for a reporter to come forward and correct any false reports.

NHTSA itself opined: “We believe that there will be very few criminal prosecutions under section 30170, given its elements.”

The loopholes made advocates like Joan Claybrook, president emeritus of Public Citizen, cranky in the extreme. In her June 2004 testimony before the Senate Committee on Competition, Foreign Commerce and infrastructure, she complained:

“In short, while the section increases the rarely-applied maximum penalty for a violation of federal law concerning reports made to the government, at the same time it completely undercuts this new authority by prohibiting application of criminal penalties if the person who lied eventually recants. Because prosecutors always retain the ability to grant immunity, and to place case-specific limits on that immunity for witnesses or participants to secure testimony, the broad language of the “safe harbor” provision creates a much larger window for illegal activity than existed under current law. In addition, this law requires a request from the DOT to the Justice Department prior to prosecution, a highly unusual potential pitfall for enforcement of any criminal liability.”

So, did LaHood request the DOJ to make the case? Toyota’s already earned the ignominious distinction of paying the largest NHTSA fine ever, for its delay in recalling millions of vehicles with sticky pedals. Could Toyota, the world’s Ichiban automaker, claim another first?

• Consumer complaints to NHTSA through June 7, 2010
• Toyota-submitted claims from several NHTSA investigations into unintended acceleration
• Incidents reported by media organizations
• Consumer contacts made to our organization and other firms 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, 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.

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.”

Barbara Kay of Morgan County, Missouri was sleeping under a Sunbeam electric blanket on October 28, 2008 when it ignited, severely burning 35 percent of her body. Kay had been invalided by a stroke 10 years earlier, which had paralyzed the left side of her body. Kay was also a smoker who smoked in bed, and kept her cigarettes, lighter and ash trays on a tray positioned on her right side, along with the controls for her hospital bed and electric blanket. At about 7 a.m., Kay awoke to pain on her left side and saw flames leaping out of the left side of the bed near her leg and hip. Kay, who was in her 70s, recuperated in the hospital for five months, but lost part of her left arm, as a result of her burns.

Fire department investigators determined that fire originated on the left side of the hospital bed, and narrowed the source of ignition to the blanket or a cigarette, but concluded that a burning cigarette was most likely the source of the fire.

In late June, however, a civil jury concluded that the blanket played a role in the fire, and in awarding Kay $2 million in compensatory damages, assigned one third of the blame to Sunbeam. In the second phase of the trial, the jury heard evidence of Sunbeam’s $1.9 billion net worth, to determine punitive damages. George McLaughlin, who represented the Kays with co-counsel James Crispin, asked for $1 each for the 30 million blankets Sunbeam had sold. But before the jury could decide, Sunbeam and the Kays reached a confidential settlement.

Kay’s blanket was supposed to be protected from ignition by a safety circuit known as Circuit 104, designed by Sunbeam in 2000 to replace a 1983 circuit design that had brought tens of thousands of fire complaints since its introduction. The old-style electric blanket relied on what is known as a positive temperature co-efficient (PTC) heating element, which was protected by a safety circuit known as Circuit 100.

“Circuit 104 is much better, but we’re still getting about 5-10 percent of the number of fire claims – 150 to 180 legitimate fire claims a year. The sales volume and the number of smokers haven’t changed,” said McLaughlin, of McDermott, Hansen & McLaughlin, LLP, of Denver, Colorado. “Circuit 104, however, isn’t perfect and fires do continue to happen. This is the first Circuit 104 case to go to a jury verdict, and Sunbeam lost – even though they assigned my client two-thirds of the blame. The jury believed that the product was defective. That was pretty significant.”

The history of Sunbeam, electric blanket and fires is a long and checkered one. Even as Sunbeam sought a patent for this technology, the company acknowledged that the PTC design was prone to fires:  “Since the heating wire used in heating pads and electric blankets is typically made very thin and flexible and is subjected to repeated flexing from use, conductor breaks in the heating wire are common. When a conductor break occurs . . . [this] can cause a fire.”

Initially, Sunbeam relied on a triode-based sensing circuit, called Circuit 100, to reduce the fire risk. But, Circuit 100 proved to be inadequate to preventing electrical fires. It did not provide short circuit protection for all of the PTC wiring within the blanket, and it did not provide open circuit protection in some circumstances – the safety circuit itself sometimes caught fire. A former Sunbeam engineer, William Rowe Jr., who eventually (and briefly) became a plaintiff’s witness against Sunbeam warned the company in a September 20, 1983 memo that the safety circuit was not reliable enough, and that the company could expect about 500 blanket fires a year.

By the late 1990s, the company was actually receiving 1,500-1,800 fire complaints annually about electric blankets bearing the Circuit 100. The complaints ranged from pin-hole sized burns, to full scale fires resulting in deaths, injuries, and property damage.

In 1995, the CPSC opened an investigation into Sunbeam electric blankets.
And in November of that year, Rowe’s testimony helped persuade a jury to return a verdict against Sunbeam in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of

Oklahoma, and awarded punitive and compensatory damages in a case in which a PTC electric blanket fire caused a death. Sunbeam sued Rowe on the eve of his testimony, but eventually settled the case, paying Rowe to be a consultant, effectively barring him from being an expert witness for other plaintiffs. (Rowe continued to be subpoenaed as a factual witness in Sunbeam electric blanket cases until his death a few years ago.)

In 1997, the CPSC asked Sunbeam to stop the sale of blankets using its old PTC technology and pressured the company to develop a safer design, develop a corrective action plan or recall the old blankets. Sunbeam eventually launched a newly designed safety circuit called the “core-yarn” safety circuit or the Model 602. Sunbeam sold about 60,000 Model 602 electric blankets, but recalled them by June 1998, after this circuit also failed to prevent electric blanket fires.

Juries continued to find against Sunbeam. In January 1999, Sacramento Superior Court jury returned a $6.2 million verdict in a Sunbeam PTC heating element electric blanket fire case. By April of that year, Sunbeam electric blankets were the subject of an expose on ABC 20/20. Under pressure from its industry-supported standards and certifying agency, Underwriters Laboratory, Sunbeam finally replaced the Circuit 100 with a new, safer Circuit 104 in 2000.

Despite the jury verdicts, the bad press and pressure from the CPSC, Sunbeam, which sells about 3 million electric blankets annually, has never recalled any with a Circuit 100. Nor has it taken any steps to recall or redesign Circuit 104 in a way to prevent it from failing.

In a news article about the verdict, a lawyer for Sunbeam said that the company stands behind its product.

McLaughlin says he doesn’t think anything’s going to change until a jury trial goes to punitive damages.

“That might get people’s attention,” he said.

Toyota’s efforts to place the story with the Journal seem to be paying dividends –  literally. The automaker’s stock rose 1 percent on the news and reporters scrambled to repeat the Journal piece with no independent sources.

So, does this bring the curtain down on Toyota’s SUA woes and concerns about their electronics?  Hardly.

Recall that Toyota reported to Congress in January that the company identified 37,900 customer contact reports “potentially related to sudden unintended acceleration” analyzing “dozens” of data recorders from the thousands of complaints doesn’t extrapolate to a driver error problem.  Nor does it explain the large jump in complaint rates when Toyota moved to Electronic Throttle Control (ETC).  Most complaints and crashes do not actually activate the EDR, which only records data in crashes severe enough to deploy an airbag or, in some instances, in near-deployment events.  The actual pool of unintended acceleration claims in which an EDR was activated is very small.

Safety Research & Strategies has already addressed the murkiness and accuracy of Toyota’s EDR’s (see EDR:  Toyota’s Electronic Doubt Receptacle).  And since the Journal failed to mention it, we would like to remind you of an important bit of context: Toyota has always stated that the accuracy of the black boxes has never been scientifically validated. In fact, the company fights to keep the data from being used in litigation because it says the EDR data isn’t reliable.

In order to extract and read the data stored on a Toyota EDR, proprietary equipment that downloads, analyzes and generates a report based on the data is required. This equipment is not available to the public.  The EDR must be downloaded and any reports must be generated by Toyota or NHTSA, which has recently been provided with readout tools.  Until March 3, 2010, when Toyota delivered one readout tool to the NHTSA, Toyota claimed that it had a single prototype tool in the U.S. that could extract the data and that it would only download data if requested by law enforcement, NHTSA or the courts.  The details of the quantity and quality of the Toyota EDR data have been shrouded in secrecy.  No one, other than Toyota, knows exactly what data is recorded, retrieved and how it is processed and analyzed to produce a report.

According to Toyota, the type of data recorded varies depending on which generation of EDR is in the vehicle. Toyota doesn’t disclose prior to the download which generation of EDR is installed on specific vehicle makes, models and years and what data is available on each version. The owner of the vehicle does not know what is being recorded, and when data are downloaded they have no way to determine whether the data downloaded is complete, how the data are being processed or the accuracy of the translation.

Toyota now wants the public to believe that an analysis of “dozens” of black boxes out of the thousands of unintended acceleration complaints somehow translates to an exoneration of electronics.

Toyota Fault Detection Capabilities in Question

Dr. David Gilbert the Southern Illinois University Carbondale professor of automotive electronics was the first to point to the Toyota fault detection capability as an area of interest.  Gilbert’s testing found that Toyota’s could lose the signal redundancy at the accelerator pedal sensors – an important failsafe that is in place to prevent unintended acceleration – without any detection.  Once the failsafe was lost, introducing voltage to the sensor would cause the throttle to open.  While Gilbert’s study didn’t pinpoint the root cause of SUA, his findings pointed squarely to problems with the electronic fault detection that could help explain why an engine could race without driver input and leave no error codes – a common complaint.

Since Gilbert disclosed his findings in testimony to Congress – and several independent experts have validated Gilbert’s findings, more evidence that the fault detection system shortcomings in Toyotas continues to mount.  The SUA issues affecting Toyotas don’t appear to be due to a single root cause, rather, they appear to be facilitated by the lack of a robust diagnostic and fault detection strategy. So, when something does go wrong – whether mechanical or electronic – problems can go undetected and the engine can race without driver input or setting an error code.

An examination of a 2004 Toyota Camry by in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida revealed yet another hole in Toyota’s fault detection strategy. The vehicle had experienced an unintended acceleration event, and exhibited an intermittent mechanical throttle sticking condition. Independent experts and Toyota technicians witnessed the engine race to nearly 3,000 RPMs when the throttle plate stuck.  But the electronic controls failed to detect the stuck throttle and limit engine speed to ensure a safe condition.

Dr. Todd Hubing, a Clemson University professor of vehicle electronics, presented similar findings to the National Academy of Sciences panel charged by NHTSA with examining unintended acceleration. Hubing was able to replicate Dr. David Gilbert’s work and obtain wide-open throttle without the fault detection system setting an error code – but with only a single fault.  Gilbert’s analyses found that first a loss of signal redundancy at the accelerator pedal sensor was needed followed by a voltage spike to create an unintended wide-open throttle.  Hubing found that many of the faults created invalid signals that sometimes would be detected, other times not.

The Real World

Simple explanations are nice, but they just don’t square with all the facts. Toyota owners have complained about sudden unintended acceleration in a variety of scenarios – some have been long duration, highway speed events, where the driver was already using the accelerator. Some have experienced multiple events. Some have experienced multiple events in the same vehicle with different drivers at the helm.

Within six weeks of leasing a 2010 Camry from Campbell Toyota, both Debrah and Dave Auger of Chatham, Ontario experienced three bouts of sudden acceleration.

Two incidents occurred when Debrah was at the wheel. The first took place in the parking lot of a small strip plaza. Debrah was parking, and had shifted into reverse, when the vehicle “jolted back quite hard,” Debrah recalled. She threw the transmission shift into park. The incident was puzzling, but the Augers passed it off as a one-time glitch.

Dave Auger, an experienced law enforcement officer, was driving at about 30 miles per hour on a four-lane highway in Port Huron. He had just taken his foot off the gas, when the Camry suddenly surged forward. “It felt like a hand suddenly shoved the car forward,” Auger said. He quickly applied the brakes and pulled the vehicle to the side of the road.

The third and final experience occurred as Debrah Auger was pulling up to a one-way stop in the Augers’ subdivision. She had made a complete stop, and had taken her foot off the brake, when the Camry took off. Debrah jammed on the brake, but she couldn’t stop it before the vehicle had surged into the intersection.

And don’t forget the Haggerty case, the first significant incident that pointed squarely to electronic issues:

Kevin Haggerty, owner of a 2007 Avalon, experienced five different SUA events.

They could not be blamed upon floor mats: Haggerty did not have accessory floor mats, and his OE mats were secured in place.

They could not be blamed on a sticky pedal: Several times, the vehicle accelerated without his foot on the gas pedal. The engine would sometimes return to idle after driving a few miles or after the Avalon shut down and restarted or was stopped and put into park.  On December 28, 2009 Haggerty, a volunteer firefighter and salesman, was driving to work on a highway when the car began to accelerate without his foot on the gas pedal. He was unable to stop the car with brakes and shifted into neutral to slow the car down. Only a couple of miles from his local Toyota dealer, Haggerty decided to call the service manager to let him know he coming in. He managed to drive the vehicle by alternating from neutral to drive and pressing very firmly on the brakes.

Heck, Haggerty’s incident couldn’t even be blamed on pedal misapplication: When Haggerty arrived at the dealer he shifted into neutral and exited the car with brakes smoking and the engine’s rpms racing.  The service techs examined the car and found no pedal interference or sticking and could provide no explanation or any computer error codes.

Toyota’s regional representative in Caldwell, NJ later inspected the vehicle, but did not provide details of this inspection to Haggerty. Instead, 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 Toyota dealer told Haggerty that they were unsure whether the repairs would fix the vehicle.  (Toyota later tried to blame the event sticky pedal, despite service technicians who stated they pulled back on the pedal to no avail.)

While there may be dancing in the streets of Torrance, we think it’s a little early to cue the music.

We know that Toyota has compounded its technical problem with a public relations disaster, but we’re always fascinated to learn that it’s worse than we thought – to wit Toyota v. David Gilbert.

This weekend, the Associated Press released a story by an enterprising writer about Gilbert, a Southern Illinois University Carbondale professor of automotive electronics, who demonstrated that Toyota’s failsafe strategy was supremely flawed and could result in a wide open throttle without the engine control module taking note. Gilbert, a Toyota owner, embarked upon his research out of personal curiosity and passed his findings on to Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Neither appeared very interested, so Gilbert contacted Safety Research & Strategies.

In February, Gilbert testified (along with SRS President Sean Kane) before Rep. Henry Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee, which has held two hearings about Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration. Gilbert presented his preliminary report, fielded questions from Congress, and then the fun really began.

We’ve chronicled his ensuing troubles, after Toyota pressured SIU to shut him down. (See You Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape), but AP writer Jim Suhr filed a Freedom of Information request for the correspondence from SIUC regarding Toyota and Gilbert, and unearthed some new tidbits. We have Toyota employees not-so-subtly threatening to curtail company donations of cash and cars to the university’s automotive program and suggesting that Gilbert be fired. (Toyota insists that its relationship to SIU is still rock-steady.) The e-mails highlighted in the story don’t do SIU any favors either – quaking before Toyota’s anger, after initially supporting Gilbert and his associate researcher Omar Trinidad.

Read the whole thing, its worth your time — and kudos to Mr. Suhr.