By Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian

March 3, 2010

View the full story at latimes.com

Some Toyota owners have begun complaining that their vehicles suddenly accelerated even after dealerships made repairs to fix the problem, according to reports filed with federal safety regulators.

At least seven complaints, filed in the last two weeks with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, allege that after the recall service to modify pedals and replace floor mats the cars still surged out of control.

Although the allegations are unverified by the agency, they are a worrying sign that the nearly 10 million recall notices issued by Toyota may not fully address the problem of unintended acceleration — which some believe is caused by problems in the electronic throttle system, rather than mechanical issues involving pedals.

NHTSA has said it will review Toyota electronics to see whether they are a potential cause, and the automaker has commissioned a private study of its throttle system.

The safety agency said that it had begun to investigate the new reports of recurring sudden acceleration on Tuesday. “NHTSA has already started contacting consumers about these complaints to get to the bottom of the problem and to make sure Toyota is doing everything possible to make its vehicles safe,” said David Strickland, NHTSA administrator.

“There is already doubt out there that the solutions Toyota has put forward really fix the problem of unintended acceleration,” said Aaron Bragman, auto industry analyst at IHS Global Insight. He cautioned, however, that the complaints should be thoroughly investigated before definitive conclusions are drawn.

In one report, the owner of a 2010 Camry that was repaired Feb. 12 in Michigan said the car accelerated up a snowbank five days later. It had received special brake override software as part of the recall, the complaint said.

“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 anonymous consumer wrote. “The fix done by Toyota is not the fix for the acceleration problem.”

In addition to the seven reports of sudden acceleration, several other complaints in the NHTSA database reported unusual vehicle behavior, such as errant check-engine lights, after the recall service.

The reports were first noted by Safety Research & Strategies, a vehicle safety consulting firm in Rehoboth, Mass.

The Japanese automaker is recalling 5.4 million cars and trucks because of a potential for the floor mats to trap the accelerator pedal, as well as 4.1 million vehicles with a gas pedal that can stick. Some vehicles are subject to both actions.

On Tuesday, Toyota executives appeared before Congress for the third time in the last week, telling the Senate Commerce Committee that it had designed “effective and durable solutions” for the problem and that its dealers had repaired more than 1 million vehicles through the recalls.

Under those recalls, Toyota is swapping out floor mats, replacing and modifying pedals and removing floor padding. It is also adding brake override software — designed to automatically reduce the engine to idle when both the brake and the accelerator are depressed — to seven models affected by the floor mat campaign.

Toyota spokeswoman Celeste Migliore said she was not aware of specific complaints alleging that sudden acceleration had recurred despite receiving the repair, but said the automaker closely monitored the NHTSA database.

“We very much would like to have any of those individuals who claim they’ve had unintended acceleration after the fix go back to the dealership,” Migliore said. “If there was an accident, we want to see the vehicle and the driver and the accident report.”

The number of complaints to NHTSA has skyrocketed since Toyota announced in late January that it would temporarily halt sales and production of eight models of cars and trucks following its announcement of the sticking pedal recall.

Those filings, many of which concern incidents from years earlier, have driven up counts of accidents in Toyota-related sudden acceleration events. On Tuesday, NHTSA said it now had reports of 52 fatalities in such accidents, up from 34 just a few weeks ago.

A concern among safety experts is that the brake override software, which has been described as a final solution to the problem of unintended acceleration, may in fact cause more problems by adding a new layer of software to the system.

“These fixes are not dealing with the root causes of the problem,” said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies.

The newly filed complaints claiming recurring sudden acceleration include incidents involving the Avalon, Camry and Matrix. Those models are currently being given the brake override software as part of the recall, along with the Lexus IS and ES. No complaints about post-repair incidents in the IS and ES were found in NHTSA databases as of Tuesday.

Last week, Toyota said it would expand the reach of that upgrade, which it calls “an additional measure of confidence,” to the Venza, Tacoma and Sequoia.

Among the other complaints was one involving a 2009 Camry in Massachusetts that “still does not respond immediately to de-accelerate” after the driver’s foot is taken off the pedal, even though it was taken in under the recall Feb. 22. Another described a 2008 Avalon in Atlanta that was repaired but only a few days later “accelerated on its own and . . . did about 3 loops around the garage area of the home causing damage to the car, benches, tree, bushes, lamp post, etc.”

Some consumers don’t allege unintended acceleration but say the fixes created other problems in their vehicles.

A 2007 Camry driver from Sherrill, N.Y., for example, said that since the repair, the car idles fast in reverse, cruise control does not disengage properly and various check engine lights come on. The owner of a 2005 Avalon in Houston, meanwhile, said that following the recall service, his wife stepped on the gas and found that nothing happened, causing it to lose speed on the highway.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) argued that until the definitive problem causing unintended acceleration was identified, the fixes implemented in the recalls, including brake override, would not solve the problem.

“It is not really a solution as much as it is a fail-safe strategy,” Cantwell said.

By TOM KRISHER AP Auto Writer

February 26, 2010

View the full story at abcnews.go.com

Investigations into whatever is lurking behind Toyota’s crisis of quality have put a spotlight on all that can go wrong with auto electronics — the growing number of wires, sensors and computer chips that have profoundly changed the automobile in the last decade.

Though no smoking circuit has been found so far, a picture is emerging that shows the automobile industry’s technology is racing ahead of quality-control testing and regulators. It’s troubling not only for Toyota owners but for drivers of any modern car that’s basically a computer on wheels.

Toyota insists that electronics played no role in the unintended acceleration that has sparked its massive recalls, and no one has been able to disprove it.

Lawyers, regulators, engineers and politicians aren’t so sure.

The auto industry has been moving at Pentium speed since the late 1990s to replace mechanical cables and other devices with computers to control everything from brakes to throttles to power steering. Automakers say electronics have made vehicles safer with devices such as air bags and antilock brakes. It’s also made cars more fuel efficient, cleaner and, usually, more reliable.

Still, things can go wrong and diagnosing problems is complicated.

Glitches can include buggy software, circuitry that’s randomly influenced by electrical interference and shorts caused by microscopic “whiskers” that sprout from solder. It can be one or more of these problems, as well as environmental factors — a blast from a heater vent or moisture from the road — that can cause a failure. Age also can be a factor.

“You’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “Those are very hard to reproduce. The problem happens and you go back and check and it’s not there. The normal tendency is to blame it on the driver and go on.”

And that’s what Toyota did initially.

Drivers complained their vehicles accelerated out of control — without stepping on the gas. But complaints were largely dismissed by Toyota, its dealers and government regulators, who blamed mechanical problems or drivers stepping on the wrong pedal.

Toyota, which until recently had a reputation for being high-quality and cutting-edge, began replacing mechanical accelerators with electrical ones starting with the Camry in 2002. Since the 2007 model year, all its cars have been equipped with the high-tech throttle.

An analysis of complaints by the auto safety research firm Quality Control Systems, found that the number of Toyota “speed control” complaints received by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tripled since the electronic throttles were introduced. NHTSA says 34 people have died because of sudden acceleration crashes in Toyotas since 2000.

But the issue didn’t get much attention from Toyota until an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and three members of his family were killed when their loaner Lexus sped out of control and crashed into traffic near San Diego. The Aug. 28 crash received widespread media coverage.

Just over a month later, on Oct. 5, the automaker recalled 3.8 million Lexus and Toyota models in the U.S. because of floor mats. In January, it recalled 2.3 million because of sticky accelerators. It later added more than a million to the floor mat recall, and also said some cars might be covered by both. So far, more than 8 million vehicles have been recalled worldwide to replace floor mats or fix pedals that get stuck because of condensation.

Toyota’s denial that electronics played a role in the problems has been repeatedly challenged. Questions linger, including why, according to a congressional analysis, 70 percent of Toyota speed control complaints involve vehicles not covered by the floor mat or sticky pedal recall.

Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., was asked at a congressional hearing this week if he could say with certainty that the fixes now being undertaken would completely eliminate unintended acceleration problems. Lentz replied: “Not totally.”

The company’s quick dismissal of electronic flaws and inability to fully explain the uncontrolled acceleration have generated many theories over what else might be in play. Flaws in electronics are well known to engineers who expect them and design around them. Some electronics experts have challenged the auto industry’s testing and backup systems.

The theories came up during this week’s congressional hearings, and Toyota repeated that it has found no evidence that electronics are at fault. But Toyota wasn’t alone in the hotseat. NHTSA, the nation’s auto safety watchdog, was attacked for not investigating complaints more thoroughly and earlier.

“Carmakers have entered the electronics era, but NHTSA seems stuck in a mechanical mindset,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. “We need to make sure the federal safety agency has the tools and resources it needs to ensure the safety of the electronic controls and on-board computers that run today’s automobiles.”

Even if regulators get the resources, they have their work cut out for them. Diagnosing electronic glitches is far more complicated in today’s high-tech cars.

Michel Mardiguian, an engineer and consultant near Paris who specializes in tracking down electronic problems for automakers, recounts one such mystery involving a European automaker. On a cold day in 2005, one of the company’s employees started a preproduction model in his driveway and began wiping the dashboard with a cloth. Suddenly, the air bag blasted into his face.

The manufacturer suspected electronics and called in Mardiguian. He worked with engineers, hitting the air bag sensor with multiple electronic signals, using a Taser-like device to create static electricity and turning the heater on just like the driver did. (Mardiguian declined to identify the automaker.) Four days of extensive testing passed, but the problem couldn’t be reproduced.

Finally, someone on the assembly line noticed an errant wire that was causing a short on some of the cars. Still, engineers couldn’t make the air bag deploy. But when they hit the air bag sensor with static electricity and directed the heater vent at it, it popped.

“Electromagnetic interference leaves no trace,” Mardiguian says. “It goes away just as it came.”

Could that be behind Toyota’s problem? Toyota says it’s not.

Mardiguian disagrees.

“An automaker who declares bluntly that uncontrolled acceleration cannot be caused by electromagnetic interference because they have fully tested their vehicle is a liar, or naive,” he said.

Nearly all automakers have big, sophisticated labs that test their products for electronic glitches. Chrysler Group LLC, for instance, says it goes far beyond what cars will encounter in the real world and beyond standards set by the European Union or Japan.

Toyota currently has eight such labs, each half the size of a gymnasium, where the automaker blasts each car and component with electromagnetic energy.

Even so, is the testing sufficient? Some experts say automakers’ labs don’t have the time to replicate real-life conditions that vary with temperature, moisture and age of equipment.

Last year, Ford Motor Co. engineers found that signals from two wires in the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrids caused the brake control computer to misbehave. The waves hit a sensor, sending a signal to the computer that it didn’t recognize, so it switched off the hybrid’s electric brakes and went to the backup hydraulic brakes, according to a Ford service bulletin.

“In the real world, there’s all sorts of different things that can happen,” said Keith Armstrong, a British electronic engineer and consultant who advises companies on electromagnetic interference.

Even if problems do crop up, backup technology should prevent the original glitch from turning into a catastrophic crash.

Airplanes, for example, are heavily shielded from electromagnetic signals and have as many as four independent systems that control devices such as flaps and the rudder. If one fails, another takes over.

Cars also have backup systems. Automakers say they prevent malfunctions and note that reports of problems are few given the number of vehicles on the road.

Most German automakers, Nissan Motor Co. and Chrysler, for example, have programmed their cars to cut engine power whenever the gas pedal and brake pedal are hit at the same time. If the throttle is stuck, for whatever reason, this “smart pedal” software gives control to the brake and prevents an accident.

Toyota has a system that kills the throttle when a computer gets unusual signals from gas-pedal sensors. It’s also started deploying “smart pedal” software in some models and pledges to add the feature to all of its new vehicles by the end of next year.

Toyota maintains its backup systems are sufficient — and all performed as expected in testing.

“We’ve designed our electronic throttle system with multiple fail-safe mechanisms, to shut off or reduce engine power in the event of a system failure. We’ve done extensive testing of this system and we’ve never found a malfunction that’s caused unintended acceleration,” Toyota’s Lentz said.

Still, just because no one has found an electronic flaw doesn’t mean there are none.

Clarence Ditlow, who leads the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer group, knows of a case of unintended acceleration in which a car had no floor mats, no sticking gas pedal and the driver clearly was pressing the right pedal because the brakes were scorched from heat.

“What else is there other than electronics?” he asked.

February 25, 2010

View the full story at wsj.com

Congress this week has begun wading into an issue that has vexed the auto industry for decades: Is sudden acceleration caused by driver mistakes, or by problems with cars?

The consensus among industry executives and federal safety regulators, embodied in a 1989 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is that most cases of sudden acceleration result from drivers hitting the gas pedal when they meant to hit the brakes.

But this week, witnesses at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have said that 21-year-old report is outdated in an age when many vehicles are controlled by electronic throttle and braking systems that didn’t exist in substantial numbers back then.

Toyota Motor Co. President Akio Toyoda told a Congressional committee Wednesday he was “absolutely confident” there was no design flaw in the company’s electronic throttle-control system.

When asked by a lawmaker whether Toyota would continue to blame drivers for sudden accelerations problems, Mr. Toyoda said: “I will make sure that we will never ever blame the customers going forward.”

Toyota’s U.S. sales chief, Jim Lentz, told lawmakers Tuesday, “I don’t think any manufacturer knows 100% what is causing” sudden acceleration. He said the company is confident “from what we know today” that electronics aren’t a problem, but that Toyota’s recent safety recalls may not totally solve sudden unintended acceleration in its cars.

Driver error is the auto industry’s bugaboo. Even when dealers and auto makers suspect driver error, it is difficult for them to outright blame their customers for fear of alienating them or appearing insensitive, as sometimes serious injuries or fatalities are involved. In Toyota’s case, some of the most high-profile incidents of sudden acceleration involve drivers who are elderly or with health issues that may never be definitively ruled out as contributing factors.

Mr. Lentz acknowledged after a hearing Tuesday that both auto parts and human error could be to blame. “I think in the case of sudden acceleration there are mechanical issues, there are human interface issues. There is pedal misapplication. It exists.”

Toyota is getting a lot of attention for sudden unintended acceleration, but Ford Motor Co. has been the subject of more complaints with federal regulators in the recent past. From 2004 to 2009, based on NHTSA data, Ford had 2,806 complaints, compared with Toyota’s 2,515. General Motors Co. had 1,192. A study by Edmunds.com, an independent market-research Web site, found that based on the number of vehicles on the road, Toyota ranked 17th in recalls.

Ford spokesman Said Deep said, “When you analyze NHTSA data and remove the complaints due to the speed control deactivation switch, which we recalled in 2005, Ford’s performance in this category has improved each year and our complaints have been significantly lower than Toyota’s each year since 2005.” Still, Mr. Deep said Ford’s speed deactivation switch—which shuts off the cruise control when the driver hits the brakes firmly—had no connection to sudden acceleration, and that about 14 million vehicles were recalled due to the potential of the switch causing fires while vehicles were parked.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Tuesday he would expand a probe into sudden acceleration to other auto makers.

In the 1980s, a consumer scare over mechanical defects in Volkswagen AG’s Audi 5000 vehicles caused Audi sales to collapse, but the NHTSA later determined the cause of the problem was “pedal misapplication,” meaning a driver was mistakenly hitting the gas instead of the brake. It took years for Audi’s sales to recover and a mechanical defect was never found in the vehicles.

Safety regulators, human-error experts and auto makers say driver error is the primary cause of sudden accelerations, and if there are no error codes in the electronics, there is no evidence to support an electronic failure.

“Many, if not all, are pedal errors,” said Richard Schmidt, a leading expert on human error, said of Toyota’s sudden-acceleration complaints. “There are all of these hypotheses flying around—the computer went haywire and it was left without a trace of evidence. What’s the evidence?”

Rhonda Smith, who testified before the House committee Tuesday, said her Lexus began accelerating on its own after her cruise-control light turned on by itself.

Toyota told Ms. Smith in a letter that the auto maker’s inspectors were “unable to duplicate the unintended acceleration you reported.”

A final report from NHTSA, dated May 2, 2007, noted an NHTSA investigator, Scott Yon, didn’t check the electronics. His report listed the cause as the pedal sticking to an all-weather floor mat, which was stacked atop a carpeted floor mat.

“When I got that I was pretty furious,” said Ms. Smith. “I called him and I said, ‘Scott, it wasn’t my floor mats,’ and I said it was the electronics. He said there’s an ongoing investigation on that.”

NHTSA says it followed up with the current owners of Ms. Smith’s Lexus and was told that they have had no problems since they bought it with less than 3,000 miles on the car. It now has about 30,000 miles on it.

February 23, 2010

View the full story and a graphic at usatoday.com

Allegations of unintended acceleration by Toyota models that are not part of the recall and by cars from other automakers have revived debate over whether electromagnetic interference is the cause of such incidents.

The theory is that electrical signals — from sources as diverse as cellphones, airport radar and even a car’s own systems — briefly and unpredictably wreak havoc with sensitive electronic controls in vehicles. It’s an argument trial lawyers and consumer advocates have made for years.

Automakers contend that vehicle systems are designed with sufficient shielding and redundancy to prevent such malfunctions. They have tested for electromagnetic interference (EMI) and found no evidence of it for as long as plaintiff lawyers have blamed it for crashes. Several acceleration suits filed against Toyota claim an EMI link.

It’s virtually impossible to prove EMI caused a crash. Plaintiffs have won just one case arguing that issue alone. But there are enough unexplainable crashes and acceleration incidents to keep the door open to allegations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration now is investigating whether EMI could be a factor in Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problems. It is NHTSA’s first serious look at EMI in decades, and members of Congress will explore it in Toyota hearings beginning today.

“If these congressional hearings probe deeply enough, they’ll discover that the car industry has known from the beginning that the most likely cause of sudden acceleration is internal electromagnetic interference,” charges Tom Murray, a Sandusky, Ohio, attorney who has brought dozens of acceleration lawsuits and is writing a book on sudden acceleration.

Toyota, however, says floor mat interference and sticky gas pedals are the causes of unintended acceleration in the more than 8 million vehicles it has recalled in the USA for either problem. It commissioned an outside company, Exponent, in December to look at the electronic throttle controls, which have replaced mechanical gas pedal and throttle systems in most vehicles of all makes since the 1990s.

According to a draft report obtained by USA TODAY, Exponent says it could not induce unintended acceleration through “electrical disturbances.”

But Keith Armstrong, a United Kingdom-based EMI expert, argues that the tests weren’t comprehensive enough to find whether EMI could be to blame. Two experts consulted by the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which is holding today’s hearing, were similarly critical. The panel’s leadership called it a flawed report, but Toyota says it is far from final and will be peer-reviewed.

NHTSA says it “has no reason at this point to believe” EMI is causing unintended acceleration in Toyotas. Still, looking at it anew is a turnabout. In 1975, a NHTSA report warned that EMI was a potential problem as electronics, just then being used in cars, became more common. Since then, however, its acceleration studies concluded that driver behavior was to blame and didn’t address EMI.

Murray, who says he was contacted by NHTSA defect investigators last month, believes that is a mistake. He blames EMI for all but “1% to 2% of all Toyota sudden-acceleration cases” and most of those in other vehicles, too. At least 14 sudden-acceleration lawsuits alleging EMI are pending, including ones against Toyota.

Onboard EMI sources

While EMI from external sources, such as traffic lights or radar, is possible, it is unlikely because it would require an unusually strong signal, says Brian Kirk, a U.K.-based consultant in software safety systems who advises in auto lawsuits. More likely sources are onboard components, he says, because even very low-power electromagnetic radiation from the car’s electronics could cause a problem. He says, for example, that EMI from poorly designed ignition wiring could disrupt signals in the electronic throttle or engine controls.

Internal EMI has been linked, Armstrong says, to high-voltage spikes when current in a wire or coil is switched, such as when the headlights or brake lights go off.

Automakers’ move to electronic engine controls, including throttles, has been driven by the need to meet tighter federal fuel and emissions regulations. They allow far more precise control of the engine operation and fuel use. Recent years have seen so-called drive-by-wire systems replacing mechanical control of other critical functions, such as steering assist.

Automakers’ quiet concerns

Testing for potential EMI is a closely guarded subject within automakers. But lawsuits over the years have uncovered documents citing internal concern.

Walter Gelon, then an employee at General Motors-owned Hughes Aircraft, warned in early 1987 that he thought EMI was behind reported unintended acceleration in GM vehicles, according to an internal memo obtained by Murray’s law firm, Murray & Murray.

“It seems very clear to me that (GM) vehicles have serious EMI problems which are triggering … unwanted acceleration,” Gelon wrote to Hughes colleagues.

But a late 1988 report provided by GM showed Hughes largely ruled out EMI as a cause of sudden acceleration after a lengthy GM investigation.

GM still holds that position. “GM has a robust testing and validation process for electromagnetic compatibility (among systems), and there is nothing past or current that suggests any unwanted acceleration issues related to EMI in our vehicles,” says spokesman Alan Adler.

Also in the 1980s, as use of electronics in cars expanded fast, EMI was on the minds of Ford engineers. The minutes of an October 1986 Ford Technical Affairs Committee meeting, provided by Murray & Murray, show Ford looked into whether “electromagnetic influences” were behind an increase in unexplainable electronic component failures.

Spokesman Said Deep said Ford later ruled out “electrical interference problems” and gave dealers better diagnostic equipment and training, which reduced the number of such warranty claims.

Armstrong, who was interviewed this month by NHTSA defect investigators, says “automakers almost never publicly acknowledge EMI problems,” but he remains sure they exist.

“Why would (automakers) spend millions of dollars on sophisticated EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) test facilities, and place EMC test requirements on all their electronic suppliers, if it wasn’t necessary?” asks Armstrong, who is president of the U.K.-based EMC Industry Association. He was an expert witness in a Ford sudden-acceleration case this month and is advising lawyers suing Toyota.

Armstrong reviewed the Exponent draft report on Toyota’s electronic throttles and called it “complete baloney.” He asserts that the “redundant” backup sensors the report suggests protect against EMI are ineffective because they are based on the same technology. He believes two different technologies must be used to keep multiple sensors from being affected in the same way at the same time.

Dozens of EMI testing centers

Automakers say they try to test for all possible electronic signals that could affect cars. There are dozens of EMI auto testing facilities in the U.S. and Mexico, including centers owned by GM and Ford.

Lee Hill, founding partner of Silent Solutions, which does EMI testing and consulting on autos says, “Anything with electronics has some vulnerability, but every important system on an automobile is tested very carefully.”

Hill says automakers have been testing for EMI since the 1960s, even before electronics controlled vital systems. He says that in addition to testing of onboard systems, vehicles are bombarded in a lab with external radio waves and driven through areas where there is known radio-wave interference.

Ford’s Deep says: “We have not seen issues from EMI or any other signal disturbances from external sources. We do also test extensively and rigorously for internal sources. Ford vehicles are designed to prevent unwanted acceleration by protecting against, detecting and evaluating electrical interferences.”

Toyota is building an EMI test facility in Ann Arbor, Mich., and already has one in Japan.

“We have never found … any issue of acceleration from the electronics,” Kristen Tabar, general manager of electronic systems for Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing, North America, said Monday during a briefing for journalists on Toyota electronics testing. “If interference did occur beyond what our testing would have found, (the system) would detect it and act appropriately.”

Toyota President Akio Toyoda said last week that its cars have “fail-safe” systems that shut the cars down when electrical interferences occur, a feature auto-engineering experts say is now standard in the industry.

Proving anything is tough

Certainty may remain elusive.

Mukul Verma, formerly one of GM’s top safety experts, points out that electronic throttle controls may be affected by other electrical and electronic systems, including those in the car, and that unintended acceleration may result from car sensor malfunctions, software glitches or from “electromagnetic interferences, which are random and still not fully understood.”

Verma, an adjunct professor of mechatronics (the relationship between mechanical and electronic components) at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich., points up the difficulty in being able to “rule in or rule out” EMI as a factor in sudden acceleration. “It’s just too hard to prove either way. The thing with electrical currents is, once they are done and gone, there’s no trace level. You can’t reconstruct any phenomenon caused by electrical current going into a computer.”

February 21, 2010

View the full story at freep.com

Toyota’s leading U.S. executive boasted to the automaker’s Washington staff last summer that they had saved the company more than $100 million by limited any regulatory action on sudden acceleration to a recall of equipment such as floor mats, according to documents turned over to a key U.S. House committee holding hearings on the issue Wednesday.

In the documents, the deal with the government was listed among “Wins for Toyota” in an internal presentation by Yoshimi Inaba, chairman and CEO of Toyota Motors Sales U.S.A. in Washington last July 6. the company last summer. The documents were obtained by the Free Press on Sunday.

The documents were among thousands of pages turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A second committee will meet on Tuesday to discuss the Toyota recalls.

“The question this raises is was the bottom line factored into Toyota’s decision making,” said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa of California “Did regulators do their due diligence once problems were brought to their attention? Did Toyota raise potential safety problems with regulators as soon as they knew a problem existed?”

Toyota defended its commitment to safety.

“Our first priority is the safety of our customers and to conclude otherwise on the basis of one internal presentation is wrong,” the company said in a prepared statement. “Our values have always been to put the customer first and ensure the highest levels of safety and quality.”

Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles worldwide in recent months because of sudden acceleration problems the company and regulators have connected to entrapped floor mats and potentially sticky accelerator pedals. A third recall covered more than 400,000 hybrid vehicles, including the popular Prius for faulty brakes.

Earlier this month before the hybrid recall, Toyota executives estimated that the unintended acceleration recalls would cost $2 billion in lost sales and cost of extra parts for repairs. Toyota stopped producing eight models in the U.S. from Jan 26 until Feb. 8. Analysts have said the cost could be higher.

Toyota has said repeatedly that no malfunction in any of its vehicles’ electronic throttle system contributed to any incidents of unintended acceleration, which has been cited in hundreds of accidents, including 34 fatalities, according to NHTSA. But the automaker has offered a brake-override software remedy on 2007 through 2010 models of the Toyota Camry, Avalon, Lexus ES and IS models. Brake override ensures that the brakes will slow the vehicle if both accelerator and brake pedals are pressed at the same time.

Toyota is making the brake override standard equipment on all Toyota and Lexus models by the end of 2011 model year, but it has refused to offer it on many of the 5 million vehicles covered by the floor mat and sticky pedal recalls.

The estimated cost savings of more than $100 million was among nine points that Inaba’s presentation labeled as “Wins for Toyota.” In addition to the savings, Inaba made note that NHTSA had found no defect.

Of course, that was before the Jan. 21 recall that did find a possible defect in the gas pedals among 2.3 million vehicles, as well as the braking recall on Prius and two hybrid models sold in Japan.

Any company would be expected to treat a reduction of regulatory costs as a positive development. Toyota, however, likely never expected an internal presentation to become evidence in a highly public Congressional inquiry into the quality of its vehicles.

By Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian

February 18, 2010

View the full story at latimes.com

When some of the world’s best-known companies faced disputes over secondhand smoke, toxic waste in the jungle and asbestos, they all turned to the same source for a staunch defense: Exponent Inc.

Now that same engineering and consulting firm has been hired by Toyota Motor Corp. as it seeks to fend off claims that sudden acceleration in its vehicles could be caused by problems in its electronic throttle systems.

A 56-page report that Menlo Park, Calif.-based Exponent sent to Congress on Feb. 9 found that the system behaved as intended and that Exponent was “unable to induce . . . unintended acceleration or behavior that might be a precursor to such an event.”

But Exponent’s research has come under fire from critics, including engineers, attorneys and academics who say the company tends to deliver to clients the reports they need to mount a public defense.

“If I were Toyota, I wouldn’t have picked somebody like Exponent to do analysis,” said Stanton Glantz, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco who runs a database on the tobacco industry that contains thousands of pages of Exponent research arguing, among other things, that secondhand smoke does not cause cancer. “I would have picked a firm with more of a reputation of neutrality.”

Mike Gaulke, executive chairman of Exponent and an employee of the company since 1992, called critiques that it produced only favorable research a “cheap shot.”

“Do we tell our clients a lot of what they don’t want to hear? Absolutely,” Gaulke said.

He said the firm often comes up with results that don’t favor clients, although he couldn’t provide specific examples.

Toyota says that it stands by the study — and the company.

“Exponent’s credentials are widely recognized and the firm has conducted testing for a wide variety of clients from the corporate, government and nonprofit sectors,” said Toyota spokesman Mike Michels. “We believe they are an appropriate choice to conduct independent testing of electronic control systems. Their research will be comprehensive and subject to peer review as well as public inspection.”

In the more than 40 years since it was founded by a group of Stanford PhDs, Exponent has worked for clients including Boeing Co., General Electric Co. and Ford Motor Co., primarily providing research for defense testimony in lawsuits.

According to Gaulke, 65% of the company’s revenue comes from materials for litigation.

Boasting $228 million in annual revenue, the company employs about 900 people, about one-third of them holding doctorates. The company, formerly named Failure Analysis Associates Inc., changed its name in the 1990s.

In the late 1980s, it was hired by Suzuki to conduct tests that showed that the Samurai sport utility vehicle wouldn’t tip over during turns at 38 mph, disputing research published by Consumer Reports magazine. In Exponent’s research, the Samurai successfully completed turns at 43 mph. It called the Consumer Reports test “stunt like.”

About 10 years ago, Ford, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler hired Exponent to help with their defense in a slew of lawsuits filed by mechanics who alleged that asbestos in brakes caused them health problems. Exponent’s findings upheld the automakers’ argument that the brakes were not a hazard.

The firm was hired by Exxon to show that a double hull probably would not have prevented the Valdez disaster of 1989. It was also hired by NASA to help determine causes of the Challenger shuttle explosion, and by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to survey the damages to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Swiss Re, an insurer of the World Trade Center, hired Exponent after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to argue its case that it should have to pay only half the $7 billion in claims sought on the grounds that the collapse of one tower would have compromised the entire complex even if the second tower had not fallen.

Last May, the Amazon Defense Coalition alleged that an Exponent study finding that dumping oil waste in the Ecuadorean rain forest did not increase cancer rates was tainted because the firm’s largest shareholder was a member of the board of Chevron Corp., which commissioned the study.

“The director involved was an outside director,” Gaulke said. “I doubt he knew that we worked on that.”

In the Toyota study, Exponent purchased six Toyota and Lexus vehicles from the 2002 through 2008 model years, testing them and comparing their performance to a 2008 Honda Accord.

The report describes how the Toyota electronic throttle control system operates and a few experiments that attempted to disrupt the normal function of the throttle, with no results.

“In all cases, the vehicle either behaved normally or entered a fail-safe mode where engine power was significantly reduced or shut off,” the study found.

But the tests described by Exponent did not appear to duplicate the sophisticated methods that automotive engineers say are needed to ensure that electromagnetic interference does not cause failure of the hardware or software of engine controls. Indeed, Exponent did not say it placed any Toyota vehicle in a test chamber that automakers routinely use to bombard cars with high-powered electromagnetic signals known to disrupt automotive electronics.

Cindy Sage, an environmental consultant in Santa Barbara who specializes in electromagnetic interference, said that much more extensive testing than described in the report would be necessary to find a potential problem.

Sage, who has faced off against Exponent witnesses on safety issues in the past, said Toyota’s hiring of Exponent was telling.

“The first thing you know is that when Exponent is brought in to help a company, that company is in big trouble,” she said.

View the full story at nytimes.com

By NICK BUNKLEY
Toyota Motor, still struggling to resolve a problem with accelerator pedals, said Tuesday that it would temporarily stop building and selling eight models, including the popular Camry and Corolla sedans, in the North American market.

The unusual move follows two recalls of millions of vehicles in the last two months for a problem that the company has described as a “rare” condition in which the gas pedal can stick and cause a vehicle to speed up unintentionally.

“This action is necessary until a remedy is finalized,” Robert S. Carter, a Toyota group vice president, said in a statement. “We’re making every effort to address this situation for our customers as quickly as possible.”

The suspension has the potential to further damage Toyota, whose reputation for quality helped make it the world’s No. 1 carmaker in recent years. Toyota said it would immediately stop selling the Camry, Corolla and Avalon sedans, Matrix wagon, RAV4 crossover, Tundra pickup, and Highlander and Sequoia sport utility vehicles.

Toyota said the move was intended to restore confidence in the automaker, and the safety of its products. One analyst said many consumers might have a different reaction.

“The problem seems to be getting larger than anyone was led to believe at first,” said Erich Merkle, an analyst with Autoconomy.com in Grand Rapids, Mich. “A lot of those vehicles are probably in the garages of families. It gets people thinking, ‘Would I want my wife and kids in the vehicle, would they know what to do in a situation like that.’ ”

It will also stop building those models the week of Feb. 1. All of the vehicles are assembled in the United States or Canada, at a total of five plants.

The models affected accounted for more than a million sales in 2009, 57 percent of Toyota’s American total for the year.

Stock in Toyota was down 3.4 percent at midday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Toyota’s acknowledgement of problems with acceleration pedals reawakens one of the oldest safety issues in the auto industry. Manufacturers have long dismissed that a vehicle can race forward out of the driver’s control, contending that the problem takes place when a driver mistakenly pushes the accelerator while trying to hit the brake pedal.

Design changes to address sudden acceleration have focused until now on placing the accelerator pedal farther to the right relative to the steering wheel, so that drivers are less likely to depress it by mistake during an emergency.

The recession has led to a sharp drop in sales over all for the auto industry. For Toyota dealers, the news will likely further reduce their business.

“It’s not exciting to hear that a good portion of my inventory now can’t be sold,” said Paul Lunsford, general manager of South Coast Toyota in Costa Mesa, Calif.

But Mr. Lunsford, who has been a Toyota dealer for 30 years, applauded the company’s decision to move fast to suspend sales of the vehicles involved in last week’s recall. “Nobody had to put a gun to Toyota’s head to get them to do the right thing,” he said.

Still, Mr. Lunsford added, “it’s not the feel-good story of the year if you’re a Toyota dealer.”

A November recall by Toyota was intended to fix a design flaw that could cause the gas pedal to become trapped under the floor mat. It was prompted in part by the crash of a Lexus sedan that ran out of control and crashed into a ravine near San Diego, killing four people.

But the automaker and federal safety officials continued to receive reports of unintended acceleration and stuck pedals even in cases where the floor mats had been removed, a stopgap measure recommended by Toyota.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking into two recent episodes, in Texas and in New Jersey. Four people died on Dec. 26 near Dallas when a Toyota Avalon — with its floor mats in the trunk — went off a road and landed upside down in a pond.

In announcing a second recall last week, Toyota said the accelerator pedal could wear down and become difficult to depress, slow to spring back or get stuck partly depressed.

Toyota does not have a solution for the problem yet, and it said drivers who experienced it should depress the brake firmly and steadily, and then contact a dealer after the vehicle was in a safe location and turned off.

Drivers who have not had a problem should wait for the company to develop a remedy before visiting their dealer.

Together, the two recalls cover 4.8 million vehicles, including 1.7 million affected by both. The Prius hybrid and several Lexus models were included in the November recall but not in last week’s action or the sales halt.

The latest series of recalls threaten to undo all the efforts Toyota made in the middle of the last decade, when it was hit by a series of quality problems that caused recalls to spike. But a number of those recalls were for vehicles at least a decade old.

On its Web site, Toyota said the years and models affected in the sales suspension were the 2009-2010 RAV4 crossover, the 2009-2010 Corolla, the 2009-2010 Matrix, the 2005-2010 Avalon, the 2007-2010 Camry, the 2010 Highlander, the 2007-2010 Tundra, and the 2008-2010 Sequoia.

The plants affected are in Canada, Kentucky and Texas, with two in Indiana.

The most recent recalls follow what Toyota insisted was a companywide effort to improve quality that was started by Katsuaki Watanabe, who served as its president before he was replaced last year by Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder.

The decision to stop production, though unusual, is not unprecedented. Detroit carmakers have delayed or slowed production to address quality issues.

The decision by Toyota on Tuesday has parallels to Ford’s response to Firestone tire problems in 2000 and 2001, but Toyota’s action is much more wide-ranging.

Ford did not halt sales of its Explorer sport utility vehicles when it recalled them in 2000 and 2001 for the replacement of Firestone tires.

The company did announce the suspension of production for one week in 2001 because Firestone had not yet made enough tires using a new design and manufacturing process to supply tires for both the recall and for new vehicles.

Keith Bradsher, Julie Creswell and Micheline Maynard contributed reporting.

As we all should have learned nine years ago from the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire maelstrom, it’s not often just one thing that creates a catastrophe of epic proportions. Defect issues that rise to the top of the charts are frequently the result of a multitude of problems that align to create a widespread hazard.

In the Ford-Firestone case, it was the marriage of tires with several poor design characteristics compounded by manufacturing problems and the application on an unstable vehicle. Add in the huge number of Explorers sold and the tires’ longevity, which kept them on the roads long enough to fail, and the result was rollovers, injuries and deaths. Now comes Toyota, with thousands of unintended acceleration complaints across different models, makes and model years and an easy-one-size-fits-all root cause: floormats.

That explanation is swiftly becoming unraveled as quick-thinking owners – like the 2007 Avalon owner from New Jersey who managed to wrest his out-of-control vehicle right to the dealership, where the evidence was revving and smoking in front of the tech’s eyes and couldn’t be floor-matted away. (see Sudden Acceleration in Reverse).

Now a “Concerned Citizen” in Franklin, Kentucky has offered NHTSA another interesting piece of the puzzle: broke throttle body shafts.

On November 27, about a month after NHTSA closed its latest Toyota unintended acceleration investigation with another pedal interference conclusion, some Kentuckian’s conscience got the better of him/her. Here is the anonymous note addressed the then-Acting Administrator Ronald Medford:

“There are potentially hundreds of Toyota and Nissan vehicles driving American highways with cracked shaft throttle bodies. Japanese management up to and including company president was aware of the cracked shaft problem and told everyone to be quiet about this problem.

The failure mode on DFMEA for broken throttle shaft is no throttle control and potential wide open acceleration. The Toyota floor mats caused American deaths. Will you sit on this information and possibly cause more American deaths? It bothers me that I did not tell anyone sooner. I have another throttle body in same condition that can be sent to Automotive News.

Concerned Citizen”

Coincidentally, Franklin Precision Industry (FPI) in Franklin, KY manufactures throttle bodies for Toyota and Nissan. FPI is part of Aisan Industry Co. Ltd., a large automotive supplier based in Japan, with its major shareholders Toyota Motor Corporation, at 35 percent and Toyota Industries Corporation at 18 percent.

NHTSA didn’t place the potential whistle-blower’s letter in the public file until Jan. 4.

Dear Concerned Citizen: Thanks for the tip. We’d like to see that cracked throttle body shaft – and we promise to investigate swiftly.

View the full story at abcnews.com

Toyota, which launched the largest auto recall in U.S. history last fall after incidents of random acceleration resulting in fatalities, has just announced an additional recall of 2.3 million vehicles to correct sticking accelerator pedals. The recall was announced late Thursday afternoon, after ABC News informed the company that the latest in a long series of ABC News investigative reports into sudden unexplained acceleration in Toyotas was about to air.

Safety expert Sean Kane tells ABC News that since last fall, when Toyota said it had solved the acceleration problem with proposed changes to gas pedals and a recall of 4.2 million cars with suspect floor mats, more than 60 new cases of runaway Toyotas have been reported. He believes this latest recall may still not be a complete fix of a problem that continues to be linked with serious accidents and deaths.
In the most tragic incident, on the day after Christmas, four people died in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, when a 2008 Toyota sped off the road, through a fence and landed upside down in a pond. The car’s floor mats were found in the trunk of the car, where owners had been advised to put them as part of the recall.

“There’s one thing that didn’t cause the accident,” said Southlake police spokesman Lt. Ben Brown.

Federal safety investigators have joined in the investigation, according to Lt. Brown.

Toyota executives had insisted in November that the recall of the floor mats in certain models and a proposed redesign of the accelerator pedal would fix the problem.

Reports of possible electronic problems or on-board computer glitches were strongly denied by the Toyota executives. “There is no evidence to support these theories,” said Bob Daly, a Toyota executive.

But the continued reports of runaway Toyotas since the November recall have shaken the company’s firm denials.

In another case, in New Jersey, a Toyota owner was able to make it to a local dealer with his car racing out of control, even though his foot was not on the gas pedal and the floor mats were not involved.

Kevin Haggerty, a salesman from Pittstown, New Jersey, said he had seen an ABCNews.com report about how to control a car experiencing unexpected acceleration — by shifting into neutral.

With his brakes smoking, and the engine racing, Haggerty summoned a Toyota manager to witness what was happening with his car.

Haggerty says after consulting with Toyota, the local dealer replaced the gas pedal and throttle and their sensors.

‘A Real Breakthrough Case’

“We now have that evidence right in front of Toyota, they’re witnessing it and they can’t walk away from it,” said safety analyst Kane, who is with the private firm Safety Research & Strategies .

“The Haggerty case is a real breakthrough case,” he said. “It’s a real problem and it points to electronic defects in the vehicle.”

Dozens of other Toyota owners had made similar claims about electronic problems with their cars, unconnected to floor mates, over the last few years, but they were routinely dismissed by Toyota as unfounded.

The latest recall, announced Thursday, affects the RAV4, Corolla, and Matrix models from 2009 and 2010, Avalons from model years 2005 to 2010, Camrys from 2007 to 2010, the 2010 Highlander, the 2007 to 2010 Tundra and the 2008 to 2010 Sequoias. About 1.7 million of the vehicles cited are also affected by the earlier recall.

The company says this action is separate from fall’s recall of 4.2 million cars to replace floor mats and alter accelerator pedals. The company had blamed floor mats for many of the acceleration incidents. An ABC News investigation, however, found that many drivers and safety experts rejected this explanation, asking instead if there was an issue with the electronic components that control acceleration.

Toyota says the recall of the “sticking gas pedals” covers Haggerty’s problem, but he says his gas pedal was never stuck.

In its statements, Toyota does not claim the “sticking gas pedal” recall is a complete fix and says it will continue to investigate other incidents of unwanted acceleration, including those cited by ABC News.