Joeb427

iTrader: (1)

Mr.Toyoda, Why is Toyota Hiding its Black Box Data?
March 06, 2010 6:22 PM
Michael Phelan Attorney

Toyota sudden acceleration crashes, black box, event data recorder, product liability0 CommentsPrint ArticleSubscribeAutomobile product liability lawyers already knew that Toyota's litigation strategy includes blocking access to data stored in its vehicles' on-board black box, also known as Event Data Recorders (EDRs). Toyota's duplicity has included:

- refusing to produce key information stored on the EDR

- prohibiting everyone in the country from downloading EDR data except the one Toyota expert whose laptop contains the proprietary software needed to read the data following a crash

- when ordered by a court to provide the data, either settling to avoid production or producing only a paper printout with key columns left blank.

The Associated Press has uncovered another layer of deception. Toyota admitted to the AP that its EDRs record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag deploys, and that such data includes"data on the brake's position and the antilock brake system," both key issues in sudden acceleration lawsuits. This admission is significant in light of Toyota's position in two wrongful death lawsuits involving sudden unintended acceleration. In a Texas case, police requested the EDR data from a 2008 Avalon that crashed through a fence, struck a tree, and kept going into a pond. The police received from Toyota an EDR readout listing as "off" any information on acceleration or braking. In an Indiana case, the driver claimed before she died that she stood on the brake pedal with both feet but could not stop her 2003 Camry. Her family was told by Toyota that there was "no sensor that would have preserved information regarding the accelerator and brake positions at the time of impact."

Toyota's EDR system has been in use since 2001. It admitted to the AP that the EDR records "data on the brake's position adn the antilock brake system." So why did the readout produced to the police in the Texas case say "off" with respect to information on acceleration or braking? The plaintiff lawyer in the case contends that Toyota may have deliberately stopped allowing the EDRs to collect acclerator and braking data so that it would not be forced to produce such data in court cases.

It's time to aks Mr. Toyoda some tough questions.

http://richmond.injuryboard.com/auto...oogleid=279076

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

best article i've read on why it's so hard for toyota to get to the bottom of all this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...d=sec-business

-J-P-L-

Good article.

I like the passage at the end describing the likelihood that cases were driver error.

It's so true. And most people will never admit or know that it was their fault.

Who here has ever, at least once in their life, hit the wrong pedal by accident? I'm willing to bet everyone.

*Batman*

This Toyota handles really well. Grips the road like an F1 car

Joeb427

iTrader: (1)

http://www.freep.com/article/2010030...s-upset-rivals



March 7, 2010

Toyota charts upset rivals
BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Comments (109) Recommend (3) Print E-mail Letter to the editor Share Facebook Twitter FarkIt Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine
Buzz up!
Toyota's recall troubles might appear at first to be an occasion for great glee among Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, a chance to steal back long-lost customers from their biggest Asian competitor.




And momentarily, at least, there is that opportunity. February sales numbers showed a decline of 9% for Toyota while the Detroit Three -- especially a surging Ford -- posted gains.

This column, however, is about what the late radio legend Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story."

Detroit auto folks are privately fuming over what they see as calculated, misleading attempts by Toyota to deflect attention from its own failings by trashing the quality records of Ford, GM and Chrysler.

This rancor over Toyota's PR tactics is blowing another hole in the already shaky solidarity of the Alliance of American Automobile Manufacturers, which includes Detroit and foreign firms, just as a restless U.S. Congress looks poised to unleash a wave of costly new safety rules on the entire industry.

None of Detroit's top guns wants to publicly bash Toyota now, because (a) Detroit still doesn't have much credibility on Capitol Hill, and (b) they might just look like whiners grousing about Toyota.

Bad blood brewing
But behind the scenes, Detroit loyalists accuse Toyota of "lobbyist malpractice" and say things like, "It's tearing the whole industry apart."

Here's why: Just as top Toyota honchos were to testify in Washington, D.C., about a spate of recalls and safety complaints, Toyota sent a set of charts under the headline "Automotive Recalls in Perspective" to offices of key congressional committee members. One striking bar graph showed that Ford, GM and Chrysler were the overwhelming leaders in U.S. safety recall campaigns during the past decade, each with around triple the recalls of Toyota.

So what's wrong with that, if the numbers were correct?

Beside the point
The charts were totally irrelevant to the point of the hearings, that's what.

Toyota was hauled before Congress to explain why it took so long to address specific safety complaints, whether it was hiding things, why U.S. regulators had to prod Toyota into action -- not to compare a decade's worth of industrywide recall data.

Indeed, Toyota sending out those charts was precisely the type of obfuscation and misdirection that's gotten the automaker into such hot water.

Meanwhile, as Congress makes noise about mandating brake-override technology and adding other costly new rules, the Auto Alliance, the industry's joint-lobbying group, is less than united.

Honda and Nissan are not members; Toyota and the German firms are.

The Detroit Three, to varying degrees in this tough economy, are questioning the value of the multimillion-dollar checks they've written to support the alliance in years past.

Now the bad blood over Toyota's tactics threatens to further split the industry, even on issues like safety and the upcoming cap-and-trade debates on energy and environmental policy.

Contact TOM WALSH: 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com

mitsuguy

iTrader: (2)

man, this time I was in college, but visiting my parents... I drove a manual 3000GT at the time, but it was snowy, so I took their Jeep Cherokee in to town to run some errands...

coasting down a hill just a bit from their house, in the 3000, I would normally clutch in, coast, down shift, over a small bridge, then accelerate up the next hill...

not this time... getting ready to do the same thing, but this time in an automatic Jeep, my left foot tried to push the brake to the floor with as much force as you would normally use for a stiff clutch...

talk about a jolt forwards in our seats!

from that point on, I made it a point that when I would go back and forth from vehicles, that I would always put my left foot completely on the floor when I got in the Jeep...

joe80

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/03/07/t...-wit/#comments


Toyota rebuts Professor Gilbert, reports nothing found wrong with remedied vehicles


During the first round of Congressional hearings last month, Toyota was blindsided by one Professor David Gilbert who was added to the witness list at the last minute to talk about an experiment in which he induced sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) in a late model Toyota Avalon. His test was reproduced in a shoddy ABC News report with Brian Ross behind the wheel and referenced often in the Congressional hearings by politicians trying to understand the complicated method by which Gilbert got the Avalon to take off running.

Well, Toyota and its independent consulting firm Exponent (they're funded by Toyota but produce results reportedly not influenced by their client) have studied Gilbert's experiment and been able to reproduce the results themselves. In Toyota's words:

The analysis of Professor's Gilbert's demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory. There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world. As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.

Likewise, a small portion of owners with vehicles that have already received the fix for Toyota's sticky pedal recall have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the fix didn't work. These owners have reportedly experienced SUA after having their vehicles fixed. Toyota has moved quickly to evaluate these complaints and submit its results to NHTSA. Again, Toyota in its own words:

The evaluations have found no evidence of a failure of the vehicle electronic throttle control system, the recent recall remedies or the brake override system.

What these two moves by Toyota tell us is that the embattled Japanese automaker is finally sticking up for itself in the face of media pundits and politicians who have used this unfortunate situation to score points with their audiences and constituents.

[Source: Toyota]

joe80

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/bu...l?pagewanted=1

Millions of Toyotas Recalled, None in Japan

TOKYO — Feeling her Toyota Mark X station wagon lurch forward at a busy intersection, Masako Sakai slammed on the brakes. But the pedal “had gone limp,” she said. Downshifting didn’t seem to work either.
Enlarge This Image
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Masako Sakai, 64, in Tokyo, where she said her Toyota suddenly accelerated before hitting two other vehicles and injuring three people. She said Toyota was not interested in her complaint.






Fumio Matsuda, a Japanese consumer advocate. He said Japanese authorities saw consumer activists as dangerous.

“I tried everything I could think of,” Mrs. Sakai, 64, said, as she recently recalled the accident that happened six months ago.

Her car surged forward nearly 3,000 feet before slamming into a Mercedes Benz and a taxi, injuring drivers in both those vehicles and breaking Mrs. Sakai’s collarbone.

As shaken as she was by the accident, Mrs. Sakai says she was even more surprised by what happened after. She says that Toyota — from her dealer to headquarters — has not responded to her inquiries, and Japanese authorities have been indifferent to her concerns as a consumer.

Mrs. Sakai says the Tokyo Metropolitan Police urged her to sign a statement saying that she pressed the accelerator by mistake — something she strongly denies. She says the police told her she could have her damaged car back to get it repaired if she made that admission. She declined.

The police say it was a misunderstanding and that they kept her car to carry out their investigation.

But veterans of Japan’s moribund consumer rights movement say that Mrs. Sakai, like many Japanese, is the victim of a Japanese establishment that values Japanese business over Japanese consumers, and the lack of consumer protections here.

“In Japan, there is a phrase: if something smells, put a lid on it,” said Shunkichi Takayama, a Tokyo-based lawyer who has handled complaints related to Toyota vehicles.

Toyota has recalled eight million cars outside Japan because of unexpected acceleration and other problems, but has insisted that there are no systemic problems with its cars sold in Japan. The company recalled the Prius for a brake problem earlier this year.

Critics say many companies benefit from Japan’s weak consumer protections. (The country has only one full-time automobile recall investigator, supported by 15 others on limited contracts.)

In a case in the food industry, a meat processor called Meat Hope collapsed in 2008 after revelations that it had mixed pork, mutton and chicken bits into products falsely labeled as pure ground beef, all under the noses of food inspectors.

A 2006 police inquiry into gas water heaters made by the manufacturer Paloma found that a defect had resulted in the deaths of 21 people over 10 years from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Paloma initially insisted that users had tampered with the heaters’ safety device; the company ultimately admitted that the heaters were at fault — and that executives had been aware of a potential problem for more than a decade. Executives are now being charged with professional negligence, and a court verdict is due in May.

When it comes to cars, the rapid growth of the auto industry here and of car ownership in the 1960s and ’70s was accompanied by a spate of fatal accidents. A consumer movement soon emerged among owners of these defective vehicles.

The most active was the Japan Automobile Consumers Union, led by Fumio Matsuda, a former Nissan engineer often referred to as the Ralph Nader of Japan. But the automakers fought back with a campaign discrediting the activists as dangerous agitators. Mr. Matsuda and his lawyer were soon arrested and charged with blackmail. They fought the charges to Japan’s highest court, but lost.

Now, few people are willing to take on the country’s manufacturers at the risk of arrest, Mr. Matsuda said in a recent interview. “The state sided with the automakers, not the consumers,” he said.

It has become difficult for drivers to access even the most elementary data or details on incidents of auto defects, says Hiroko Isomura, an executive at the National Association of Consumer Specialists and a former adviser to the government on auto recalls. “Unfortunately, the Automobile Consumers Union was shut down,” she said. “No groups like that exist any more.”

For the government to order a recall, it must prove that automobiles do not meet national safety standards, which is difficult to do without the automakers’ cooperation. Most recalls are done on a voluntary basis without government supervision.

An examination of transport ministry records by The New York Times found that at least 99 incidents of unintended acceleration or surge in engine rotation had been reported in Toyotas since 2001, of which 31 resulted in some form of collision.


Critics like Mr. Takayama charge that the number of reports of sudden acceleration in Japan would be bigger if not for the way many automakers in Japan, helped by reticent regulators, have kept such cases out of official statistics, and out of the public eye.

In 2008, about 6,600 accidents and 30 deaths were blamed on drivers of all kinds of vehicles mistakenly pushing the accelerator instead of the brakes, according to the Tokyo-based Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis.

But Mr. Takayama has long argued that number includes cases of sudden acceleration. “It has become the norm here to blame the driver in almost any circumstance,” he said.

“Regulators have long accepted the automakers’ assertions at face value,” said Yukiko Seko, a retired lawmaker of the Japan Communist Party who pursued the issue in Parliament in 2002.

The police strongly deny pressuring drivers to accept the blame in any automobile accident. “All investigations into auto accidents are conducted in a fair and transparent way,” the Tokyo Metropolitan Police said in response to an inquiry by The Times.

Figuring out who is really to blame can be hard because of Japan’s lack of investigators.

Japan’s leniency has also meant that automakers here have routinely ignored even some of the safety standards for cars sold in the United States. Until the early 1990s, Japanese cars sold domestically lacked the reinforcing bars in car walls required of all vehicles sold in the United States. Critics say skimping on safety was one way automakers generated profits in Japan to finance their export drive abroad.

A handful of industry critics like Mr. Takayama and Ms. Seko have, over the years, voiced concern over cases of sudden acceleration in Toyota and other cars in Japan. Under scrutiny especially after the introduction of automatic transmission cars in the late 1980s, Toyota recalled five models because a broken solder was found in its electronics system, which could cause unintended acceleration.

In 1988 the government ordered a nationwide study and tests, and urged automakers to introduce a fail-safe system to make sure the brakes always overrode the accelerator. This month, more than 20 years later, Toyota promised to install a brake override system in all its new models.

Meanwhile, Toyota maintains a large share on the Japanese market, with about 30 percent. The Prius gas-electric hybrid remained the top-selling car in Japan in February despite the automaker’s global recalls, figures released Thursday showed.

But Japan’s pro-industry postwar order may be changing.

In 2009, in one of the last administrative moves by the outgoing government, a new consumer affairs agency was set up to better police defective products, unsafe foods and mislabeling.

The new government’s transport minister, Seiji Maehara, has been outspoken against Toyota.

He said last week that he would push to revamp the country’s oversight of the auto industry, including adding more safety investigators. The government has also said it was examining 38 complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas reported from 2007 through 2009, as well as 96 cases in cars produced by other automakers.

Toyota continues to deny there are problems with unintended acceleration in Japan.

“Yes, there have been incidents of unintended acceleration in Japan,” Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota’s quality chief, said at a news conference last week. “But we believe we have checked each incident and determined that there was no problem with the car,” he said.

Mrs. Sakai said she has called and visited her Toyota dealer, as well as Toyota Motor itself, but has not received a response.

A Toyota spokeswoman, Mieko Iwasaki, confirmed that the automaker had been contacted about complaints of a crash caused by sudden acceleration in September. She said, however, that she could not divulge details of how the company handled each case.

“We are investigating the accident alongside the police, and are cooperating fully with investigations,” she said. “Anything we find, we will tell the police.”

Makiko Inoue and Yasuko Kamiizumi contributed from Tokyo

mitsuguy

iTrader: (2)

3,000 feet... thats ridiculous thats over half a mile...

for a car to go completely crazy, accelerate on its own, and somehow make the brakes fail for only a short period of time, is ridiculous...

so, lets see... lets just assume there is something wrong and the vehicle will accelerate on its own, unintentionally... how do we fix this issue? simple, we hit the brakes... well, lets examine quickly how the brakes work... because brakes are not drive by wire, but instead, they are old fashioned hydraulics, they are not controlled by the ecu... Well, in a sense, they can be - they can be driven by the ABS pump and commanded to not allow pressure to the calipers, thus not engaging the brakes... the problem with this, is that, in this instant, the brake pedal would be instantly firm instead of limp as noted above...

so, the story doesn't add up, at all...

in fact, the only way that story could be true, would be the car suffering from some sort of sticky gas pedal/SUA event, ~AND~ a complete brake system failure at the same instant... Here's the funny thing... both of these "problems" would then, instantly, heal themselves, NEVER to reproduce the same problem... hydraulic systems, especially, do not hide their problems in that way...

the only pedal in an automatic that ever feels limp is the gas pedal.... weird coincidence...

IS350jet

5,280 feet is a 1/4 mile.

mitsuguy

iTrader: (2)

hehe... um, 1320 feet, actually...

IS350jet

Ooops! You're right.

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

have any people younger than middle age been involved in these 'unintended acceleration'?

LexBob2

It would be interesting to see the average age of at least the high profile "victims".

*Batman*

even young people can be incompetent drivers. It's interesting but I bet brands like Porsche and BMW have on average more competent drivers than Lexus. It's the kind of people the ES350 appeals to that brings down the average. People who view driving a car as using an appliance.