OT--For Toyota owners (1000+ cases of sudden acceleration dismissed)
Kris Baker
a Toyota with that odd 59-cent driver's side floormat "hook"? The 2003
Prius has it.
I'm posting this here, because the LA Times website is scrambling the text.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-toyota-recall8-2009nov08,0,2472257,full.story
By Ralph Vartabedian and Ken Bensinger
November 8, 2009
More than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their
vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own, in many cases slamming into
trees, parked cars and brick walls, among other obstacles, a Times review of
federal records has found.
The crashes resulted in at least 19 deaths and scores of injuries over the
last decade, records show. Federal regulators say that is far more than any
other automaker has experienced.
Owner complaints helped trigger at least eight investigations into sudden
acceleration in Toyota and Lexus vehicles by the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration in the last seven years. Toyota Motor Corp. recalled
fewer than 85,000 vehicles in response to two of those probes, and the
federal agency closed six other cases without finding a defect.
But those investigations systematically excluded or dismissed the majority
of complaints by owners that their Toyota and Lexus vehicles had suddenly
accelerated, which sharply narrowed the scope of the probes, the Times
investigation revealed.
Federal officials eliminated broad categories of sudden-acceleration
complaints, including cases in which drivers said they were unable to stop
runaway cars using their brakes; incidents of unintended acceleration
lasting more than a few seconds; and reports in which owners did not
identify the possible causes of the problem.
NHTSA officials used the exclusions as part of their rationale to close at
least five of the investigations without finding any defect, because -- with
fewer incidents to consider -- the agency concluded there were not enough
reported problems to warrant further inquiry. In a 2003 Lexus probe, for
example, the agency threw out all but one of 37 customer complaints cited in
a defect petition. It then halted further investigation, saying it "found no
data indicating the existence of a defect trend."
Meanwhile, fatal crashes involving Toyota vehicles continued to mount.
In a written statement, the NHTSA said its records show that a total of 15
people died in crashes related to possible sudden acceleration in Toyota
vehicles from the 2002 model year and newer, compared with 11 such deaths in
vehicles made by all other automakers.
The Times located federal and other records of 19 fatalities involving
Toyota and Lexus vehicles from the same model years in which sudden or
unintended acceleration may have been a factor, as well as more than 1,000
reports by owners that their vehicles had suddenly accelerated. Independent
safety expert Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies, said
he has identified nearly 2,000 sudden-acceleration cases for Toyota vehicles
built since 2001.
Other experts say the numbers may be far higher, pointing to a 2007 NHTSA
survey of 600 Lexus owners that found 10% complained they had experienced
sudden acceleration.
Most sudden accelerations did not result in a crash, but there were notable
exceptions. Bulent Ezal, a retired engineer, plunged 70 feet off a Pismo
Beach cliff into the Pacific Ocean surf. He was hospitalized with minor
injuries, but his wife of 46 years was killed.
"By the time they pulled me out, the tide was about to cover the car," Ezal
said.
He said his 2005 Camry had suddenly accelerated in a parking lot.
In its research, The Times examined thousands of federal defect
investigation records, complaints filed with NHTSA by Toyota and Lexus
owners, lawsuits against the company, and reports by independent safety
experts and local police agencies.
Toyota has been under a spotlight since Aug. 28, when off-duty California
Highway Patrolman Mark Saylor and three members of his family died in a
Lexus ES 350 that accelerated to more than 100 mph and crashed in San Diego
County.
Toyota has blamed the Saylor crash on an incorrectly installed floor mat
that jammed the accelerator pedal. The company announced a recall of 3.8
million vehicles in September and is designing a fix aimed at preventing
sudden acceleration caused by floor mats.
The recall affects the following Toyota models: the 2007-2010 Camry, the
2004-2009 Prius, the 2005-2010 Avalon, the 2005-2010 Tacoma and the
2007-2010 Tundra, as well as the 2007-2010 Lexus ES 350 and the 2006-2010
Lexus IS 250 and IS 350.
Last week, the NHTSA called the issue a "very dangerous problem" and said
the remedy remains to be determined.
The agency declined a request for interviews, but issued a statement
defending its past actions, saying its officials have continuously monitored
Toyota vehicles for potential defects and that many of the reports of sudden
acceleration involved only momentary surges of engine power that did not
result in any loss of vehicle control.
"NHTSA takes every allegation of safety problems seriously and that is why
we read every consumer complaint within one business day of its receipt,"
the agency said. "In the case of complaints about sudden acceleration in
Toyota vehicles NHTSA moved very quickly to respond to them."
Toyota Motor Corp. defended its Toyota and Lexus vehicles and the validity
of prior investigations.
"Over the past six years, NHTSA has undertaken several exhaustive reviews of
allegations of unintended acceleration on Toyota and Lexus vehicles. In each
case, the agency closed the investigation without finding any electronic
engine control system malfunction to be the cause of unintended
acceleration," the company said in a statement.
Whatever the cause, Toyota and Lexus owners have grappled with the dangerous
consequences.
* Jean Bookout awoke in an Oklahoma hospital a month after a crash in her
2005 Camry.
She said the car sped out of control on a freeway, then smashed into an
embankment after she swerved it onto an exit ramp, leaving behind long skid
marks from attempts to stop the vehicle with her brakes and emergency brake.
Bookout sustained permanent memory loss, and her best friend died.
"I did everything I could to stop the car," she said Tuesday.
* Nancy Bernstein, a vice president for a Long Beach community garden and
former science teacher, said she was taken on an 8-mile high-speed ride by
her 2007 Prius while she was following her husband in a group bicycle tour
in Wisconsin. She said her Prius accelerated from 45 mph to 75 mph on a
winding, two-lane highway crowded with 100 cyclists.
"I was sure I was going to kill someone on a bicycle or myself," she
recalled. "I stood on the brakes with both feet. All of a sudden, I see
fire. I thought, sure, my brakes are on fire. I thought about maybe trying
to sideswipe a tree to slow down."
Eventually she was able to stop at the bottom of a hill, using her brakes
and emergency brake. A local resident rushed out with a fire extinguisher.
* Dr. David. W. Smith, an emergency room physician from San Dimas, has yet
to receive a satisfactory answer from Toyota about his Lexus GS 300. Smith
said he was driving with his cruise control in Central California on Highway
99 last year, not touching the accelerator, when suddenly the vehicle
accelerated to 100 mph.
The brakes did not release the cruise control or slow down the vehicle,
Smith recalled. Finally, he shifted into neutral and shut off the engine. "I
am sure it is the cruise control," he said. "I haven't used it since."
In reviewing consumer complaints during its investigations, the NHTSA relied
on established "positions" that defined how the agency viewed the causes of
sudden acceleration. Cases in which consumers alleged that the brakes did
not stop a car were discarded, for example, because the agency's official
position was that a braking system would always overcome an engine and stop
a car. The decision was laid out in a March 2004 memorandum.
When asked to submit its own complaint data to the NHTSA, Toyota eliminated
reports claiming that sudden acceleration occurred for "a long duration," or
more than a few seconds. Elsewhere, the company said a fail-safe in its
throttle system makes such an event impossible.
NHTSA officials acknowledged in a statement that the exclusions were made,
but defended the practice.
"While some vehicles may be excluded from the scope of an investigation into
a specific defect allegation, all are continuously reviewed, along with
other relevant information, in order to identify other emerging issues of
concern," the statement said.
A reduced pool of reports created the appearance that the problem was much
smaller than the total number of complaints suggested, making a broader
vehicle recall seem less necessary, critics say.
"NHTSA has ways of pigeonholing reports, categorizing them as brake failure
rather than sudden acceleration," said attorney Edgar Heiskell of
Charleston, W.Va., who is suing Toyota over a fatal crash in Flint, Mich.
"By excluding these braking and long-duration events, they have taken 80% of
the cases off the table."
In 2004, the NHTSA began a probe into a defect petition filed by Carol J.
Mathews, a registered nurse who was then director of health services for the
Montgomery County, Md., school system. Matthews reported that she had her
foot on the brake of her 2002 Lexus ES when it took off and hit a tree.
In its subsequent investigation, the NHTSA and Toyota both winnowed down
other reports of sudden acceleration involving 2002 and 2003 Lexus ES and
Camry models.
When the agency asked Toyota to disgorge all of the reports it knew about,
the company eliminated an unknown number in five broad categories, including
cases in which drivers said they were unable to control a runaway engine by
applying the brakes.
In closing the probe, federal investigators said only 20 cases were
considered relevant.
But The Times' examination of consumer complaints and a sampling of reports
from Toyota dealers found more than 400 reports of sudden acceleration
involving those models. And federal records show that the NHTSA knew about
260 of those cases and another 114 cases identified by Toyota.
As for its position that brakes can always overcome a vehicle's engine, the
safety agency and Toyota now acknowledge that a braking system cannot always
counter a wide-open throttle, as is the case in sudden acceleration.
The NHTSA began investigating the problem of sudden acceleration in the
mid-1980s, after a flood of complaints about the Audi 5000. One outgrowth of
the subsequent investigation was the NHTSA view that acceleration events at
high speed are a different issue than events at low speed.
In 2005, for example, Jordan Ziprin of Phoenix, who had experienced a minor
accident he blamed on sudden acceleration, filed a defect petition with the
NHTSA that included nearly 1,200 owner complaints about Toyota vehicles. The
automaker argued that the majority should be eliminated because they dealt
"with two completely different issues."
When owners said the "vehicle unintentionally or suddenly 'accelerated,' "
Toyota claimed that represented a different issue than when they said "the
vehicle 'surged' or 'lurched.' " The NHTSA ultimately went a step further,
eliminating every single complaint except Ziprin's, finding them to have
"ambiguous significance."
The agency also has thrown out evidence for other reasons. In 2008, the
NHTSA opened a probe of the Toyota Tacoma after a consumer found that the
truck had accumulated 32 times as many sudden-acceleration complaints as any
other pickup. But Toyota at the time said the complaints stemmed from "media
and Internet exposure." The NHTSA closed the case without a finding after it
whittled down a list of more than 450 complaints to just 62.
"To this day I still can't find evidence online of a flood of media
exposure," said William Kronholm, the Helena, Mont., man who said he
requested the investigation after he experienced two acceleration events in
his 2006 Tacoma. "They never dealt with the question I presented in any real
way."
The NHTSA has declined to reconsider previous investigations, even in the
face of new evidence.
In March, Jeffrey Pepski of Plymouth, Minn., formally requested that the
NHTSA reopen two closed investigations into Toyota and Lexus vehicles for
the acceleration problem, arguing in part that 10 other motorists had
experienced sudden acceleration that could not be explained by floor mats.
The NHTSA looked at the 10 cases and tossed them out. The agency's way of
looking at them sharply contrasted with the drivers' original accounts.
In one case, the driver of a 2007 Lexus ES 350 reported that the sedan
accelerated into a building, bounced backward, struck another vehicle and
ended up on top of a snowbank.
But federal officials described the same case as a "single incident of
alleged engine surge while parking vehicle. No trouble found by dealer."
The NHTSA denied Pepski's petition last week, arguing that further study was
"not warranted."
--
Kris
Pneuma
<paralle...@ggmail.com> wrote:
>....and then investigators said "there wasn't enough data". Anyone else got
>a Toyota with that odd 59-cent driver's side floormat "hook"? The 2003
>Prius has it.
>
>I'm posting this here, because the LA Times website is scrambling the text.
Jung qb lbh zrna fpenzoyvat grkg? Looks OK to me.
>
>http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-toyota-recall8-2009nov08,0,2472257,full.story
>
>By Ralph Vartabedian and Ken Bensinger
>
>November 8, 2009
>
>
>More than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their
>vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own, in many cases slamming into
>trees, parked cars and brick walls, among other obstacles, a Times review of
>federal records has found.
The problem is that drivers often claim the gas pedal was stuck to avoid
tickets and higher insurance rates. Often time they will believe they
really are the victim of a car with a mind of it's own, when operator
error occurs. I had a lady in a parking lot drive right into a building
from her parking spot. She claimed she put the car in reverse and it went
forward instead. A quick check of the transmission indicator showed it was
still in drive.
Pneuma
--
Read the United States National Health Insurance Act
outline @ http://www.cprights.org/plan.php?plan=8
Total Estimated Cost: $1.8 Trillion/year
Garth
accelerated unintendedly... could have just slipped their cars into
neutral.