Day One of Congressional Hearings Question Toyota Explanations for Acceleration Recall

The first day of hearings got under way in Washington, D.C., as the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee heard testimony from a variety of invited witnesses in its probe into the ongoing recall saga at Toyota. Chaired by Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, that committee heard three waves of testimony yesterday, beginning with Rhonda Smith and her husband, who recounted the tale of their 2000 Lexus ES350's sudden acceleration to over 100 mph, with Smith unable to bring the car to a halt through any of the recommended measures. The Tennessee woman chastised Toyota for ignoring her subsequent appeals to try and diagnose what might be wrong with the car, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for failing to take her claims seriously. Smith was followed by testimony from Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies consultancy, and Professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University, both of whom cast doubt on the sources of the unintended acceleration that Toyota has insisted are the cause of the vehicles' ills. "Years of mounting evidence, including eight NHTSA investigations—six at the request of consumers—and countless unintended acceleration incidents that were summarily dismissed by Toyota as driver error or floor mats, has yielded only a couple of small recalls," said Kane. Gilbert meanwhile insisted that he has been able to recreate an unintended acceleration event in Toyota vehicles, blaming a less-than-robust failsafe software failure mode that could trigger an event without triggering a fault code in the vehicle's ECU. Gilbert filmed a spot with ABC News that was broadcast earlier in the day that reportedly demonstrated the actual unintended acceleration event in a Toyota Avalon sedan; Toyota refuted the broadcast, claiming that Gilbert had artificially introduced a situation in the vehicle that cannot actually occur, but Gilbert suggested that the failure mode was not unreasonable. The overall effect of the morning testimony has however cast doubt over Toyota's insistence that the acceleration fault could not be electronic in nature, despite the company's repeated claims that it has not been able to create such a situation.

The second run of testimony encompassed Toyota Motor Sales president Jim Lentz, representing the company. Lentz was grilled by the assembled politicians particularly harshly, with questions regarding everything from when Toyota knew of its problems to whether or not Lentz was confident that the current countermeasures will definitively solve the unintended acceleration issues. "We now understand that we must think differently when investigating complaints and communicate faster, better and more effectively with our customers and our regulators," Lentz said, responding to criticism that Toyota has been slow to react and has not listened to complaints from consumers. Lentz agreed that 70% of complaints about unintended acceleration remained unexplained. "That is probably fair to say," he said. "There are many factors that lead to it." However, he dismissed the continuing idea that the investigators put forward that it may be electronic in nature. "We are confident that no problems exist with the electronic throttle control system in our vehicles," Lentz said in his prepared testimony. "We have designed our electronic throttle control system with multiple fail-safe mechanisms to shut off or reduce engine power in the event of a system failure."

The final person to testify was Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who despite being on the job for just a year, found himself facing questions about the NHTSA's actions over the past decade as related to its oversight of the auto industry's safety regulations. "There is no evidence that Toyota or NHTSA took a serious look at the possibility that electronic defects could be causing the problem," said committee chairman Henry Waxman of California. "Toyota failed its customers, and NHTSA neglected its responsibilities." Lawmakers openly questioned whether the NHTSA under LaHood was adequately staffed, or whether the agency found itself unable to exercise its powers. LaHood insisted that the agency was functioning properly and doing its job, and that evidence of that existed in the forced production shut-down and stop-sale of eight key Toyota models late last month. After some confusion over whether or not NHTSA actually had electrical engineers on its staff and whether it had actually evaluated electronic faults as well as it could have in the recall situation, LaHood vowed to continue to being diligent, and committed to putting Toyota's feet to the fire.

Outlook and Implications

It was a very difficult day for Toyota, with a parade of witnesses claiming that the company's products were faulty and defective, and that the company itself exhibited none of the compassion or concern in practice that it claims to have demonstrated in its recent advertising. This disingenuous image was not lost upon the assembled politicians either. "What we found was quite troubling," Stupak said in opening the first of three hearings. "Toyota all but ignored pleas from consumers to examine sudden unintended acceleration events... They mislead the American public by saying that they and other independent sources had thoroughly analyzed the electronic systems and eliminated electronics as a possible cause," when in fact it seems that Toyota has not. The company only recently (this month) hired an independent research firm to confirm that vehicle electronics are not at fault for its unintended acceleration issues, and it increasingly looks like the company has been aware of such issues, even floor mat pedal entrapment, for years thanks to recalls in the United Kingdom and Canada that were never addressed in the United States.

Overall, the theme of the hearings yesterday kept returning to the question of whether or not Toyota has fully identified the reasons behind its unintended acceleration; and the final verdict on the matter does seem to be in question. Expert witness testimony from the assembled panel was less than convincing to most automotive experts; the story given by Rhonda Smith about her inability to stop her car despite shifting into neutral (and even into reverse) and stomping on the brakes seems strange, and the likelihood that an engineering professor in a small Illinois university has been able to create in three hours a fault that the world's biggest, most advanced automaker could not do in three years seems dubious at best. The fact is that most reports of unintended acceleration—not just Toyota's—are indeed due to driver error.

Today's hearing promises to be even more interesting, as Toyota global president Akio Toyoda plans to take the stand to deliver testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. His prepared testimony has suggested that the company will apologise again for the quality glitches, and pins the blame for the lapses on the company's rapid expansion over the past couple decades. Given that recall responsibility rests with the Japanese management (as per Jim Lentz's testimony), it should be very enlightening to see how Toyota's Japanese management responds to the kind of grilling that the company's American personnel had to endure yesterday.