New Tests Show Toyota Prius Wasn't At Fault

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If Toyota was hoping for a quick resolution to its various problems with sticky accelerators and braking problems, the company was dealt a series of blows last week following reports that drivers suffered more incidents due to unintended acceleration. However, new tests last week by U.S. government officials and Toyota revealed that a San Diego Prius driver likely misled police when he said his car sped out of control last week. The credibility of the driver, James Sikes, was called into question last week when new information surfaced about his background. Technicians with Toyota and NHTSA have found that the incident could not be duplicated during a federal investigation into last week’s dramatic episode.

The results came to light in a memo prepared for the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform.

“Every time the technician placed the gas pedal to the floor and the brake pedal to the floor the engine shut off and the car immediately started to slow down,” read the memo.

NHTSA's finding is in line with the Prius's brake override system -- in place on Sikes's car -- that uses software to cut engine power “if the brakes are applied with moderate to heavy force,” said Mike Michels, a spokesman for Toyota in an e-mailed statement to BusinessWeek.

A Toyota official who was present at the inspection in San Diego said that that an electric motor in the Prius would “completely seize” if that override system had failed. During the investigation there was no evidence found that supported that occurring during Sikes’ incident.

Given these circumstances, the memo said that "it does not appear to be feasibly possible, both electronically and mechanically, that his gas pedal was stuck to the floor and he was slamming on the brake at the same time."

The fact that the NHTSA investigation has yielded no findings added further skepticism to Sikes’ account of the incident as the results directly conflict with what he has said happened. 

According to his explanation, the 2008 Toyota Prius had inexplicably accelerated to 94 MPH on a San Diego freeway and would not slow down, even though he was standing on the brake with both feet and attempting to pull up the gas pedal with his hands.

He claimed he was only able to come to a stop with the help of a California Highway Patrol Officer who caught up to Sikes after he called 911 and had been traveling close to 100 MPH for more than 20 minutes.

“I won't drive that car again, period,” said the visibly shaken Sikes after the terrifying event. 

With technicians unable to find what exactly went wrong during his ordeal, the cracks in his story appear to be widening even more.

“These findings certainly raise new questions surrounding the veracity of the sequence of events that has been reported by Mr. Sikes,” a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa, the lead Republican on the House Oversight Committee, stated.

Sikes, however, remains defiant.

“That’s not surprising; NHTSA’s never been able to replicate one of these incidents,” said John Gomez, Sikes's attorney. “Toyota denies they happen at all. Mr. Sikes drove the vehicle for three years without incident. The idea that they couldn’t make it happen again really doesn’t show anything.”

Though Sikes stands by his story, the deck is certainly stacked in favor of Toyota, who will make a statement regarding the investigation today at 3:30PM, EDT.

Given the available evidence, Toyota seems poised for victory in the James Sikes runaway Prius saga.

The automaker, however, is far from being out of the woods.

Deceptive Practices?

Even though Toyota may come out of the Sikes episode with minimal damage, another incident in California has them, yet again, in hot water.

In an entirely separate case, the district attorney of Orange County, California has filed a lawsuit against Toyota, alleging that the company sold thousands of vehicles knowing that they had potential for unintended acceleration.

The attorney, Tony Rackauckas, has charged the automaker with engaging in deceptive business practices and seeks $2,500 per violation and a court order blocking Toyota from selling defective vehicles as warranted by the Unfair Business Practices Act, the AP reported.

According to The Detroit News, Rackauckas alleged that even though evidence of Toyota’s safety problems has been “massive for many years,” the company and its American subsidiary ignored the issues and settled any lawsuits that may have publicly disclosed the truth.

The DA has claimed that “rather than halt sales of products in California until it genuinely fixed the problem, [Toyota] made the business decision to continue selling their defective products,” in an 18-page complaint. He alleged the company “ignored, omitted, obfuscated and misrepresented the evidence.”

The civil lawsuit is the first of its kind in the United States and, if Rackauckas is successful, will “enjoin [Toyota] from continuing to endanger the public through the sale of defective vehicles and deceptive business practices.”

Toyota has not commented on the lawsuit or the allegations.

The automaker is already subject to a growing number of civil lawsuits from owners of its vehicles who have either experienced unintended acceleration or are scared that it may happen to them.

Given these circumstances, Toyota may find itself wading through lawsuits for a very long time, especially if cases similar to that of Rackauckas’ follow as more counties or even entire states could file suit in the same manner.

Asked Rackauckas, “We demand to know: Did Toyota, in their relentless pursuit to become the No. 1 carmaker in the United States, put profits over people?”

Too Big To Fade Away?

Even if Toyota ends up finding a quick resolution to the James Sikes incident, it's unlikely the company will be able to find a similarly swift ending to the lawsuits they will face, not to mention a long climb rebuilding their public image. Our story about James Sikes and his allegedly false claims racked up some 3000 comments and nearly 100,000 votes in which 81% of AOL users thought the whole ordeal was a fraud.

One reason we know Toyota is going to have a hard time putting this behind them is that the Prius has now elevated to the level of pop culture topic du jour, what with NBC's Saturday Night Live spoofing a Prius in their show this weekend. Watch the clip for yourself below.

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Tests Show Toyota Driver Lied, Didn't Brake

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The runaway Toyota Prius in New York has been attributed to driver error after an investigation by Toyota and NHTSA (Denis Poroy, AP).

At this point, we can all agree that apologies aren’t enough.

Over the past month, every Toyota employee from CEO Akio Toyoda down to your local dealership’s janitor has apologized for the company’s quality meltdown.

Realizing that wasn't quite enough, Toyota took the bold step of going after recent unintended acceleration incidents, hoping to either find the root problem or debunking the claims as false.

After federal investigation and Toyota's own available black box data, two of the most notable incidents over the last two weeks seem to fall into the latter category: both the San Diego and New York runaway Prius incidents appear to be more than originally reported. The driver of the Prius in San Diego who ran out of control until police stopped him had a colorful past and his car was found to be capable of stopping under its own power. This week, federal investigators found the New York Prius driver avoided the brake pedal altogether when she went into a stone wall, even though she claimed she had her foot on it the entire time. If Toyota is directly to blame for either of these incidents, more evidence will need to surface.

But that doesn't mean Toyota is back on the sunny side. Let’s assume that Toyota replaces all those defective floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals, then rewrites its software for its balky antilock brakes. What can Toyota do to prevent a recurrence? 

Luckily, we’ve got a few answers. Amid all the arm-waving on Capitol Hill, some interesting details have emerged about Toyota’s dysfunctional corporate culture.

Two industry experts, David Champion of Consumer Reports and Robert Cole, a professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, helped me to assemble a list of five things Toyota can do to restore quality.

1) Stop trying to be the world’s largest automaker. If you focus all your energy on higher sales, the customer no longer comes first.

In 1998, Toyota’s then-president Hiroshi Okuda instructed his subordinates to attain a 15% share of global car sales by 2010. Okuda’s unstated goal was to make Toyota the world’s biggest car company.

Toyota pulled it off. Sales soared from 4.7 million units in 1999 to 7.8 million units a decade later, and Toyota now outsells General Motors and Volkswagen.

But the company has paid a price. Breakneck growth over-stretched the company’s engineering staff, says Cole, an expert on automotive manufacturing and an authority on Toyota’s corporate culture.

Why not simply hire more engineers? Cole says it takes a decade or so for an engineer to learn all the intricacies of Toyota’s product development and culture of teamwork. Some things can’t be rushed.

There were other problems. As Toyota grew, it lined up new suppliers around the world to provide components -- vendors who were less familiar to Toyota than the suppliers back home, which often were managed by former Toyota executives.

In a Feb. 23 article in the Harvard Business Review, Cole describes what happened next: “Relatively inexperienced Toyota managers, with greater frequency, were put in charge of supplier relations.”

Hmmm. Remember that it was an Indiana supplier, CTS Corp., that produced the sticky accelerator pedal (to Toyota's designs) that sometimes fails to return to the “idle” position.

By contrast, Toyota has experienced no problems with accelerator pedals produced by Denso Corp., a longtime member of Toyota’s keiretsu family of suppliers.

Breakneck growth creates too many temptations for an automaker to cut corners. Toyota should stop trying to be the world’s biggest car company.

2) Let independent experts study allegations that electronic malfunctions may be causing sudden acceleration.

Toyota insists that its own tests have turned up no electronic  malfunctions that would cause sudden acceleration.

The company also has refuted Prof. David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, who demonstrated to ABC News how electrical problems supposedly could cause a Toyota Avalon to accelerate out of control.

And yet we have all those sudden-acceleration fatalities since 2001...  Are Toyota’s runaway cars afflicted by electronic gremlins, or by motorists who slammed the wrong pedal? We don’t know.

The usual American solution is to leave it up to the courts. Attorneys representing accident victims will call in their experts, while Toyota counters with its own engineers. And then 12 jurors with no technical expertise will do their best to sort out this nightmare.

There’s a better way. During his congressional testimony, Toyota chief engineer Takeshi Uchiyamada suggested that the company might invite the National Academies of Science to study sudden acceleration.

Good idea. The NAS doesn’t have a dog in this fight. Let them conduct an independent study.

3) Put an American executive in charge of U.S. recalls and quality.

In testimony during the congressional hearings, Jim Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., admitted he had no authority to issue a recall. All such decisions are made in Japan.

A three-year-old memo from his predecessor, Jim Press, was even more revealing.

In 2006, Press warned his Japanese superiors that Toyota was running into trouble with U.S. safety regulators. His pleas apparently went unheard -- which is shocking.

At the time, Press was arguably the most powerful non-Japanese executive who ever worked at Toyota. His colleagues called him “the emperor” because he always got his way.

And yet his calls for help fell on deaf ears. That’s a pretty good sign that Toyota’s chain of command has calcified. “You’d get quicker action if you didn’t go through the Japan bureaucracy,” Cole says. “It would speed up the process.”

Amen. Put an American in charge of U.S. recalls.

4) Launch fewer models in your lineup. Model proliferation makes it tougher to manage quality.

As Toyota gained market share, it has fallen prey to model proliferation -- a disease that nearly killed General Motors.

In 2010, Toyota, Lexus and Scion market 28 different models, up from 23 in 2000. And if you count the hybrid variants that Toyota has introduced for a number of models, the model proliferation is even greater.

David Champion, who is senior director of Consumer Reports’ automotive test center in Connecticut, argues that Toyota’s decision to fill every product niche stretched its engineers too thin.

Champion questions whether Toyota needs a Camry, a Highlander and a Venza in its lineup. Is it really necessary to market an FJ Cruiser and a 4Runner? Does America need a Toyota Sequoia and a Toyota Land Cruiser? “Why produce both when they compete in the same market?” Champion asks.

Good question. In 2007, Consumer Reports decided it would no longer give all Toyota models a blanket endorsement. Toyota now ranks third in the magazine’s 2010 quality survey, behind Honda and Subaru.

Toyota’s models as a group are still rated “above average” in reliability.  But Consumers Reports has not restored its across-the-board endorsement of Toyota products.

At a time when many consumers are questioning the company’s commitment to quality, it would be a priceless advantage if Toyota can regain the top spot in Consumer Reports’ reliability survey.

Dump the unnecessary models. Focus your engineering talent on quality -- not quantity.

5) Design your vehicles to be panic-proof.

Last month, Toyota announced plans to install a brake override system in its vehicles.

A brake override cuts the throttle back to “idle” if the accelerator and brake are applied simultaneously. In theory, this would eliminate incidents of sudden acceleration caused by electronic defects.

Earlier this week, Mazda also announced plans to install brake overrides in all vehicles, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has said he may require it.

Clearly this is an idea whose time has come. More broadly, automakers should design vehicles to be as panic-proof as possible.

Right now, the recall furor has claimed Toyota’s complete attention. In months to come, it will be interesting to see whether Toyota reverts to its bigger-is-better default mode, or whether it changes the way it does business. Keep your eye on Mister Toyoda.

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