Prius Drivers NOT Blocking The Left Lane

These drivers scare me the most: Prius pilots running 20 miles per hour under the flow of traffic while in the right lane of a freeway, eyes glued to their fuel consumption gauge. They clearly did not read their owner’s manual, which spells out they are required to hold up traffic in the left lane. They are an unpredictable lot, prone to uneven speeds and sudden braking, unlike their left-lane brethren who you know are never going to yield to faster cars and thus you can adjust accordingly.

Drivers With Cars With Too Many Bumper Stickers

Question: When was the last time you saw a vehicle with more than two bumper stickers running quickly and unobtrusively through traffic? Answer: You never have. To these motorists, a car is not even an appliance – it is a bulletin board used to express their political views. I don’t think they realize that people cannot read their messages due to the clouds of blue smoke belching out the tailpipes of their beaters.

Driver Who Insist On Holding Fluffy In Their Lap

Your cell phone won’t poop or pee in your lap or yap at other cars. Besides distracting the driver, dogs can and do get injured or die by falling out of vehicles. The state of Hawaii has already banned motorists from holding animals while driving and three other states can ticket you under distracted driving laws. If they sport more than two bumper stickers, call the highway patrol.

Drivers Of Dump Trucks And Gravel Trucks

I have the greatest respect for professional truck drivers. These are not professional truck drivers. They are usually minimum wage, minimum brain and, in my neck of the woods, minimum English speaking individuals. Whether cracking your windshield – always directly in your line of sight – by shooting up an errant rock or mowing down a group of motorcyclists, these goons may be the very worst drivers on the road. And good luck going after the trucking company to replace your windshield: did you ever see a dump truck with a readable license plate?

Drivers Who Brake With Their Left Foot

Anytime you spot a car with its brake lights stuck on, you can bet the driver is resting his or her left foot on the brake pedal. (I give Land Rover drivers a pass on this one, as their taillights may genuinely be stuck on permanently.)  If you are behind one and they slam on the brakes, you will have no way of knowing they are stopping and if you hit them you will be deemed responsible. Any old-time used car manager can tell you they used to judge brake wear by the scuffing on the left side of a brake pedal. I really thought these folks had all died off, as the teaching of left footed braking in driver’s education ended decades ago, but it appears to be making a comeback.

I know you can add many other obscure terrible drivers to this list…

As the technology that will one day network cars together and reorganize the roads in the name of safety and efficiency continues to rush towards us, word comes that the computerized systems used to control commercial aircraft in flight are now vulnerable to hackers via android devices. Net-Security.org is reporting on an April 10th presentation at the “Hack in the Box Conference” by German security consultant Hugo Teso during which he demonstrates how a wireless device can be used to transmit malicious code into an aircraft’s computer through at least two different systems currently used to exchange information between aircraft and ground stations. Those of you who are already afraid to fly will want to read all of the excruciating details here: http://www.net-security.org

Like many people, I believe that the highways of the future will be heavily automated. The possibilities of computerized roads are enormous and the technology could change the way our society functions by combining the benefits of cheap, efficient public transportation with the convenience enjoyed by car owners today. Imagine a world where a car will arrive at your doorstep moments before you leave for work, carry you in comfort and privacy on a trip that will meet with no traffic jams, stop at no lights, and during which you will be free to watch TV, browse the internet, catch a nap or just look out the window. Upon dropping you off, the car will then head off to its next customer or, if you are one of the Neanderthals who insist on owning your own vehicle, head off to a designated parking facility until you summon it again.

That future is heavily dependent upon the seamless integration of a number of networks and like modern aircraft, cars of the future will need to exchange a great deal of data to coordinate even the simplest of trips. Within that coordination lies the opportunity for mayhem and our lives will hang in the balance. While I look forward to that better, brighter future, for the time being I will keep my feet firmly on the ground and my hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

They can cuff me anytime.

Hot girls in short skirts are the first things that leap into my mind whenever anyone says anything about the Japanese. The internet has not helped to change that, in fact it may have made things worse. If you add the word “Japanese” to any noun that describes a group of people and enter it into your favorite search engine, pictures of hot young girls will always appear near the top of the results. Look for Japanese tour guides, Japanese students, Japanese beach volleyball players or Japanese anything and you will see I am right. Try it, I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back, did you look for Japanese Police? I did, and despite my prior confession I was surprised at what I found. The main reason for that is because I have met a lot of Japanese police officers over the years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that they are, for the most part, nothing at all like the ones pictured above.

One of the most respected and professional police forces in the world, the Japanese “keisatsu” is a no nonsense outfit that takes its work seriously. Detectives pour over crime scenes and mark even the smallest bits of evidence with dozens of tiny red flags, rank and file officers patrol the streets on foot in groups or individually man “police boxes” in virtually every neighborhood and Japanese traffic police hone their driving and motorcycle riding skills to such perfection that only an idiot would think about running. The keisatsu is not an organization to be disrespected or trifled with and anyone who does, does so at their own peril.

Like any modern police force, the Japanese police have a tremendous amount of equipment. I could write several articles detailing armored cars, motorcycles, disaster response vehicles, buses, etc. but the most instantly recognizable vehicle in any police force is always the police car and Japan is no exception. Decked out in stunning black-and-white livery, Japanese police cars command instant attention and respect on the street. Unlike the United States, where most police cars are one of just two or three common types of sedan, the Japanese use an astonishing variety of cars, each especially suited to a specific role.

This photo is a bit dated, but I still love it.

Without a doubt, the coolest cars in the Japanese police’s motor pool are the interceptors, and well they should be because they are based on some of the baddest rides going. Some of the more famous examples have been Skyline GTRs, Mitsubishi 3000 GTs (Called the GTO in Japan), the RX-7, RX-8 and even the Fairlady Z. However, the Japanese police seldom engage in high speed chases and the rules of the road are usually maintained by speed cameras and the good old fashioned speed trap. So, while they look glorious wearing their official colors, these cars are used more as public relations tools than they are as true enforcers of public order.

One tool the keisatsu does use to great effect on the road is the unmarked car. These can be virtually any make or model and generally they hide their lights in the grill or under trap doors in the roof that pop open when they are triggered. I imagine that, like the unmarked cars used by American police forces, these cars are easily recognized by the locals but to me they were a real threat. On at least two occasions I ended up having polite conversations at the side of the road after cutting around a line of slow moving cars on the freeway to find one of these at the head of the parade. In both cases I got a firm talking to, but fortunately no tickets.

The Toyota Crown at work – check out those raised lights!

The backbone of the Japanese police fleet is the “patto-ka” and the most common patrol car on the Japanese roads today is the Toyota Crown. I have seen three versions of the Crown in action. One wears police livery but goes without the overhead lights and I presume this type of car is used by high ranking officers as a part of their duties. Actual “siren cars” as every little Japanese boy calls them, come in two flavors, those with regular, fixed red lights and those with red lights that can be raised for better visibility at accident scenes. Toyota Crowns, by the way, are also used in Japan as taxi-cabs and medium sized limos. The sheer number of them on the road makes me think they are pretty tough cars.

The Japanese police car Americans know the least about are those most often assigned to small neighborhood police stations. Because the Japanese police are committed to community policing, officers are often assigned to these small “koban” and they generally stay close to their duty station. The cars attached to these outposts are usually small econoboxes, with the cars most used being from the tiny 660cc kei class. These little cars are a great fit because they work well on narrow roads and offer the ability to carry a passenger. They are by no means fast and they would not serve as good patrol units, but they were never intended to.

A typical around town police car.

That’s because when posted to a Koban, Japanese officers are most often found on foot or on bicycles. Of course, we have bicycle patrols in the United States as well, but unlike the expensive high tech multi-speed bikes that specially outfitted and uniformed police use in our country, the Japanese approach is more mundane and makes a lot more sense.

Decked out in their regular uniforms on the same type of plain, single speed upright bikes often used by Japanese housewives, complete with handlebar mounted baskets and small cases on the cargo racks, the keisatsu are able to see and hear things that they might miss were they to patrol using motorized transport. They use the bicycle to its best advantage and their accessibility to the public makes the cop on the beat an easily approachable and welcome part of any neighborhood. How many American children know the names of the police officers who patrol our neighborhoods?

Bicycles patrols are more than just effective ways to reach the public, the are also environmentally friendly. As the sponsor of the Kyoto Convention on Climate Control, the Japanese government is especially concerned about going green wherever possible and, as a result many of the newest official vehicles are either hybrid or battery powered and police cars are no exception. As with the kei class cars, these vehicles are used in for short trips rather than day long patrols, but the fact they are relied upon at all shows that the Japanese police are constantly looking to modernize their fleet. Like the interceptors, these cars garner a great deal of public attention and often appear at public events. I expect that the numbers of these in service with the police will continue to increase as time goes on.

The Japanese police are a good organization that works hard to ensure public safety. They are serious about the job they do and the variety of vehicles they operate says a lot about their commitment. Like police forces worldwide, the Japanese police must work within a budget and one way they do so effectively is by using the right tools for specific jobs. I hope you have enjoyed this limited look at some of the cars they utilize in their effort to protect and to serve.

The average Japanese cop is more about kicking ass than he is about showing it.

Thomas Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

HFO-1234yf is a refrigerant that is becoming an industry standard in Europe. Thanks to incentives offered by the Environmental Protection Agency, the refrigerant is likely to be rolled out widely in the United States as well. Honeywell and partner Dupont have a monopoly on the stuff. It also can kill you in more ways than one. Says  Reuters:

“When engineers at Mercedes-Benz tasked with field-testing a revolutionary new refrigerant watched it ignite in a ball of fire before their eyes, it took a while for the significance of their discovery to sink in.

Simulating a leak in the air-conditioning line of a Mercedes B-Class tourer, they had released a fine mixture of refrigerant and A/C compressor oil, which sprayed across the car’s turbo-charged 1.6 litre engine.

The substance caught fire as soon as it hit the hot surface, releasing a toxic, corrosive gas as it burned. The car’s windshield turned milky white as lethal hydrogen fluoride began eating its way into the glass.

“We were frozen in shock, I am not going to deny it. We needed a day to comprehend what we had just seen,” said Stefan Geyer, a senior Daimler engineer who ran the tests.”

After Daimler’s findings, major carmakers quietly did a new round of safety tests. The tests showed combustion occurring in more than two-thirds of the cases after a simulated head-on collision, Reuters says.

Before that, Andreas Kornath, a chemistry professor at the University of Munich, warned that HFO-1234yf can release hydrogen fluoride HF.L during its combustion. Says Reuters:

“Readily absorbed by the skin, hydrogen fluoride begins attacking the body once it enters the bloodstream by spreading death on a cellular level, a process known as necrosis. High enough doses are known to cause the lungs to fill up with fluid, causing a drowning sensation, and to trigger cardiac arrest.”

European carmakers are opposed to using the new refrigerant. Volkswagen Chairman Ferdinand Piech advocates the use of CO2 as a refrigerant that is “guaranteed not to burn”.

Honeywell and Dupont concede that HFO1234yf is “mildly flammable”, but claim the reports of a killer substance are overblown. “The chance of being killed by an inflating airbag is 100 times higher,” said Chris Seeton, an engineer from Honeywell leading the development of HFO-1234yf. He also says Daimler doctored the test. “Their test was engineered for that outcome.”

GM announced it will use  HFO-1234yf in 2013 Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac models. Ford says it will use HFO-1234yf in its European models if required, but would like to stick with the current refrigerant, HFC-134a.

In late 2011, photos of melted and damaged Volt charging cords appeared on the internet. GM initially blamed wiring problems in the electrical outlets, eventually, the company announced that they would replace all the 120V chargers in all 2011 and some 2012 models with a new unit. About 9,500 charging units were replaced.

When the 2013 model came around, Volt owners were faced with a new and improved feature: Longer charge time. In self-help groups on the Internet, the culprit was quickly found:  GM had reduced the default circuit load of the charger from 12 Ampere to 8 Ampere. Then, a low intensity war on the message boards ensued, and is still rages on. Here the latest dispatches from the front:

Volt owners found out that there is a way to make the Volt charge at 12 Ampere and therefore faster. But that is buried a few levels deep in a maze of menus – and most annoyingly, it can’t be made sticky. Must wade through menus every time. Of course, the most practical solution would be to use the 240V charger on a 240 V circuit (something yours truly could install in a few hours, including a trip to the hardware store), but owners confess that they are too lazy/stingy to do that, and the complaints continue.

“Melissa” of  “Chevrolet Customer Svc” intervened. Chevrolet must have the matter outsourced, because Melissa identified herself as an “Associate of Morley Companies, Inc.” On its website, Morley introduces itself as a “group travel, business theater, interactive, research, performance improvement, exhibit, display and experiential marketing firm,” which more than establishes its credentials to handle the matter. Especially after its associates receive some remedial English lessons.

Melissa informed the frustrated Volt owners that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature:

“As a safety feature the Volt will automatically default to the 8amps. This was designed by the engineers as a safeguard the Volt needs. This is to assist and remind owners that the Volt needs to be on a dedicated, grounded, oriented outlet on an individual circuit to be able to charge. This feature is to prevent the outlet getting “warm” and overheating.”

To change from 8A to 12A, says Melissa, is very simple. It also reminds the Volt owner that there is a competing product from Nissan:

“The 2013 owners only have to push the “Leaf” button, select the charging tab, then charge level, and then push the amps they would like to charge at. You can change this level while driving. “

Oops. Don’t let Ray LaHood read that last. No, you can’t make the 12A setting sticky, and don’t hold your breath that this will ever change:

“This is the way the Volt was designed for the 2013, there will not be an option to retrofit, or change the charge cord charging design. We truly do value your feedback regarding this safety feature.”

Howls of protests ensued. “This is absolutely idiotic form a usability stand point.” You honestly want us to push FOUR times?

Yep, says Melissa. “I understand your frustration for the safety feature and we appreciate your feedback for the option.”

That exchange happened in early September. It did not appease the Volt owners, and the discussion is raging on, wisely sans Melissa. Tired of talking to themselves,  enraged 100 Volt owners  widened the conflict.  Complaints appeared in comment sections of Forbes.  Expect more elsewhere. TTAC just received a reader’s letter, complete with headline! (See above.)

BS comment: Of course, pushing buttons four times won’t make charging at 12A any safer, and it won’t help the outlet keep its cool. It simply gives GM opportunity to instruct the user each and every time of the potential hazards, and (hopefully) lets GM off the hook.  A standard three prong (with ground) U.S. outlet is good for 15 Amp, should be connected to a 15A wring with a 15A breaker, and therefore plenty for a 12A load. If something else is on the line, the breaker should blow. Note the shoulds.

General Motors announced changes to the Chevrolet Volt’s design after a NHTSA investigation into why a Volt caught fire following crash testing.

The changes will go into effect once production restarts at the Hamtramck, Michigan facility, but customer cars already sold will follow a different protocol.

Starting in February, GM will initiate a “voluntary customer satisfaction program” to make the necessary changes to the Volt. According to GM’s Rob Peterson said that  formal recalsl must be initiated by NHTSA, and their lack of movement prompted GM to enact a voluntary one instead.

The fix involves changes to the Volt’s battery pack housing, as well as a coolant temperature sensor and a special bracket to prevent overfilling. The previous system allowed the battery housing to be punctured, which then resulted in coolant overflowing onto a circuit board causing an electrical short. The short was determined to be the cause of the fire.

Opinions vary widely. In recent years, there have been two legislative efforts to convert the ubiquitous state driver license into a national ID card, making it the essential “show us your papers” document in order to navigate in, around, and through our society.

At the other end of the spectrum, a current movement to do away with the driver license altogether may seem impractical, but it is gathering momentum in regions around the U.S.

Which should it be – a federally-mandated document that uniquely identifies its holder and is necessary to provide the right to drive, to fly, and to participate in various governmental programs, or an extraneous card that serves no useful purpose in a society where individuals have the right to travel without restrictions?

Let’s examine these two diametrically opposed positions:

Driver License as National ID

The Real ID Act of 2005 was enacted, but has not gotten off the ground yet. Real ID is premised on a national ID system based on the driver license. One significant administrative problem with this is that the states, not the federal government, control the requirements of driver licenses, and no two state licenses are exactly the same.

Real ID puts forth requirements so that the various state driver licenses would be accepted by the federal government in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security.

In March 2007, the government announced that the requirements of Real ID wouldn’t be enacted until 2009, supposedly giving the federal and state governments time to implement a workable system. In early 2008, the implementation deadline was further extended to 2011.

In the meantime, U.S. Senate Bill S.1261 was introduced and subsequently reported by committee in July 2009. Also known as Pass ID, S.1261 was claimed by supporters to solve some of the inherent problems of Real ID. Pass ID has been on the Senate’s calendar of business since December 2009, but has not been brought up for vote. In essence, it has been all but abandoned.

Real ID is a time-delayed national ID law hanging over our heads. Somewhat ominously, it states that after 2011, “a Federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver’s license or identification card issued by a state to any person unless the state is meeting the [Real ID] requirements.”

States can keep issuing their unique driver licenses, but unless the requirements of Real ID are met, those driver licenses will not be accepted as federal identification. It does not seem likely that all — if any — states will be in compliance by 2011. What a mess!

Ironically, personal security under Real ID is a significant concern. To quote from a January 14, 2008 NMA Blog article, “The manner in which the driver license is carried and used makes it highly susceptible to theft and physical loss. Under the ‘one national ID number’ concept, the compromise of that number would expose the victim to financial ruin, malicious acts, and the exposure of highly personal information. Having a single national ID card/number is an invitation to fraud, theft and the loss of personal security and individual privacy.”

From the same NMA article, “Such a [Real ID] system will not deter terrorists and will not make our society safer, but will make our society less free and more authoritarian.”

As the Real ID law is presently configured, people born on or after December 1, 1964, will be required to obtain national ID by December 1, 2014. Those born before that 1964 date will have until December 1, 2017 to obtain their Real ID.

Real ID should be repealed, and the notion dismissed that the driver license be used as a national ID card.

Eliminate the Driver License

Georgia State Representative Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) introduced House Bill 875 in November 2009. The first two sentences of that proposed legislation, better known as the “Right to Travel Act,” summarize what the bill is about: “Free people have a common law and constitutional right to travel on the roads and highways that are provided by their government for that purpose. Licensing of drivers cannot be required of free people because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of an inalienable right.”

Meanwhile, other groups around the country are pushing to introduce similar bills to their state legislatures in order to question the constitutionality of certain laws related to driver licenses.

The NMA View

Much of the anger and concern surrounding this issue is based on the federal government’s attempt to leverage the driver license into a national ID card. The feds are trying to use the driver license as a club to enforce government sanctions, or to use it as a means to circumvent basic rights, such as implied consent that a citizen can be forced to give evidence against him or herself.

The basic (and only legitimate) purpose of the driver license is to certify that the owner of that license has proven that he/she is capable of operating a motor vehicle on public roads in a safe and responsible manner. The license should not be withheld for any reason other than the fact that the applicant could not pass a fair and objective driving test.

The driver license can be taken away if the holder drives in such a way as to endanger others, but it should not be confiscated for any other reason, and it should not be demanded as a formal means of personal identification.

If shrewder heads prevail in our ruling class, they will understand that defusing the anti-driver license movement will require the federal and state governments to stop using the driver license for purposes other than basic certification of a driver’s competence.

[This piece appears at the National Motorist's Association blog]

Transportation Secretary and Supreme Allied Commander in the War On Distraction Ray LaHood is quite chuffed about initial pilot program results for his latest offensive against in-car cell phone use, and he’s taking to the airwaves to declare victory. The programs, modeled on the “Click It Or Ticket” and “Over The Limit, Under Arrest” initiatives combined an advertising blitz and waves of enforcement to crack down on the behavior, but more importantly to send the message that distracted driving is as serious a problem as drunk driving or not wearing a seatbelt. Thanks to the relative success of these earlier programs, the DOT has a strong template for its pilot anti-distracted driving campaign, the enforcement components of which took place in April, July, and October 2010 and March-April 2011. But was the “Phone In One Hand, Ticket In The Other” program actually as successful as LaHood claims?

Based on data from the report’s finding [PDF], it seems fairly clear that the program made some difference… but the contrast between the results in Hartford and the results in Syracuse are a little surprising. New York has had a ban on in-car hand-held cell phone use since 2001, and accordingly Syracuse’s initial numbers were relatively low compared to Hartford’s, where a “hands free” law has only been on the books since 2005. Unsurprisingly, Hartford saw the largest declines that can be attributed to the program, with observations of drivers holding phones to their ears dropping from 6.8% to 2.9%, nearly double the drop observed in Syracuse.

Another interesting result is the seemingly organic drops in in-car handheld cell phone use in the control groups, because here the dynamic reverses itself. New York, with its long-standing ban on handheld cell phone use saw stronger decreases in the control group than Conneticut with its more recent ban. As NHTSA’s report puts it

Generally there was a steady decline in the comparison sites, as well. This is a promising finding and suggests that social norms towards phone use and texting while driving may be shifting, becoming less acceptable behaviors to the public.

This is difficult to argue with, but in the context of evaluating the program’s effectiveness, it almost proves that the program was unnecessary. Connecticut’s more recent law meant there were more lower-hanging fruit for enforcement officers in Hartford, but their efforts made less of an impact in the control cities of Bridgeport/Stamford. Meanwhile, New York’s results were less dramatic in the targeted area (Syracuse) but the organic declines in Albany were stronger than any in Connecticut. The lesson? Media and enforcement blitzes do make a difference, but so does passing a law and simply waiting. The longer a law has been in place, the more diminished the returns will be in the targeted area… and the stronger the declines will be in non-targeted areas.

Weigh these results against the not-inconsiderable costs of the program (anyone know what police make per hour on average?) and the results of the program are a little less overwhelmingly impactful than LaHood makes them out to be. Like any other change in social norms, the key ingredient seems to be not advertising dollars nor cops on the beat, but simply time. The longer a law is on the books, the more it seems to be respected… and at a certain point, more advertising and enforcement seem to deliver diminishing returns. On the other hand, the program does seem to be effective at accelerating declines in observed handheld cell phone use… and given the human cost of distracted driving, it does feel a bit churlish to get too worked up about half a million taxpayer dollars (not counting the opportunity cost of dedicated law enforcement hours). So yes, the program was a success (certainly compared to LaHood’s annual hand-wringing “summits” on distracted driving)… but let’s not pretend that anything will be more effective at changing behavior than laws and the progress of time.

The controversy over red light cameras, once relegated to websites like TTAC, thenewspaper.com, motorists.org and highwayrobbery.net, is hitting the mainstream media thanks to a new study by the IIHS [PDF here]. The study used the following methodology:

Telephone surveys were conducted with 3,111 drivers in 14 large cities (population greater than 200,000) with long-standing red light camera programs and 300 drivers in Houston, using random samples of landline and cellphone numbers. For analyses combining responses from the 14 cities, cases were weighted to reflect each city’s share of the total population for the 14 cities.

And what did they find?

Among drivers in the 14 cities with red light camera programs, two-thirds favor the use of cameras for red light enforcement, and 42 percent strongly favor it. The chief reasons for opposing cameras were the perceptions that cameras make mistakes and that the motivation for installing them is revenue, not safety. Forty-one percent of drivers favor using cameras to enforce right-turn-on-red violations. Nearly 9 in 10 drivers were aware of the camera enforcement programs in their cities, and 59 percent of these drivers believe the cameras have made intersections safer. Almost half know someone who received a red light camera citation and 17 percent had received at least one ticket themselves. When compared with drivers in the 14 cities with camera programs, the percentage of drivers in Houston who strongly favored enforcement was about the same (45 percent), but strong opposition was higher in Houston than in the other cities (28 percent versus 18 percent).

Sounds like those red light cameras are pretty great after all, doesn’t it? That’s certainly the IIHS’s takeaway…

The IIHS concludes:

Most drivers in cities with long-standing red light camera programs support cameras and recognize their safety benefits, but communities could do a better job of educating the public about the dangers of right-turn-on-red violations and the need for enforcement. Given that camera opponents frequently said cameras make mistakes, it appears communities also could do a better job of explaining the safeguards that ensure citations are issued only to drivers who clearly run red lights.

But that’s a fairly one-sided interpretation of the data, as you might expect from a body that derives its funding from the insurance industry, which in turn has a vested interest in anything that might reduce insurance payouts, regardless of other drawbacks or context. What do I mean by that? Let’s go line-by-line through the IIHS’s conclusions:

Most drivers in cities with long-standing red light camera programs support cameras and recognize their safety benefits

First of all, the data underlying this conclusion is skewed by only including respondents in cities with “long-running red light camera systems.” The only exception is one city that had red light cameras but voted them out: Houston. And despite finding stronger opposition there than in other cities with red light cameras, the IIHS is forced to concede another problematic finding: “In Houston, 53 percent of voters cast ballots against the cameras in November 2010. In the current study, however, 57 percent of the drivers interviewed said they favor camera enforcement, and 45 strongly favor cameras”).

So where are the respondents from cities that had cameras but voted them out? Where in this report can we hear the voices of the citizens of Anaheim? Or Cincinnati? Or San Bernadino? Or how about Baytown, Texas, where the fraudulent tendencies of the red light camera companies couldn’t have been more obvious? Sadly, the list goes on. The IIHS has made its point about “cities with long-standing red light camera programs,” but it’s not at all clear that this data reflects wider American sentiment.

Meanwhile, even among this selective data set, there are issues. When asked if drivers running red lights is a problem in the city, the most common answer, with 38%, was “not a problem.” The next-most popular choice, with 31.8%: “somewhat of a problem.” Furthermore, nearly 93% of respondents said they had not run a red light in the last 30 days, further indicating that the problem is rare and limited to a small percentage of the population. A more fair presentation of the data would simply state that drivers see red-light running as having high risk potential, but that they don’t see it as a common, or everyday problem. This doubtless helps fuel a major complaint about red light cameras, namely that they exist primarily for revenue generation rather than safety.

Given that camera opponents frequently said cameras make mistakes, it appears communities also could do a better job of explaining the safeguards that ensure citations are issued only to drivers who clearly run red lights.

For one thing, the fallibility of cameras was not overwhelmingly chosen as a reason for opposition. At 26.4%, it was the number one reason for opposing, but “focus is on money, not safety” was an extremely close second, at 26.1%. If anything, the need for education is not limited to “explaining safeguards,” but rather explaining the financial incentives that local governments and photo enforcement firms have to rack up as many tickets, accurate or not, as possible. After all, if 4.4 percent are saying “camera programs cost too much money,” clearly there’s a disconnect between how people view red light cameras and the reality (as red light cameras are almost always revenue positive for local governments, unless massive errors or fraud force them to return fines).

but communities could do a better job of educating the public about the dangers of right-turn-on-red violations and the need for enforcement… it appears communities also could do a better job of explaining the safeguards that ensure citations are issued only to drivers who clearly run red lights.

Too bad the IIHS hadn’t sounded the alarm on the need for pro-red light camera “education” a few months ago… Bill Kroske might still have a job. In all seriousness, the 90%+ awareness level among respondents seems to indicate that folks do know that the cameras exist… what the IIHS seems to be suggesting is that people should be indoctrinated to believe that more red lights are fundamentally good, and that these beneficent cameras never screw up. Both of these points of “education” are aimed more at propagating photo enforcement industry talking points than furthering the public good.

On Tuesday, a study by NASA, commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, had exonerated the Toyota ECU that had been fingered by the media and politicians as the source of all SUA evil.

”It is extremely good that it was made clear that Toyota’s system is not the reason (behind the acceleration cases),” Edano told a news conference, witnessed by The Nikkei.

It is widely believed on both sides of the Pacific that Toyota was made an example of in order to demonstrate to a Japanese administration unpopular with the American in particular, and to the world in general, what can happen to a nice company if a country doesn’t play ball according to American rules.

It came as no surprise that the public hounding of Toyota was ratcheted down immediately after Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned in June 2010. He had been elected on a platform of removing U.S. Marine air units off the strategically important Okinawa islands.

What happened shortly after the congressional tribunals in Washington? In May last year, Hatoyama announced that ridding Okinawa of U.S. troops might not be possible. To make sure that he did not forget, LaHood visited Japan 4 days later and made hints of further fines against Toyota (which came.)

Hatoyama had to go, and that’s what he did.

What a sudden change!

Two weeks after Hatoyama had resigned on June 2, 2010, the NHTSA recalled large parts of the recall database which had been used as a virtual killing field before. A few weeks later, the NHTSA changed its position and started to mention possible driver error.

Soon, a supposedly suppressed report by the NHTSA that named driver error as the cause was leaked. In October, NHTSA Chief David Strickland suddenly praised Toyota, extolled a “change in how Toyota approaches defects” and said that “Toyota really is taking safety much more seriously than they did before I took office.”

Things became quiet around Toyota, LaHood picked another enemy: Text messages.

Tuesday’s NASA findings are nothing else than the final act of a drama that had long ended.

It’s the administration’s peace with honor with Japan.

The troops are still in Okinawa. The auto industry is humming again. A whitewashed and prettied-up GM has been successfully floated at the stock exchange. Toyota had to sacrifice market share in the U.S. GM is selling cars again and has come within spitting distance of Toyota in the World Championship of Automobile Production. All signs point to GM becoming the world leader again this year.

Mission accomplished.

Before you start typing snide remarks, read this:

For more than 25 years, I was married into a high powered Washington military family. My former father in law was top brass. He taught me three things: Don’t believe in wide conspiracies. Don’t believe in coincidences. Battles are won by exploiting the weakness of the enemy.

The administration did not make up the SUA reports. The CIA did not sabotage a Lexus to send Mark Saylor and three of his family to their death.  Brian Ross is not on the payroll of the UAW. This is not a Clancy novel.

In this game, you don’t make things up. (Not unless you are really hard pressed and you absolutely must invade Iraq.)

Politics is the art of spin. You wait for something to happen.

If politically expedient, you ignore it. Such as the countless SUA cases that had been filed over the years, involving just about any brand’s car.

If it fits your plans, you take the event, you blow it out of proportion, you put a drop of blood in the water and let the sharks do the dirty work for you. If it gets out of hand, you can always blame the sharks.

William Safire once said: ”Spin is what a pitcher does when he throws a curveball. The English on the ball causes it to appear to be going in a slightly different direction than it actually is.” I know a little about spin. In more than 35 years of producing propaganda for the world’s third largest automaker, I spun my fair share of industrial strength yarn.

Timing is an important part of spin. When the Toyota Unintended Acceleration Scandal of 2010 unfolded into a full scale frenzy, America, and especially the American car industry was deeply humiliated. Two of the Detroit 3 had declared bankruptcy. One was hanging on for dear life. The government found itself in the car business, and business was bad. U.S. car sales were at their lowest level in 27 years. For the first time since anyone could remember, the U.S. had to give up the title largest car market to someone else. To add insult to industry, that someone was China, a country we thought held the world record in bicycles. Jobs were lost. Houses were foreclosed.

What do you do in such a situation? You use a tool that had proven its usefulness over thousands of years: The enemy abroad.

[Ed: With today's news of NHTSA's investigation results, we thought we'd look back at TTAC's coverage of the Toyota Unintended Acceleration scandal.]

The Toyota Unintended Acceleration Scandal of 2010 was a curious beastie of a media phenomenon. Shortly after I started writing for TTAC, NHTSA opened an investigation into Toyota Tacomas because, as the Center for Auto Safety’s Clarence Ditlow put it,

If there were truly human error, there would be a proportional distribution across models. It’s very difficult to explain how some makes and models have higher numbers of complaints than others absent some flaw in the vehicle.

Fresh as I was to writing about the world of cars, I was sure I had the story dead to rights. I had seen this movie before, when my father told me his epic Parnelli Jones Unintended Acceleration story. Dad had even killed the the family pickup’s engine at a traffic light to prove it… and I knew how bad the brakes in the old Ford were (but that’s another story). Absent a better explanation than mere statistical likelihood, I knew there was only one cause for this problem. With a level of confidence that seems totally at odds with subsequent events, I concluded by suggesting that

the Detroit Free Press and Motor Trend blog, are trying to resuscitate the [Audi 5000] media frenzy, only this time Toyota’s to blame for people mistaking the accelerator for their brake pedal… If a TTAC reader out there has a Tacoma, perhaps they would do us the honor of standing on the brakes while mashing the accelerator for a few seconds. This should prove fairly simply that “unintended acceleration” is possible only when you are not actually on the brakes.

It was that simple… wasn’t it?

What I hadn’t counted on back in early 2008, was that floormats and sticky pedals would emerge as possible causes of UA in Toyotas. Reports of runaway Toyotas continued to surface throughout 2008 and 2009, and nearly a year after taking on Ditlow’s statistics, TTAC logged its first story on possible “electronic” causes for UA in Toyotas. The now-defunct Autocoverup.com took up Ditlow’s statistical logic in April2009, and added the missing piece: a story that could not be logically explained.

On November 5, 2008, I was driving on a freeway in my 2008 Lexus ES350 with the cruise control on. I gave the car a little extra gas to pass another car and the car just took off. I tried to disengage the accelerator by trying to turn off the cruise control switch as well as tapping on the brake pedal, but it would not disengage. I tried to turn off the engine by pushing the keyless ignition button, but it would not turn off. I checked the floor to make sure that there wasn’t anything on the accelerator, and there wasn’t. I then put the car in neutral, but when I did this, the engine sounded as if it were going to explode, so I put it back in gear. By this time, I was going well over 100 mph. My only choice was to stand on the brakes. Within seconds, the car was in a cloud of smoke coming from the 4 wheels/brakes. The car began to slow as thankfully the brakes were stronger than the engine which was going at its maximum rpm’s. The car went over a mile before finally coming to a stop. I was then able to put the car in park and stop the engine. After a few moments, when I had calmed down a bit, I started the engine again and it immediately start racing at maximum rpm’s again, so I shut it off . . .

Before Toyota’s first floormat recall, the formula for the media firestorm that would erupt nearly a year later was already in place. First, statistics seemed to point to Toyota. Second, the power of narrative far surpassed the media’s mechanical knowledge. By the time Toyota finally blamed and recalled its floormats, it looked like the company was trying to blame a mundane floormat for a ghost in the machine.

With the powderkeg packed, the unintended acceleration scandal needed only a spark to ignite it. That spark was the fiery crash that killed an off-duty police officer and three family members near San Diego. Because the driver in that incident was a highway patrol officer, many refused to believe that he could have born any responsibility for the incident. Even after evidence surfaced that the car in the incident was a dealer loaner with incorrect floormats which, even with its pedal trapped, could be controlled, the Saylor crash remained proof positive for many that nobody, no matter how well trained, was safe from their Toyota if it decided to take off.

Weeks after the Saylor crash, Toyota recalled 3.8m floormats. Shortly after it announced it would be introducing brake override systems. Though, in retrospect, Toyota was probably scapegoating mats to keep from blaming customers, the story was already reaching a fever pitch. In the wake of the Saylor incident, even I began to hedge about the possibility of some kind of electronic problem causing UA. After all, cars were becoming increasingly electronics-dependent… weren’t we asking for some kind of inevitable techno-nightmare? Still, by the end of 2009, I thought the story had finally had its last hurrah. Of course I was wrong.

By the end of January, Toyota was recalling cars around the world, for sticky pedals made by its supplier, CTS. On February 1, the recall spread to the US. As TTAC explored the roots of Toyota’s decades-long trend towards decontenting, the first signs of saber-rattling from Washington were hitting the airwaves. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood may not have had the first idea about what was actually causing UA in Toyotas, but he definitely knew the political routine, and he laid into Toyota with gusto. Papers were leaked to the relevant congressional committees, and as tensions built in the leadup to congressional hearings, the story exploded in a riot of mass media confusion.

ABC News dumped fuel on the fire when notorious auto safety-baiter Brian Ross teamed up with Professor David Gilbert to produce a video suggesting that errors could be caused in Toyota’s engine control unit without registering error codes. Ross’s report was quickly criticized, and Toyota maintained that Gilbert’s test results had no bearing on real life. After all, the Southern Illinois professor had hard-wired ECUs to create his “ghost in the machine.” In the frenzy, everything from “tin whiskers” to cosmic rays were blamed for creating an untraceable, irreparable madness in Toyotas… eventhe nerd-god Steve Wozniak got in on the fun. TTAC’s own investigation, in which we stripped and analyzed both the recalled and replacement pedals was fascinating but inconclusive. By the time congressional hearings began on unintended acceleration in Toyotas, we were no closer to the truth than when the story started… if anything, the dizzying blur of media coverage made the certainty of early 2008 difficult to recreate.

Luckily, congress was on hand to bring back a sense of clarity to the issue. Not through the clear-eyed vision of our elected representatives though, but rather because of the very opposite. Both the House and Senate committee hearings were flailing disasters of mechanical misunderstanding, misleading testimony, grandstanding and general uselessness. Akio Toyoda was duly humiliated before the House Oversight Committee, before that august body settled into the defining moment of the entire scandal: a day-long hearing in which every hope for a secret hidden electronic gremlin was dashed upon the rocks of common sense. From the committee’s lying, lawyer-connected “expert witnesses“, to a failed attempt to skewer Toyota’s head of US operations, to its concluding meeting with Ray LaHood, April 24 brought every accusation against Toyota to the fore, and yet none managed to stick. By the end of the day’s “Comedy In Three Acts,” my belief that UA in Toyotas was primarily due to operator error was fully renewed. I concluded

Congress holds hearings like these to uncover shocking evidence and to impress its constituents with its dedication to their safety and well-being. Having been enticed into believing that sinister conspiracies exist in Toyota’s software code and the halls of the NHTSA, the House Energy Committee uncovered only one actionable solution to the ongoing scandal: greater funding for NHTSA’s investigative capabilities. Put differently, after hours of posturing congress finally met the enemy and he was them.

By the time Jim Sykes escalated the media hype a step further, when his Prius was caught being slowed by police cars on an interstate, the story was already over-ripe, and decaying from within. By the time the media learned that Sykes was hardly credible (never mind that his story was never credible), his 23-minute-long 911 call gave the story the reek of self-parody, and it collapsed on itself. Since then, we’ve received only regular updates from NHTSA with findings that point to driver error as the main cause of UA, capped by a report I summarized in a post titled Unintended Acceleration In Toyotas: The Ghost In The Data. Its conclusion:

This, in a nutshell, is what the whole Toyota unintended acceleration scandal is boiling down to: either pedal design or some other ergonomic issue makes UA more common, in which case the government can regulate it, or Americans are really becoming worse drivers and are always glad to have a convenient scapegoat for their ineptitude. As unsatisfying as these conclusions are, making peace with them is the only healthy choice at this point. Unless, of course, Government-run “behavioral training and adjustment” sounds like a practical solution to you.

With confirmation of this conclusion coming from today’s release of the long-awaited NASA investigation findings, it seems that the chimera of “Unintended Acceleration” may well be sealed up back in the American unconscious, where it should lay dormant for at least a few more years. After all, as a mass-market brand, Toyota’s lessons should be better remembered than were Audi’s from decades earlier. And yet, I still worry that the connections -and lessons- from the Toyota UA scandal could slip away just as they did after the Audi scandal. Ironically, I feel I captured the real lesson of the scandal best outside of TTAC, when I wrote in a Reuters op-ed:

Just as motorists can never assume that their vehicle will always function perfectly, consumers should avoid being lulled into a false sense of security by an automaker’s reputation alone. Automobiles are complex machines manufactured by firms that must constantly test the cost-quality equation to stay competitive in a cutthroat industry. As long as this is the case, the market for automobiles will remain dynamic and cyclical: an arena with little room for the kind of unquestioning trust that Toyota has enjoyed for so many years. If there’s a lesson to Toyota’s tumble, it’s that easy assumptions aren’t enough to keep you safe on the road, or in the showroom.

A year on from the height of the scandal, I think that if we bring anything away from the experience, it should be this.

I’ve lived and worked through this antagonism all my professional life. Even at automakers, there are those who think the best car ad is a Soviet style list of specs, accompanied maybe by a cut-away picture. (A good cut-away demands a higher budget than a porn flic shot in Hungary, but I digress. It’s easy …) Others think one should dispense with the car altogether (they all look alike) and show lifestyle scenes instead. What does the TTAC reader think? Let’s take a clinical approach and look at raw numbers only, delivered by the soulless TTAC host computer.

The Art Ross story clearly was yesterday’s most read story. It narrowly beat out Michael Karesh’s review of the Hyundai Sonata Turbo. It was a photo finish, both stories were less than 100 clicks apart. Naked women have a greater attraction on the common TTAC reader than a Hyundai – but just barely.

Now add to that the fact that the Hyundai story was already a day old. On the day it ran first, it had handily beat out … nope, the winner on Friday was “What New Car Is The Best Value For Money?“ That one had attracted twice the numbers of eyeballs than the blown Hyundai.

However, the next day, and with a starting position slightly better than sex, the Hyundai story spooled up fast, raced out of the gate and remained the leader of the pack for most of the day – until sex came from behind and won by a hair.

What does that tell us? The common TTAC reader is interested in sex only slightly more than in a Sonata that had a blowjob. Both topics are valued higher than money: On Saturday, the raunchy Ross report and the Hyundai review received 50 percent more attention than the value for money story that had won the previous day.

Now for the juicy part. Sonatas aside, what genres REALLY pique the TTAC reader’s discerning interest?

The traditional art of Art Ross, including portraits, surrealistic paintings, and a treasure trove of some of the finest car designs of the last century were offered-up for further viewing at The Art Of Art Ross.

A collection of vile and repugnant porn, devised by a deviated degenerate, a lot while he was supposed to support the war effort by designing camouflage netting that kept our fighting men from being bombed by the enemy, was – for strictly scientific reasons – referenced under Erotica By Art Ross. It came with ample warnings. The nauseating nature of the material was clearly flagged.

Now guess what received more clicks.

One more time, you guessed it right. Erotica By Art Ross did beat The Art Of Art Ross more than six to one. Drawing conclusions is left to the reader. All I can say is that warning labels do not impress our readers. They appear to be, as the saying goes, “sure in their sexuality.”

This is where the story would end, would there not have been a late entry. After a death-defying race to Toronto (and after declining my suggestion – made in jest – to type on his iPhone while driving) Jack Baruth wrote the story of a cookie monster that escaped a smashed 1984 vintage Audi GT (I remember them well) unharmed. Said story was posted at 6 in the evening. With sex and Sonata having an 18 hour lead, the story had impossible odds. Old racer’s adage: Better to enter a race late than never. The others could break. Jack’s accident report raced up the charts. By the end of the day, it made a podium finish, coming in third, after sex and Sonata.

In today’s very early morning, Baruth leads, with the Sonata two laps behind, closely followed by Paul Niedermeyer’s story about a futuristic RV from 1959. Pornography is back in the field.

Four possible conclusions (multiple choices ok):

• The B&B value their lives more than sex or money.
• If it (barely) bleeds, it leads.
• Jack Baruth is one reckless heck of a writer.
• Sonatas will rule the world.

Over to you.

(PS: As this story goes to press – so to speak – word reaches us (finally) that “hyper-texting” leads to sex, drinking or drugs. Scientific fact. Was LaHood right after all? Should Jack Baruth have written the story as a prelude while driving, instead of wasting a precious hour on a laptop in a motel? Will we ever know?)

Science fiction author Charlie Stross recently penned a blog piece on the future impact of autonomously computer-driven cars. Let’s call them “robocars.” I’ve pondered this before and Stross’s post is the perfect jumping-off point for a discussion of the many issues standing between science fiction and the robocar future. Let’s take a look.

Firstly, based on the progress from DARPA’s Grand Challenge and now Google’s fleet of robocars, it’s eminently clear that computers are getting very good at driving. Robocars rely on a variety of different ways of sensing the road (stereo video cameras, laser range-finders, sonar, radar, GPS — you name it and somebody’s tried it). One of the ways that robots gain increased accuracy is by fusing data from multiple distinct sensors, and that means that the cost and reliability of those sensors will be one of the limiting factors before robocars hit the mainstream, never mind the pesky problem of all those sensors looking decidedly ugly.

Stross posits that once robocars become affordable, insurance companies and government regulations will immediately favor them over traditional cars, and it’s easy to see why. Take away the human driver and you take away driving while drunk, distracted, or drowsy. Long-distance trucking companies would immediately jump on the chance to have their rigs running all day and night without drivers who require food and sleep. Stross suggests that we won’t even bother owning cars any more, except for the occasional nut-job / TTAC aficionado who likes to race. In a congested big city where taxis are everywhere (New York, London, etc.), plenty of people already don’t bother to own cars, and new business models like ZipCar fill in where taxis don’t really cut it. Still, while I’ve only spent occasional time in New York, I have attempted to get a taxi there while it’s raining, and let’s just say that supply didn’t meet demand. With robocars, we can easily imagine ZipCar-like services where you pay more for higher priority when demand grows. Maybe we’ll see instant auctions: I’ll pay $100 for the first car that shows up right here, right now! Or reverse auctions: I need to go from here to there, who’s willing to take me for the least money? My kingdom for a ride downtown in a Mercedes! Make it so, number one.

I see a completely different impact on suburbia. With my own house, I made the tradeoff to live close to work versus having a glorious suburban starter castle and a one hour drive-time commute from hell. What if all that pain went away and I could rig up my car to be more like a rolling office? Now living in the distant suburbs wouldn’t be nearly as bad. Robocars could drive faster, with less separation between cars, and would be far less likely to get into wrecks. And when wrecks do happen, robocars wouldn’t slow down just to rubberneck. Expensive parking lots at work or the airport? Why bother? Send the car home and it will pick you up when you need it again, or send it a few miles away to a robocar-only parking lot that can really pack the cars in for a cheaper price.

Since I’m a computer security guy, I should probably spend some time on how things could go horribly wrong. Some of Stross’s commenters got into the dystopian aspects of robocars. Much like all the robots in the inexplicably lame I, Robot movie all going evil at the same time (poor Isaac Asimov, spinning like a hidden Iranian centrifuge in his grave), it’s easy to imagine that robocars would be required to have “back door” access for the government, both in terms of reporting your whereabouts (see, for example, attempts to tax cars based on miles driven rather than gas consumed) and in terms of being able to hijack your car for any of a variety of purposes ranging from instructing a bank robber’s car to go straight to the police station to various spy-vs-spy applications, up to and including murdering undesirables by driving them at high speed into any convenient brick wall.

Perhaps less ominously, it’s easy to imagine hacking your robocar to post bogus traffic announcements that cause other cars to reroute themselves away from you, giving you a clean shot at your destination. You might also send fake messages to a car from its tire-pressure sensors causing the target robocar to slow down and pull over because it thinks there may be a flat tire (the fake message part is already feasible). Computer security researchers have already determined that in-car electronics aren’t particularly well-engineered from a security perspective, which seems unlikely to change any time soon, so there may not need to be any sort of government-mandated backdoor. It will probably be there as a consequence of poor engineering.

Malicious behavior aside, teenagers will have great fun hacking their friends’ cars to take them to incorrect destinations and hacking their own cars to ignore speed limits or take them to the party while the electronic logs say they went to the library. Tinkers will still mod their robocars in a variety of ways, such as increasing the g-limit for acceleration, braking, and turning in non-emergency situations. Why? A robocar would make for a hell of a hoontastic experience! J-turn your way into every parallel parking space. Safely and accurately.

It’s equally easy to imagine the liability lawyers getting involved in all kinds of ways. If a software bug caused my car to misbehave and I got hurt, or if a car thief told my car that it wasn’t mine any more and it left me, whose fault is that? Can I sue the manufacturer for negligence? That kind of fear, alone, will slow down the rise of the robocars. It’s a safe prediction that robocars will first come to us as an evolution of taxis and ZipCar-like services, particularly when the technology is still expensive and immature. Another easy prediction: the big consumer demand will start when the Baby Boomers, now in their 60′s, hit the age where their kids agitate for the keys to get taken away. The Baby Boomers will proudly get up, shake their canes at us, and lead us into our inevitable robocar future. Let’s just hope all the security issues have been worked out beforehand.

Linguistic note: I’m using the term “robocar”, while ABC News, in the clip below, uses “self-driving cars.” If you think about the word “automobile” — “automatic” plus “mobile” — robocars are really a step toward realizing the original purpose of the car, namely to get you where you want to be, automatically.

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We didn’t make it down to the first meeting of the NHTSA-National Research Council panel tasked with studying unintended acceleration, but apparently we weren’t the only ones. A scan of the MSM confirms that a number of “more study is needed” stories were filed for the occasion, a good two weeks ago now, but we’ve been pointed towards the presentations for that meeting [available for download here, all 128 slides in PDF format here], and we feel comfortable drawing a few conclusions from them. In fact, we’d even argue that this data puts a lot of the controversy over unintended acceleration in Toyotas to rest.

As the slide above indicates, there have always been three possible outcomes to the hunt for a ghostly electronic problem with Toyota’s throttle control units: either there’s a problem, there’s not a problem, or there’s a weakness that can be learned from. Remember, NHTSA has already fined Toyota for a slow recall of sticky pedals… for this study, we’re looking at instances of electronic issues. So, have NHTSA and the NRC found anything that indicates any kind of problem?

On the face of it, they have. Looking at the Vehicle Owner Questionnaire reports filed in the NHTSA database, it’s clear that complaints of sudden unintended acceleration in Toyotas have increased massively since 2008. But one slide alone doesn’t tell the whole story… first we must look at how this data came about.

Starting with 426,911 complaints since 2000, NHTSA eventually narrowed down to UA complaints only, finding nearly 20k incidents, which were winnowed down by “manual review” to about 11,500 complaints. How thorough this “manual review” was is a crucial issue though, because Bertel has pointed out that NHTSA’s database counts a number of cases as “UA-related” even when the circumstances don’t seem to fit the diagnosis. Still, even assuming the data are all relatively kosher, you’re left with Toyota causing about 3,000 of the 11,500 cases of unintended acceleration. This is the first sign that the 2009-2010 data is being skewed.

Another way to look at the data: incidents per 100k units. Already we can see weakness in the claim that Toyotas are uniquely affected by some kind of mysterious problem: Volvo, a company built on its reputation for safety, has had nearly an identical rate of UA complaints per 100k vehicles.

After NHTSA and the NRC “manually reviewed” the complaints (theoretically winnowing out fraudulent claims), Toyota starts looking even better by comparison. Before October of 2009, Toyota’s UA complaints were on-par with GM and Chrysler, and actually lagged behind Ford. Only post October 2009, when the media-fueled scandal started to take off, did Toyota’s UA complaints start getting out of hand. So, what can we conclude from this?

Yes, even NHTSA admits that there’s a “publicity effect” going into the spike in Toyota UA complaints. Given that the rest of the data fail to provide a pattern of UA problems in Toyotas, media and lawyer frenzy are the only plausible explanations for the recent spike in complaints. But we’re not done yet… next, let’s look at these incidents and try to find out what’s going on.

This might just be the most significant slide in the entire string of presentations, as it proves that the overwhelming majority of Toyota UA complaints took place at low speeds (another slide shows that the majority took place in parking lots). Note that these are not the high-speed freeway terror events that the media so blithely latched onto at the height of the frenzy. The fact that nearly all of these complaints happened at low speed is yet another parallel to the Audi 5000 debacle.

Another major factor: age. Extremely young and extremely old drivers are far more likely to experience sudden unintended acceleration… on this basis alone, it should seem clear that driver error is a major factor in most UA cases. Taken with the fact that the majority of these cases took place at low speeds, in parking lots, and that most complaints have been filed since the scandal broke, and the picture becomes fairly clear: the recall has given a green light to complain about any kind of accident that involves a Toyota that is unable to stop. What any car could do that would make it impossible control under 15 miles per hour is difficult to imagine.

This having been said, if you break the data down to incidents involving Toyota Camrys, you do get some interesting results. The fifth-generation Camry’s rates are far lower than the sixth-generation, which is a difficult statistic to square with the publicity effect hypothesis… especially because this graph shows only data for pre-recall complaints.

Finally, the only other correlation to be made from the NHTSA-NRC data is that electronic throttle control does play into the rate of complaints, although because this graph is not weighted for the publicity effect, it’s far from conclusive.

The upshot? Flawed as it is from the get-go (due to its amplification of the publicity effect), the NHTSA VOQ data shows few patterns that indicate an underlying problem unique to Toyota vehicles. Within the subset of Toyota UA complaints, there are patterns pointing to electronic throttles and the Mk.VI Camry, but these (though intriguing) do not explain why complaints of UA in Toyotas have taken off in the last nine months. In fact, the data more broadly suggests that Toyota is one of several manufacturers with elevated levels of UA incidents, and most of those incidents occur in situations where nothing prevents full control of the vehicle and where “accidents” are generally higher.

NHTSA and the NRC should continue to look into UA, and should continue to look into the possible causes for elevated complaint levels about Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler and Volvo cars, but the search for a “ghost in the machine” that uniquely affects Toyota products is clearly headed nowhere fast. Don’t expect outcome #1 from the top slide to come about, and even coming up with something conclusive for an outcome #3 seems unlikely.

In his presentation on human factors in UA [in PDF here], Richard Compton, Director of the Office of Behavioral Safety Research estimates that there are 10b “opportunities” for pedal misapplication each day, and he cites research showing that “correcting” pedal misapplication usually makes the situation even worse. His conclusions?

This, in a nutshell, is what the whole Toyota unintended acceleration scandal is boiling down to: either pedal design or some other ergonomic issue makes UA more common, in which case the government can regulate it, or Americans are really becoming worse drivers and are always glad to have a convenient scapegoat for their ineptitude. As unsatisfying as these conclusions are, making peace with them is the only healthy choice at this point. Unless, of course, Government-run “behavioral training and adjustment” sounds like a practical solution to you.

The complaint database contains everything, from someone who has heard something somewhere from someone, to detailed accident investigations. Want to beat a ticket? File a report. Try to get out of jail where you landed due to vehicular manslaughter? File a report. Want to smear a manufacturer you don’t like? File a report. Have a serious problem? File a report. It’s all there.

Until yesterday, some of the more carefully filed reports had PDFs of scanned documents attached. These documents ran the gamut from lawyer letters to accident reports prepared by uniformed police. You could find search warrants for black boxes. You could find data readouts from black boxes. You also could find a lot of personal information. That is all gone.

Yesterday, NHTSA switched off access to the documents linked to the reports. Most likely, this was triggered by a report that “names, birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, VINs, and drivers license numbers” are contained in these documents. This was revealed by frequent TTAC commentator Carquestions, who documented it in a Youtube video. In the video, Carquestion says: “NHTSA appears to be a source for identity theft.”

The story was picked up by Slashdot and went from there all over the Internet. Curiously, the mainstream media that usually buzzes to NHTSA database stories like flies to you-know-what, is quiet. Said one Slashdot commentator: “The guy who discovered and reported the leak is a Canadian.  So not only is the government leaking sensitive information, it took a foreigner to discover and disclose it. Embarrassment all around today.”

Someone at the NHTSA (we are still waiting for an official comment) must be more alarmed than the dozing media. There is the possibility that the Privacy Act of 1974 has been violated. The law says that “no agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.” There are the usual caveats, if interested, look them up. Civil suits can be brought against the agency. Criminal charges can be brought also. A violator “shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined not more than $5,000.”

Violating the privacy of a citizen is less costly than the late filing by an automaker (can cost $16.4m currently, $200m if the amended version of the Motior Vehicle Safety Act is signed into law.) But the NHTSA seems to be worried enough to have turned off the access to the attached data. Quietly, without making the usual breathless announcements.

Don’t believe that that documents are locked away? Go to the Office of Defect Investigation complaint database. Enter “10318183 , 10284881” (without the quotes) into the search box. These are the case numbers of two notorious Toyota cases. Hit the search box. Before Friday, you would have found links to the following documents:

The no longer available document for ODI# 10318183 describes how the driver of a Lexus ES350 crossed the center line, slammed in to a prison van. Lexus driver and one prisoner dead. Accident report concludes that the Lexus drove in the oncoming lane, and hit the prison van at a speed between 72 and 73 mph. The report finds no defective equipment.

The no longer available document for ODI# 10284881 documents the infamous floormat-on floormat Mark Saylor case.

We carefully selected these two cases due to their notoriety. We show you the previously available  documents because they do not appear to reveal personal data. Other documents were not as carefully redacted.

Both documents, along with all other documents previously available, are no longer on-line. We retrieved ours before access was shut down.

The NHTSA is closing the barn after the cow got out. However, the NHTSA also prevents the researcher from proving that often cited death and fatality cases are either made up or caused by reckless drivers. Closed is the ability to drill down on cases. Many accident reports, carefully researched by police and investigators have vanished. Before, someone who went to the pain of actually going through the data could conclude that reports were filed by or on behalf of a drunk driver, or someone who was speeding in the wrong lane and was convicted for it. Now, such reasoning is made impossible.

All that is left are the allegations of dead and injured people, now without a shred of evidence.

What is also left are names, partial VINs (where available) and other information in the still available complaint records. Only the attachments have been blocked. Doesn’t the law say “no agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains?”

Shutting down access to the attachments is not enough. It only aggravates the situation. Public access to the whole database must be shut down until the database has been carefully cleaned up.

Unverified allegations must go. Cases that have been researched by government agencies and where equipment failure was ruled out must go. Personal information in the case description must go. Evidence backing up the cases must come back, carefully redacted to delete any personal information. Data should not be released before the agency that supposedly watches over our safety establishes the same level of quality control and reporting discipline which it demands from auto manufacturers.

How does Kris Kristofferson end his song? “There’s a lot of wrong directions on that lonely way back home.”

What is that car? Some of you will figure it out immediately, while the rest will want to sneak a peek at the end of this article. Regardless of the make and model, here’s what it is: it’s a race car that competes in an entry-level ARCA series. No longer street legal. Not even close. Since it’s a race car, it uses (some) racing safety equipment. That’s all well and good. There’s a problem, however. In the past couple of years, I’ve seen more and more drivers incorporating “harness bars”, four-or-five-point belts, and other racing-style accessories in their street/trackday cars. Those people are risking their lives, and if you’re one of them, you should keep reading.

As trackday drivers progress into the intermediate level, they start to notice a few things about the interface between (wo)man and machine in a street car. To begin with, most of us sit much too far away from the steering wheel when we’re on the street. This is the standard test: Sit all the way back in your seat, with your shoulders resting firmly on the seatback. Now stick your right arm out and lay on the top of the steering wheel. Where on your arm does the wheel make contact? For most street drivers, the answer will be “the ends of my fingers, maybe.” That’s bad news. Move your seat and seatback forward until it’s your wrist that touches the top of the steering wheel with your arm straight out.

This puts you a lot closer to the wheel. How close? Well, here I am behind the wheel of the Mystery Car, which is now revealed by its windshield banner to be a Mystery Rental Car. Surely you’ll figure it out now, but note that I have about a 90-degree bend in my arms when I am grasping the wheel.

Yes, that’s an Omega Speedmaster “Broad Arrow” I’m wearing. Thanks for asking. Even this close to the wheel, however, we face another problem with car control. Most street cars can generate 1g or more on a racetrack. The Audi R8 I tested at MSR Houston two years ago generated transitional g-forces of 1.18g during a 90-mph entry to a corner. This is more sideways force than I would encounter if the driver’s seat were mounted sideways on a wall and I was trying to sit in it. No wonder, then, that during fast driving we find ourselves sliding around in the seat a lot.

Heavy braking produces a similar effect, and not all inertia-reel seatbelts will hold us in the seat when it happens. This means we can’t use our left foot to brake. We have to use it to press against the floor and keep us in the chair. Damn. What we’d really would be a way to hold us securely in the driver’s seat during trackdays.

Enter the harness bar. It allows us to use four-or-five-point harnesses in a street car. Fixes all the problems. We’re locked securely in the seat. We can left-foot brake, we can fingertip-control the car since we aren’t hanging on to the steering wheel in corners. It’s perfect.

Race cars don’t have harness bars. They have roll cages. When you roll the car and land on your roof, the main roll hoop and halo bar are supposed to prevent the roof from collapsing. Most of the time, this works. Sometimes the forces are too much to predict, but in general, when race cars roll over, the cage does what it’s supposed to do.

What happens in a street car? Well, the roof collapses. There’s some roll reinforcement in most factory cars, but it’s not what you get in a race car. When the roof collapses, it’s okay, because a three-point belt allows your head and torso to move forward, away from the collapsing roof.

Unless, that is, your head and shoulders are locked in position by shoulder harnesses. What happens then? Simple. Your neck supports the force of a rolling automobile landing on the roof. Hope you have a strong neck. If you don’t, you are either dead or paralyzed.

Some track rats figure this out, so they go ahead and cage their street cars. That leads us to another problem. During a high-speed impact, your body and head will end up in all sorts of places, even if you’re strapped into the seat. I was in a race-car accident where the top of my helmet grazed the “halo bar” at the juncture of roof and windshield. Without that helmet, I’d have cracked my skull. It’s illegal to wear a helmet on the street in many states. Don’t ask me how I found that out. Even if you don’t crack your head, your hands, arms, and other soft body parts may come into direct contact with solid steel rollcage bars. That’s a contest the steel bar always wins.

There’s a race-car safety system, and it consists of a full cage, five-point harnesses, helmet, and full race suit. There’s a street-car safety system, and it consists of three-point inertia belts, airbags, and soft interior surfaces. Don’t mix the two. The results are never good. It’s mandatory to wear a helmet at most trackdays, unless you’re driving the ‘Ring, so that’s just something we have to live with. The rest of the time, however, be smart. Leave the racing equipment at the track. If you think your car is too fast to drive on-track without a half-cage or five-point belts, it’s worth considering whether you and your massive talent really shouldn’t be in a real race car.

Our Mystery Car, for example, can be raced at any Flat Rock ARCA race for the staggering sum of $300 plus damage. That includes entry to the race. Why not give it a shot and see whether you’re ready to be a racing superstar? I wasn’t quite ready myself: as the official ARCA report shows, I finished one step off the podium in my oval-track debut. This was my ride: behold the amazing Flat Rock Tempo!

Jim Sikes’ Prius high-speed dash to fame or infamy is a media hype-fest, with wild swings in sentiment from Toyota bashing to Sikes trashing. The rush to judgment is innately human, and Sikes certainly makes an easy target. But in the process, very little effort has been made to analyze what actually happened, or what might have actually happened, on the basis of the facts rather than Jim Sikes’ financial history and sexual proclivities.

There clearly are valid questions in Sikes’ seeming inability to bring the Prius to a stop, and certain inconsistent and contradictory statements. But Toyota, which should know better, is not helping either. The brakes on the Prius were utterly worn down in examination, and were witnessed to be smoking. Yet Toyota continues to assert that “the hybrid braking system used in the Prius would make the engine lose power if the brakes were pressed at the same time as the accelerator”. (WSJ 3/14/10) That statement smells as bad as some of Sikes’, so I rented a 2008 Prius to determine what could or couldn’t have happened, and examine some of the other claims and counterclaims. You be the jury.

A memo released by the Congressional aide who witnessed the tear down of the Prius clearly shows that the front brake pads were worn completely off, and grooves had been cut into the discs from the pad retainers or calipers. The rear drum brakes shoes, which tend to wear much more slowly, were worn down to one-eighth of the normal depth. The discs showed signs of heat discoloration. Sikes claimed he smelled the brakes. The CHP officer said he saw the brakes smoking. There is no doubt that the brakes were being applied by Sikes.

This morning, NHTSA issued the following statement: “Further, the Prius is equipped with a system that detects simultaneous brake and accelerator pedal applications. When the brake applications are moderate or greater, the system will close the throttle allowing the vehicle to slow down and stop,” said NHTSA officials. “The system on Mr. Sikes’ Prius worked during our engineers’ test drive.”

The key here is the degree of brake pressure, and what variance there may be from car to car, or if that system is prone to malfunction. I tested the system initially by applying very strong pressure, and the system worked, cutting power from the engine. But there is a wide range of pedal pressure less than a full-on application that did not cut the power.

I drove along for quite a few miles, with wide open throttle (WOT), and kept the Prius’ speed reduced by continuous left foot braking to various degrees. Depending on terrain and brake pressure, vehicle speed was restrained to as little as 45 mph and as high as 90 mph.

Coincidentally, as the battery depleted (from e-motor assist), the brakes also began to lose some effectiveness from excess heat and fade. Describing the amount of pedal pressure used is subjective, but I would call it moderate, comparable to what one would use to come to a stop from high speed in a reasonably short time.

When I noticed increasing fade, I pulled over and the front wheels were engulfed in a cloud of smoke. I had also begun to smell the brakes through the ventilation system. I did not drive long enough to induce significant brake wear, but I have little doubt in my mind that they could be fully worn down driving in this fashion for an extended period, such as Sikes’ thirty-some miles at speeds between 80 and 94 mph.

Several scenarios are possible. The brake override that normally kicks in at high braking pressure could have failed. If his Prius suffered some sort of random electronic “ghost” to cause the UA, than it seems safe to assume that could theoretically also affect the brake override. But even then, it still should have been possible to stop the Prius, IF one strong application was undertaken. If Sikes cycled the pedal repeatedly, like the SD CHP officer in the Lexus did, the relatively modest-sized Prius braking system could have begun to exhibit terminal fade fairly quickly, and the engine would have been able to overpower it to some degree.

If the override system didn’t fail, that leaves two possibilities. Either Sikes purposefully and carefully modulated the brakes just to the degree that allowed the Prius to continue to travel at fairly high speed, using both feet like I did. Or if his Prius really was running wide open against his will, he is such a tentative and poorly skilled driver that he never actually pushed the brake pedal harder than a moderate amount.

Unless his performance on his cell phone was remarkably well controlled, it sounds to me like he was genuinely panicked and was putting all his effort in steering the car and maintaining some degree of control. It’s also clear from the 911 tape that most of the time the phone was on the seat or elsewhere, because he wasn’t responding to almost any of the 911 operator’s requests or questions.

It is possible that since he thought putting the car in neutral might cause it to lose control, he may have felt the same about the consequences of a full-on brake application: that it might throw the Prius into a skid. Many drivers have never explored the full range of their vehicle’s dynamic responses to unfamiliar or extreme control inputs, and are loath to find out.

Speaking of neutral, putting a Prius into that realm is not as simple, obvious or intuitive as might typically be the case. The joystick has to be held to the N position for a more than a moment, because the stick has no detent. And then it goes back to its normal position. This is similar to D and R, but it might be a challenge to ponder during an actual emergency.

One aspect of Sikes’ story is suspect. He claims that the actual gas pedal was stuck to the floor, and that he reached down to try to pull it up, unsuccessfully. First, this is an e-pedal, and a Denso one that has no history of sticking. Even if it was a bit sticky, it would have been easy to pull free,assuming you could reach it. I’m tall, and had no trouble reaching it; Stephanie did (have trouble).  Sikes wants us (or himself) to believe that the engine running wide open would somehow cause the pedal to also be wide open, as would be the case if there was a mechanical linkage or throttle cable.  But he may have said that to convince himself and/or others that he was trying to do something about the runaway Prius.

The hoax theory is compelling, but why would Sikes put himself at serious risk by destroying his brakes, when he had no way of ascertaining when the police would actually show up, if at all? Why not just drive down the freeway at 85 to 90, and just say the brakes didn’t work at all, like others have done? Or run into a wall at slow speed? Somehow, Sikes doesn’t strike me as a high-speed daredevil, willing to risk his life at ninety with completely shot brakes. Of course, that could also just as well confirm his stupidity.

The comparison to the Balloon Boy is appealing, but conveniently leaves out one important fact: the Ballon Boy was never in the balloon; it was launched empty. Sikes actually was in his brakeless Prius at ninety, audibly panting hard, so in that regard at least he was either a lot gutsier or a lot stupider than the Ballon Boy perpetrators. And a hell of an actor, to boot.

Michael Fumento, director of the Independent Journalism Project, went on Neil Cavuto’s show on Fox Business and said: “It appears that everybody on planet earth suspected that there was something horribly wrong with this picture – except for the national media. The real hoax wasn’t James Sikes, it was in fact our press.”

On his own blog, Fumento fumed at the press: “To test his claim that he actually reached down and tried to pull the accelerator up but it wouldn’t budge I did something that apparently occurred to no other reporter in the country. I actually got in a 2008 Prius to see if it was physically possible to reach that far. I couldn’t get anywhere close. An orangutan could, but whatever Mr. Sikes is, that doesn’t seem to describe him.”

The real blame is on the press, says Fumento: “The red flags were popping up right from the beginning and the media ignored them because they wanted to ignore them. There’s a Toyota feeding frenzy going on and reporters just want their chunk.”

Well, now they dropped the video, and it looks like their editors sic them on Sikes.

The Wall Street Journal [sub] reports that “the investigation of the vehicle, carried out jointly by safety officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota engineers, didn’t find signs the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time, the three people familiar with the investigation said.

The brakes were discolored and showed wear, but the pattern of friction suggested the driver had intermittently applied moderate pressure on the brakes, these people said, adding the investigation didn’t find indicators of the heavy pressure described by Mr. Sikes.”

As we vividly remember, ABC had led the “let’s burn Toyota on the stake” faction with the Gilbert video that subsequently turned out as a fake. Now, as the tide turns against Sikes, ABC goes with the flow: “A memo drafted for a congressional panel says the Toyota Prius involved in a California runaway car incident performed exactly as it is designed to in tests trying to replicate the situation…The memo says that each time the technician floored the gas pedal and hit the brake at the same time, the car shut off as it is designed to do.” ABC got ahold of Patty Sikes who complained that “the couple’s lives have been turned upside down and they are getting death threats.”

According to CBS News “a congressional spokesman said the finding casts doubt on the driver’s story.”

Looks like Sikes won’t testify.

[Note: This piece first ran in May 2007. It seems particularly relevant again in light of the current Toyota unintended acceleration (UA) situation. But please note that the circumstance that caused the Audi UA may, or may not be very different, depending on the circumstances. In the early eighties, electronic gas pedals and complex engine controls and other interfaces such as with ABS/brakes were still on the horizon. Nevertheless, the rules of physics have not been repealed. And an unknown percentage of Toyota UA events undoubtedly are the result of pedal misapplication. Audi's near collapse in the American market after this incident remains a painful lesson in the power of the media, the slowness of the NHTSA, and the critical PR choices manufacturers make in the wake of a crisis like this. PN]

When I first heard about the Audi “sudden unintended acceleration” segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1986, I knew instantly that they were blowing smoke. Literally.

Some years earlier, I was part of a TV crew shooting an educational program. Legendary race-car driver Parnelli Jones was the guest celebrity one day. The producer offered to take us to lunch in his 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. Three or four of us hopped into the giant back seat. Parnelli took the wheel, and the Caddy owner/producer rode shotgun.

Parnelli fired up the Caddy’s giant V8, dropped it in gear and floored it – with his left foot on the brake. One of the rear wheels lit up in a screeching howl, and the car was soon engulfed in a cloud of acrid smoke. The Caddy didn’t move an inch; obviously. And neither did Parnelli, glancing at the wincing producer with his wicked grin. he probably burned off half the rubber of that tortured tire before he stopped grinning and gunning. I had assumed (wrongly) that race-car drivers grew up eventually.

The experience seared in a lesson in basic automobile physics: brakes are always more powerful than engines, even when they have 500 cubic inches (8.2 liters). Too bad we didn’t have our cameras running; we could have made a graphic rebuttal to 60 Minutes’ fraudulent destruction of Audi.

Let’s set the scene: it’s 1984, and Audi sales had shot up 48 percent on the strength of their new aerodynamic 5000, the latest hot weapon in the perpetually-escalating suburban driveway status war. It was a stunning slick piece, and Audi was on a roll.

Suddenly, the war turned bloody. Moms in runaway Audi 5000′s were mowing down their little kids in the driveway and pinning granny against the far garage wall with the four-ringed front of the Audi.

This had never happened with the Olds Cutlass Supreme Brougham Coupe, the previous “hot” suburban car Mom traded in for her Audi. The German car certainly felt different. Unlike the Olds’ wide push-bar brake pedal – that some Americans still operated with their left feet – the Audi had that weird, small brake pedal, set kinda’ close to the gas pedal.

And these Audis had a mind of their own. No matter how hard Mom pushed on the brake pedal, the Audi kept on charging, right through the garage door with granny on the prow. This despite the fact that the little five-cylinder mill only cranked out 130 horsepower. And the top-notch four-wheel disc brake system probably could generate well over 600 equivalent horsepower.

Apparently, the brakes were failing at exactly the same moment that the gas pedal decided it had a mind of its own. Perfectly plausible, at least to the 60 Minutes crew, the Audi (non)drivers, and much of the media and public.

About as plausible as ignoring the police report of the most dramatic victim on the show, Kristi Bradosky, who ran over her six year old son. That report said “Bradosky’s foot slipped off the brake pedal onto the gas pedal accelerating the auto.” Denial isn’t just a river.

Ed Bradley’s 17 minute “investigative report” aired on November 23, 1986. Between interviews of the teary-eyed “victims” (drivers) of unintended acceleration swearing their feet were on the brake pedal, CBS showed a clip of a driverless Audi lurching forward on its own.

Viewers didn’t get to see the canister of compressed air on the passenger-side floor with a hose running to a hole drilled in the transmission. An “expert” had rigged the Rube Goldberg device to shift the big Audi into drive and, like any automatic-equipped car, move forward (unless the brakes are depressed).

The clip was blatantly deceptive AND totally irrelevant. Nobody claimed driverless Audis were taking off and killing kids and grannies. Mom was always at the wheel, pushing the 5000′s “brake” pedal with all her might.

In 1989, after three years of studying the blatantly obvious, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued their report on Audi’s “sudden unintended acceleration problem.” NHTA’s findings fully exonerated Audi and some other implicated foreign makes”.

The report concluded that the Audi’s pedal placement was different enough from American cars’ normal set-up (closer to each other) to cause some drivers to mistakenly press the gas instead of the brake. 60 Minutes did not retract their piece; they called the NHTSA report “an opinion.”

(Update: Audi and many manufacturers quickly added an automatic transmission interlock, making it impossible to shift into drive or reverse without a foot on the (real) brake.)

A flood of lawsuits was already washing over Audi, not to mention a tsunami of bad publicity. Audi took a questionable stance: they didn’t blame the drivers for the problem, even after the NHTSA report came out. Hey, the customer’s always right, and we sure wouldn’t want to make our American customers look stupid. Anything but that.

So the German automaker took it on the chin. Audi sales collapsed, from 74k units in 1984 to 12k by 1991. The timing added insult to injury; sales fell exactly during the same years when Lexus arrived to battle for the hearts and wallets of America’s up-scale consumers. Lexus quickly became the latest suburban driveway prestige symbol.

As a final kick to the near-corpse, Audi’s suddenly wanna-be-Lexus drivers launched a class action suit charging lost resale value. No wonder the brand almost abandoned the U.S. in 1993. It’s a killer market.

And the data beat goes on. I asked Edmunds if they had updated model information to filter out the spike of UA reports to NHTSA after the 9/29/09 Toyota mat recall in order to improve my attempt at coming up with a model-specific UA rate. Not only did they oblige, but they already did all the work! A big hat tip to Edmunds, who has taken a lead in the quest to make sense of the data as well as the whole UA fiasco.

A note of explanation from Edmunds:

Attached are the UA complaints against sales by Model for MY2005-2010 and complaints received through 9/30/2009.  A couple things to note about our “complaints per 100k sold” measure: if the model sales was less than 30k, then we excluded it from the list and if the model sales was between 30k and 100k, then we extrapolated the complaints to 100k.

Furthermore, I removed a few cars that had very low UA reports, generally less than four. But I left other in with low numbers because they were essentially “twins” of other models (Fusion/Milan), in order to test how reliable and consistent they are between the. I’m happy to see that generally that is the case: (Grand Cherokee: 7.57; Commander: 7.30); (Fusion 2.91; Milan 3.18) (Vibe 2.85; Matrix 2.75).

Obviously, the same question as to the Panther triplets comes up: they’re all high, but by varying degrees. And of course the biggest on is the discrepancy between the ES 350 (32.03) and the very similar Camry (6.52).

One more minor note: the Lexus LS 430 has an old-time bottom-hinged accelerator pedal, so mat entrapment is not an issue with it. And it hasn’t been implicated with a sticky pedal either. So in its case it must either be human error or…

Finally, the next step would of course to cross tabulate both sides of this chart to specific model years, since awe saw in our previous post how much variation there is from year to year. And then…

Here’s TTAC’s and the web’s only complete guide to Toyota’s gas pedals (so far), with tear downs, pictures, analysis, explanation, the shim fix, and commentary, all consolidated into one portal:

Part 1: Exclusive: TTAC Takes Apart Both Toyota Gas Pedals: Tear down of both the recalled CTS pedal assembly and the non-recalled Denso pedal assembly. Note: Assumptions and conclusions in this initial tear down lack the more complete understanding of the importance of the friction arm aspect of the CTS unit.

Part 2: Toyota Gas Pedal Fix Explained – With Exclusive Photos: Describes Toyota’s proposed fix for the recalled CTS gas pedal assembly, with detailed photos and graphics. Explains the significance of the friction arm assembly and its limitations.

Part 3: Toyota Gas Pedal Fix Simulated – Friction Reduced, By Too Much?: TTAC simulates the fix prescribed by Toyota for the recalled CTS pedal assembly, and notes how the fix changes the degree of friction, and the possible unintended result. With detailed pictures

Part 4: Why Toyota Must Replace Flawed CTS Gas Pedal With Superior Denso Pedal: Detailed analysis with pictures of the two pedal assemblies, an explanation as to why the Denso design is superior, and a call for having all CTS pedals replaced with the Denso pedal.

Part 5: TTAC Does The Toyota Pedal Shim Fix:  Stop Gap Solution At Best: Toyota’s solution is carried out here with detailed pictures, the whole Toyota document detailing the fix, and our commentary.

Part 6: Toyota Floor Mat/Gas pedal Recall Includes Computer Reflash And Trimming Of Gas Pedals: Info on the details of the floor mat/gas pedal interference recall.

Part 7: Toyota Recall  Creates Unintended Accelerator Consequences: As predicted in Part 4 (above), the CTS shim fix reduces the carefully designed amount of friction required for comfortable and smooth pedal action to the point where pedal action may now be jerky and potentially unsafe.

(Thanks to you-know-who-you-are for access to these parts and info)

Both Claybrook and Ditlow are products of the Ralph Nader legacy: Claybrook ran the Nader-founded group Public Citizen, while Ditlow is the current director of the Nader-founded Center for Automotive Safety (and gained infamy for his role in the NBC “GM Firebomb” scandal). Claybrook worked closely with Nader to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, as well as the Highway Safety Act, some of the first safety legislation ever passed in the US. At the time, these bills were easily justified by relatively high accident rates, and they have most likely made important contributions to the consistent reductions in accidents per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) that have occurred ever since.

But the fact that deaths per VMT are currently at their lowest levels since statistics have been regularly recorded doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on Claybrook, who seems stuck in a time-warp of Nader-heyday attitudes towards auto safety. One of her main assertions: that NHTSA’s defect investigation capabilities haven’t been significantly upgraded since her tenure at NHTSA, seems damning until you put it in the context of significant declines in fatalities per VMT.

Absent any recognition of the improvements in auto safety since her tenure (which are graphically illustrated by the IIHS’s recent crash test video), Ms Claybrook’s main proposals seem particularly anachronistic. Her first suggestion, that NHTSA be given the power to file criminal complaints against automakers, is hardly justified by the circumstances of the Toyota case. Secretary LaHood was unequivocal in stating that Toyota had issued its own recalls for floor mats and gas pedals before NHTSA even launched investigations. Unless Claybrook was proposing that NHTSA be authorized to act as judge, jury and executioner before even marshaling the facts of a case, it’s difficult to understand how this extra authority could have made a difference in the case of Toyota (unless, of course, a major electronic bug is proven to have existed and been covered up, a finding that NHTSA is likely months away from making).

Ultimately, this advocacy leads up to Claybrook’s main point: the NHTSA should see its funding increase by about $100m to allow for more reporting, investigations and presumably to wield the criminal complaint powers that Claybrook would also have bestowed upon the Agency. Without belaboring the point or bringing the conversation too far off topic, the United States currently finds itself in a fairly severe budget and debt crisis. $100m pales in comparison to the auto bailout, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and any number of other hot-button political issues, but what Claybrook is recommending is a massive commitment of resources to a problem that is in a decades-long decline.

Not only are fatalities per VMT declining on an absolute scale, but the number of deaths caused by defects (specifically unintended acceleration in Toyotas, which prompted Ms Claybrook’s recommendations) also pales in comparison to the overall fatalities per VMT. The number of deaths blamed on unintended acceleration in Toyotas over the past decade varies from 6 to 36, depending on the source. When compared to the 35k-40k fatal accidents that have occurred in each of the past 15 years or so, it’s clear that this current media-fueled frenzy does not justify the kind of massive buildup in NHTSA resources that Claybrook recommends.

That Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood did not request extra funding (beyond the 66 new positions already proposed in the Obama budget) is telling: LaHood certainly doesn’t want to be back in front of congress with another scandal, and if there were ever an opportunity for him to ask for more resources, yesterday’s hearings were it. Unfortunately, LaHood did  prove in his testimony that he is not free from Naderite tendencies: when one committee member suggested that safety must be balanced against other issues, and that there is no such thing as a 100 percent safe car, LaHood took umbrage, stating that it was his agency’s goal to uncompromisingly dedicate itself to the goal of making cars 100 percent safe.

This is an admirable motivation, but it begs an important practical question: if defects blamed for no more than 36 deaths in a decade can inspire two days of congressional hearings (complete with contrite executives flown in from Japan), what causes the other 35,000 plus annual traffic fatalities, and what are these acolytes of the church of safety doing about them? The answer gets to the heart of the Toyota issue, and the issue of vehicle safety as a whole, because the majority of those 35k annual “accidents” are in fact caused by some form of driver error.

Unfortunately for Claybrook and Ditlow, this does not fit conveniently with a worldview forged in the Nader-era of anti-corporate consumer advocacy. Every word of Claybrook and Ditlow’s testimony dripped with the baggage of their activist backgrounds, in which corporations could not be contained by concern for their own reputations, requiring huge resources for constant, pervasive, and confrontational government regulation. Though the current Toyota recall scandal proves that NHTSA must remain vigilant, it also proves how devastating a relatively small defect (compared to the number of Americans who die in cars every year) can be for a company’s reputation, especially in an industry that’s as competitive as the auto industry.

It’s said that when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Clearly Claybrook and Ditlow are stuck in an era that has little to do with the safety climate of today. Now, more than ever, safety regulations need to be balanced against environmental and efficiency regulations. More importantly, self-appointed consumer advocates need to balance the number of road deaths caused by corporate malfeasance against the number of road deaths caused by human error, before determining where hundreds of millions of tax dollars would be best spent. Ironically, this challenge has already dogged Secretary LaHood in his campaign against distracted driving, although it hasn’t seemed to increase his interest in tackling safety as a crisis of personal responsibility.

As stuck in the past as they are, asking Claybrook and Ditlow for recommendations in the wake of the Toyota recalls was a bit like asking a Soviet central planner for advice in managing the government’s stake in GM: the problem isn’t that they aren’t intelligent, well-meaning people, it’s that their battles have already been waged, and the world has moved on. Driving cars will continue to be the most dangerous activity any of us engage in on a regular basis, and it’s time to stop pretending that this reality can be reduced to something as simple as corporate greed.

According to popular wisdom, the flood of recalls will change Toyota and will permanently damage Toyota’s market share in the United States (much like what happened to Mitsubishi and their cover up scandal). But there are some people who believe (like I do) that this is “man bites dog” journalism. That the Toyota recall (whilst serious) is being blown out of proportion. It seems that other people are starting to see it that way.

US Recall News‘ reason for being is recalls. They would be dead without recalls. US Recall News has written an article that says that the real recall bogeyman doesn’t live in Toyota City, but in Detroit. The identity of the true bogeyman’s name may surprise some.

US Recall News’ article starts off rather reasonably:

“Toyota led the pack for recalls in 2009 with over 4.8 million units recalled across both the Toyota and Lexus brand names. And 2010 already puts Toyota as a front-runner so far with its Prius recall of over 437,000 units and the subsequent recall of over 4.5 million units for various problems. A Tacoma recall of 8,000 units was added to Toyota’s bill on February 15 as well.”

Nothing contentious there, but then, it takes a sudden turn:

“But wait – is the hype more bark than bite? While 5 million units for the Japanese automaker may seem like a sea of cars, there’s another car manufacturer that trumps Toyota in total recalls over time”

Your best guess in 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1

Time’s up, let’s take a look at the answer:

“Since the NHTSA started keeping records, Ford Motors has recalled over 20 million vehicles, the highest recall year being 1996 with over 7.6 million units. Thus, while the current recall hype might be news to the US consumer who favors Japanese models over their American counterpart, the news of Toyota’s 5 million units recalled could be overshadowed by Ford’s recall history.”

A partial breakdown of Ford’s recalls is then given, from 1972 when Ford recalled over 4 million cars for defective seat belts to cruise control issues of the new millennium.  In fact, the article sticks the boot further into Ford by mentioning that the Dearborn boys barely averted a total meltdown:

“2005 wasn’t such a great year for Ford in the recall department, either. While we’re at it, we should mention 2009 as well. Both years resulted in a recall of 4.5 million units each for Ford, and were directly related to cruise control malfunctions. Had the NHTSA combined these incidents into a single report, it would have been the largest recall of all time with an estimated 14 million Ford / Mercury vehicles affected.”

But don’t think that this TTAC article is just here to pour water on Ford being on fire recently (are they on fire due to one of their cruise controls?) You see, despite Ford dwarfing Toyota in the recall stakes, Ford are making huge strides in quality and reliability and are now being thought of in the same vein as Toyota and Honda. Which shows that you can turn a perception gap around. So, things aren’t that bleak for Toyota and is it totally within reason that they can get back on top and put “acceler-gate” (copyright Cammy Corrigan) behind them. Then they can start worrying about Hyundai.

Yesterday, a strange love-fest between U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos and Japan’s transport minister Seiji Maehara ensued. After their meeting in Tokyo, as reported by the Nikkei, the ambassador and the minister said that everything is hunky-dory, and that Toyota’s recent recalls won’t undermine relations between the U.S.A. and Japan. Which is odd in itself: Since when does a $15 gas pedal get a leading role on the world stage of international politics?

Ambassador Roos effusively told reporters that the recall issue ”in no way has any kind of direct or indirect impact on the strength of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Japan.” Who said it would?

Japan’s transport minister Seiji Maehara likewise said that Toyota’s troubles mean no harm to Japan’s relationship with the U.S.: “The issue shouldn’t damage the two countries’ relationship and shouldn’t hurt free and fair market competition.” Again, why should it?

Strange answers to questions nobody raised.

Kyodo News reiterated this morning in Japan that Toyota’s President Akio Toyoda will travel to the United States in March. Toyota spokeswoman Martha Voss said Toyoda ”would look forward” to the opportunity to meet with members of Congress when he visits the United States. The travel plans of the CEO of a car maker get more attention than a state visit.

There has been an odd amount of highest level governmental involvement with this issue recently, far beyond the regular regulatory ratcheting and the habitual grandstanding. The posturing is solely between the U.S.A, and Japan. Nobody in Europe, or China, which are just as affected by the recalls, turns Toyota into a political issue.

China’s state-owned news agency Xinhua couldn’t help but noticing today: “In a sharp contrast to media reports out of the US, voices of leniency and softened tones have emerged in China on the issue, with some people going as far as highlighting the massive safety recalls as a sign of ‘responsible business operations.’” China is Toyota’s second largest foreign market.

In Europe, where Toyota recalls 1.8m cars, the reaction is even more subdued. The German newspaper Die Welt yesterday cited a spokesperson of the powerful ADAC, Germany’s equivalent of the AAA: “The club does not have any complaints or claims from its members. There is no reason for panic.”

As commentator L’Avventura said: “It seems to me that a lot things are going to happen behind closed doors before the congressional hearings. The question is how it’s going to play out and how much of it is going to be predetermined and politically orchestrated.”

Out of the many possible explanations for the strange behavior, here is one of them:

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had campaigned on a platform that contained moving all U.S. bases off Okinawa, or even out of Japan. The Okinawa issue had received a lot of play in Japan. In the last weeks, it turned quiet.

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained with her Japanese counterpart Katsuya Okada about alleged discrimination of the Japanese cash for clunker program against American cars, it sounded oddly out of proportion. The number of cars affected wasn’t enough to fill a ship.

Now, the U.S.A. seems to have found a powerful pivot point, and Japan’s undivided attention.

As long as the U.S.A. sits on Okinawa, it doesn’t have to dump a lot of arms into Taiwan, a move that would make China increasingly grumpy. China already threatened to cut Boeing et al out of the Chinese market, after $6.4b of American arms made their way to Taiwan. China is estimated to need more than 3000 airliners worth $400 billion in the 20 years from 2009. Airbus already has the inside track in China and would be more than happy to fill the void.

Nobody claims Toyota doesn’t have problems. As many have said, they have had problems for years.  Their problem management is a mess. However, the timing and intensity of the diplomatic activity should give reason for thought.

Implications of a $15 gas pedal …

Here’s a challenge: try to find a review of the Toyota Corolla that doesn’t bemoan its numb steering. Now try with a Chevy Cobalt. Or a Venza, or Vibe, Or Rav4, or Equinox. What do these vehicles have in common? Column-mounted electric power steering systems from JTEKT, a Toyota spin-off supplier which has done a brisk business in these fun-eliminating steering systems. And though the motor press has been bashing electric power assist steering (EPAS or EPS) for its deleterious effect on handling, the explosive growth in these systems may put more at risk than mere enthusiast-approved steering feel.

This anesthetization of steering systems has not taken place because manufacturers appreciate the proliferation of words like “numb” and “overboosted” in reviews of their products. EPS offers improved efficiency due to its reduction of parasitic losses, and is cheaper to manufacture than traditional hydraulic systems. This killer combination offers manufacturers a combination of improvements that have proven near-impossible to resist, resulting in the broad proliferation of EPS systems. And if reduced steering feel were the only casualty of the switch, it would be a tradeoff that any manufacturer would be willing to run.

But as EPS has exploded onto the market, a number of troubling issues has plagued the system. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened investigations into the Chevy Cobalt and Toyota Corolla, which share the column-mounted JTEKT EPS system. Cobalt, which moved to an EPS system for the 2005 model year has been haunted by an accelerating number of failures since the switch, while the Corolla investigation centers on Corollas built since the 2009 model-year switch to EPS.

In both of these vehicles, pinning down exact steering defects is proving to be difficult. Many of the Corolla complaints are related to sudden veering, particularly at speeds above 40 mph. The Cobalt, meanwhile, seems to experience complete EPS failure, causing momentary loss of steering and/or the need for drastically increased steering effort. Again, the inability to stay in a set traffic lane is being targeted as the most dangerous symptom of the possible defect.

These symptoms fit conveniently into a category that an early report (by Amit Rohidas Bendale of the Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, publication date unknown) on EPAS technology posted at college-seminars.com calls “auto steer,” a term the paper asserts “has crept into the lexicon as an adjunct to the development of EPAS system.” Bendale attempts to explain this phenomenon in his paper’s section on the disadvantages of EPS thusly:

To-date, technical and product liability concerns have precluded the introduction of such systems in the U.S. market through it is expected that niche application may be expected in the near-to-mid term mix of future vehicles. Such system design have yet to prove themselves sufficiently reliable and safe to prevent dangerous “auto steer” events. “Auto steer” has crept into the lexicon as an adjunct to the development of EPAS system. As the name implies “auto steer” denotes an uncontrolled steering event neither commanded nor stoppable by the vehicle’s driver due to catastrophic failure in the electron hardware or software. In truth, these systems are control servo systems, similar in function to aircraft control servo systems, and must have multiple redundancy. Although these new EPAS systems are said to have multiple redundancy , their design and broad application within the automotive industry have been, and will continue to be, subject to economic pressure more extreme then found in the aircraft industry. For instance one obvious safety related item has been universally deleted from such system specifications: a clutch for physically disengaging the reduction gear box and drive motor assist assembly from the host steering system in the event of system failure. This means that a driver encountering an EPAS system failure will have to exert additional force to “back drive” (i.e. manually over ride) the systems reduction gear box and drive motor assist assembly while attempting to maintain control of the vehicle in the absence of normal power steering assist.

Already, the parallels between these EPS issues (which are admittedly theoretical, but reflect NHTSA complaints) and Toyota’s gas pedal issues are plain to see. The first is the issue of economic pressure towards cost-cutting, which leads to the reduction of fail-safes and redundancy. Another parallel is the fragility of by-wire control systems: in Toyota gas pedals, tiny amounts of moisture was enough to cause the pedals to stick. In the case of EPS steering, there’s evidence to suggest that even cell phone interference could cause system failure. This is not to say that these two situations are directly comparable, but both cases indicate that earlier mechanical systems offer few clues as to possible malfunctions of electronic systems. Finally, the most important parallel between Toyota’s “unintended acceleration” and EPS “unintended veering” is the complicated dynamic between the driver and the system at the moment of malfunction or failure. Bendale continues:

Unlike the manual system described above, PAS with the presence of supplementary steering force to that provided solely by the operator introduces additional engineering challenges in terms of maintaining the desired steering linearity described previously. In fact, with respect to steering linearity, a poorly designed power steering assist system may have almost no relationship between the hand wheel torque applied by the operator and the actual required steering force imposed by the wheel or tires. There no longer may exist the uniform, consistent and predictable relationship between the “input and outputs” to facilitate “tactile reference driving.” Restated, the tactile sense of the driver to maintain directional control, and the magnitude and modulation of the “input” force may not bear a direct, proportional relationship to the required “output” force delivered by the steering system. Tactile reference steering is simply not possible with such vehicles. Rather their drivers must continuously engage in “visual reference steering” to maintain directional control. The result is that such vehicles are very tiring to drive for any length of time or distance. Further their drivers are constrained to continuously look at the road. If such driver should look away even momentarily (i.e., to check a rearview mirror or a child in the car), he or she has minimal tactile reference as to the actual position of the vehicle during that period of time. This is dangerous because, depending upon the road topography and condition, the vehicle may have moved transversely in significant amount relative to where the driver thought his or her vehicle was positioned. This can and often does lead to serious trouble.

This helps explain the varying accounts of unintended veering, as the ability to handle sudden changes in steering response varies greatly from driver to driver. Like unintended acceleration, this makes the task of narrowing down the primary causes of EPS failure or malfunction impossible based on recorded accounts alone.

More importantly, this helps explain the link between numb, overboosted and uncommunicative steering and safety. At highway speeds, any failure or malfunction would be registered and reacted to by touch (tactile feedback) before the brain would be able to register visual cues that vehicle control has been compromised. Because of EPS’s deficits in tactile feedback, and consistency between wheel and steering wheel positions, that all-important emergency tactile feedback would be more difficult for even a well-trained driver to interpret, making a crash more likely even if the unassisted steering system were still functioning (as has been reported in certain Cobalt incidents).

This is clearly an issue that companies like JTEKT have known about, as a 2008 paper on EPS [PDF] by a JTEKT engineer admits that making EPS feel like the hydraulic systems the buying public is used to has been a major challenge. Another paper from the JTEKT Engineering Journal [PDF] indicates that on higher-power versions of column-mounted EPS,

sensitivity to such inverse inputs as flutter and brake vibration has become higher. J-ISM [JTEKT's EPS assist control algorithm] has adopted a suppression system that can detect inverse input vibration as torque differentiation value, and by providing assist in the direction of canceling the vibration, the vibration is not transmitted to the steering wheel.

In short, tactile feedback is actively canceled, not only reducing the driver’s ability to respond to an emergency based on steering feel, but also further loading the EPS system with compensation duties in addition to pure steering control.

The point of all this is not to merely raise unwarranted fears about EPS. Improved efficiency and lower costs are the very definition of a successful automotive system, and as long as EPS offers these benefits, its use will continue to grow. As this trend continues, it will be important for safety watchdogs to pay close attention to these systems. Without pressure to include redundancy, fail-safes and extremely robust sensor units, suppliers will continue to cut the cost of these systems to remain competitive with the growing number of firms that offer similar systems. Just as importantly, these new electronic systems require a new approach to safety that pays as much attention to driver reaction to malfunctions as to the malfunctions themselves. Only in this way can we be sure that relatively minor malfunctions don’t yield an epidemic of inexplicable accidents and recalls.