In February Leftlane reported that the joint effort by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) had released its findings after investigating potential sources of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.
The report largely concluded that scientists and engineers were unable to reproduce any type of unintended acceleration in a lab environment, prompting Toyota to issue a press release touting the findings and its innocence. Now, a watchdog group focused on the automotive industry, Safety Research & Strategies, has released an analysis of the government’s findings that seems to paint a somewhat contradictory picture.
According to the findings of the watchdog group, NASA actually identified “numerous failures in Toyota electronics that could lead to unwanted acceleration.” SRS goes on to make the direct claim that the reports issued by the government agencies were not only “narrowly construed examinations of limited vehicles and components,” but even going as far as to claim that the reports were “heavily influenced by Toyota and its experts, including Exponent [the agency Toyota hired as a third party to investigate the unintended acceleration issue].”
Research by SRS is directly at odds with the published conclusion of the government’s findings, pointing out that testing found several scenarios in which the engine’s speed could be increased, RPMs could surge, or throttle positioning could be at odds with the positioning of the accelerator pedal without tripping a Diagnostic Trouble Code (DTC).
SRS goes on to make the case that NASA and NHTSA failed to procure any outside professionals on their own accord that specialized in vehicle engine management or testing, instead relying on Toyota to guide them in those areas. SRS says that the report shows the government also relied on Exponent, the third party hired by Toyota, in order to dismiss a key finding concerning a phenomenon known as “tin whiskers.”
Tin whiskers are hair-like structures which can causes electrical shorts and they were found in “virtually every potentiometer accelerator pedal assembly inspected – including a vehicle whose pedal was replaced by Toyota following acceleration problems.” The report even verified that tin whiskers as a cause of electronic malfunction.
“These studies were far from independent. They are the products of Toyota’s involvement and that of the company’s litigation defense experts who provided the statistical analysis that the agencies used to dismiss the physical evidence that showed flaws in Toyota’s electronics,” says SRS President Sean Kane. “Contrary to Secretary Ray LaHood’s pronouncements, the investigations actually showed numerous ways that Toyotas can experience unintended acceleration without alerting the fault detection system. They were simply dismissed as unlikely.”
SRS has produced several reports of its own on the issue, including an 72-page report that specifically focuses on the presence of Electronic Throttle Control System-Intelligent (ETCS-i) and the correlating spike in unintended acceleration on those vehicle. SRS believes that there is an undeniable correlation between vehicles experiencing unintended acceleration and the existence of the throttle system on the vehicles.
Toyota and supplier CTS are currently facing a class-action lawsuit specifically aimed at “inherent design defects” in Toyota’s ETCS-i system, which was first introduced in 2001.
About SRS: SRS was founded in 2004 by Sean Kane, who in his career has prompted several federal safety investigations. Kane was a key player in revealing the faulty Firestone tires on Ford Explorers in 2000. Later, SRS played a pivotal role in the Congressional hearings on Toyota’s unintended acceleration woes in 2010, testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
References
1.’NHTSA-NASA reports…’ view
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