Toyota's Off the Hook: Unintended Acceleration Saga Ends
On Thursday, a U.S. judge dismissed the criminal charges against Toyota Motor Corp after the automaker completed a mandated three years of probationary monitoring. As part of its $1.2 billion settlement, where it admitted to intentionally misleading the public over dangerous unintended acceleration and building vehicles with faulty parts, Toyota was assigned former U.S. attorney David Kelley as an independent safety monitor.
“It is a long road ahead,” he said upon his appointment in 2014. “If you look at the deferred prosecution agreement there is a lot of ground to cover.”
The agreement gave Kelley sweeping powers to hire staff and review all of Toyota’s policies and operating procedures for communicating safety issues internally and to regulators. Kelley and his staff were required to be payed standard consulting fees and rates by Toyota, but this will be their last week on the job.
Adhering to the settlement terms, the Justice Department agreed to move for dismissal of any further criminal charges. U.S. District Judge William Pauley in New York concurred with the motion and ruled to close the case entirely.
Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin told Reuters the company was pleased the court accepted the recommendation. “Over the past three years, we have worked hard in the spirit of continuous improvement to make Toyota a stronger company that serves its customers better,” he said.
While not all civil claims have been settled, Toyota spent an estimated additional $1.63 billion in lawsuits related to the case. It also invested in itself to make significant changes to its safety practices and policies following a recall crisis so vast that it was temporarily forced to suspend sales of half its fleet in 2010.
“Regrettably, the payment of a $1.2 billion fine and the appointment of a monitor appear to have concluded the government’s investigation into this tragic episode,” Judge Pauley said on Thursday.
[Image: Toyota]
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
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Wasn't one of the odd things about this sorry saga that even if the throttle is fully open the brakes are still powerful enough to bring the car to a halt without too much difficulty - which would suggest that pressing the wrong pedal is the most likely explanation?
While I'm not a Toyota fanboi, I was very sympathetic to Toyota at be beginning of this fiasco. Yes, there were floormat problems. Yes, the cars could've been stopped by holding down the start button, or standing on (not pumping) the brakes. But I personally thought that the lawsuits were bogus, just like the lawsuits filed against Audi. However. In one privately-funded lawsuit against Toyota, some embedded-software experts studied Toyota's software for 18 months. They documented that Toyota's software was un-maintainable "spaghetti code", and that Toyota did not use a source-control system. And they identified a critical task they called "Task X" in court testimony. According to their analysis, if Task X died, the car would accelerate with no input from the accelerator pedal. The prosecution installed an ICE (In-Circuit Emulator) in two of the afflicted Toyotas, set the cars running on a dynamometer, and used the ICE to clobber some global variable with a bad value. Task X died as a result. With the car running almost 70MPH on the dyno, they pressed Resume on the cruise control, and, with Task X dead, the car accelerated beyond 90MPH with no accelerator. In this scenario, the brake pedal would still disengage the cruise control, and they did so, as 90+MPH on a dyno sounds pretty scary to me. But they proved their points: a) Task X could be killed with some trivial memory corruption, and b) when Task X died, the car would likely accelerate with no driver input. https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319966 After the above loss, Toyota settled all the remaining unintended-acceleration cases: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-25/toyota-settles-oklahoma-acceleration-case-after-jury-verdict