Congressional lawmakers are mad at Toyota. What has Toyota done now? Their sin this time: They may have harbored a secret “attack plan against congressional testimony.” This, says the Washington Post, has “drawn the ire of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”
End of February, the witch-hunt against Toyota definitely had gotten out of hand. ABC News found a Southern Illinois Professor named David Gilbert who demonstrated to a shocked Brian Ross that Toyotas take off on their own if the ghost in the machine is roused. This was conveniently aired a few days before congressional testimony. In which Gilbert testified. A few days later, a man called Jim Sikes could‘t stop his Prius on a San Diego freeway. A housekeeper in a tony suburb of New York City had a runwaway Prius. Toyota had a problem.
The anti-Toyota-league was salivating. The pro-Toyota-league told Toyota to “get in front of the story.” I was asked what I would have recommended, and I truthfully answered: “Wakarimasen” – I have no idea.
Toyota demanded ideas, that’s why they called on the President’s pollster Joel Benenson (he had worked for Toyota for three years before.) They also gave an assignment to the New York PR firm Robinson, Lerer & Montgomery. That company calls itself an expert in “crisis management” and “public policy and regulatory issues.” Their mission: Find out how best to counter the onslaught of bad news.
However, soon their services were superfluous. The problem solved itself. We called shenanigans, saying that “For the Intended Gilbert Acceleration to occur in the wild, several things would have to happen in the exact sequence: First, the isolation for both VPA and VPA2 would have to break down. Then, a connection between VPA and VPA2 would have to be established. Into this connection, a resistance of no less than 50 ohms and no higher than 250 ohms would have to be connected. Once, and only once this connection between VPA and VPA2 has been established through the proper resistor, VPA2 (and not VPA) would have to be connected to +5V. Then, the car would take off.” That went right over everybody’s head.
A day later, Toyota’s technical advisor in these matters, Exponent, came to the same conclusions. That also overwhelmed most of the audience. Should have known better: Nearly half of the Americans believe that ghosts exist. Very few give credence to the existence of VPA and VPA2.
What did ABC in was that they were sloppy in their editing, and that they were called “fakers” by the likes of Gawker. People can indentify with that.
Toyota’s ultimate saviour was the man from San Diego, Jim Sikes. Turned out he had operated a business called Adultswinglife, after he had declared bankruptcy. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Sikes was promptly dubbed “Balloon Boy II”, and when NHTSA and Toyota engineers didn’t find signs the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time, he turned into a lead balloon. A wife-swapping bankrupt real estate agent receives is comeuppance? People eat that up.
The runaway Prius of the New York housekeeper? Pilot error. Camry crashes into wall of YMCA? Driver error. Runaway Prius nearly kills boy? Driver error.
In February/March, any accident involving a Toyota did to the press what blood in the water does for sharks. Now, suddenly, no more unintended acceleration stories. Hot potato. Don’t touch.
The best pollster and the trickiest PR company can’t make that up.
At Toyota, the polling data and possible talking points were quickly filed away. Problem solved. Not for plaintiff lawyers and for Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), the House committee chairman. Both desperately want to keep the story alive. Their latest attempt: They called the polling witness tampering. Lawmakers “would take very seriously any effort to malign or intimidate witnesses who cooperate with our investigations,” a committee spokesman said in a statement, quoted by the Washington Post. Their headline? “Toyota had attack plan against congressional testimony, documents show.” Shades of December 7 …
Toyota’s answer? The cited a letter from Obama’s pollster, submitted to the committee, in which Benenson says that “testing messages to rebut unfair or false assertions is a common and legitimate research practice and is no different than message testing our firm regularly does for Congressional candidates or Congressional campaign committees in response to critics or opponents.”
Good for them. And other than candidates or campaign committees, they didn’t even need to use the research. The matter righted itself.
I see this whole episode as just so much dribble and also to get un- employed Legal people work!
ABC is used to raking muck, like they did a few years back with the Audi vehicles, I guess it all makes “gravy” and some one gets “money” out of it.
If I had been in charge of Toyota, I would have considered closing down one of the Plants in KY too, that way someone may have realized they can’t have it both ways, hey bring the work here to Canada, we have space and workers ready and we are closer then is Mexico for shipping vehicles.
Shutting down any US plants along with NUMMI would’ve been Toyota cutting off it’s nose to spite it’s face. Not only would they have had to go through the hassle of moving production but a tax break later and in moves Hyundai/Kia. Not to mention that it’d be adding fuel to the fire and create huge amounts of negative PR at a time where Toyota was starving for anything good to publicize.
If lawyers would have brought up this lame accusation, that would have been one thing, and expected.
But a congressional committee? Discrediting a witness is part and parcel of the adversarial legal system. And in this case, no discrediting has taken place.
If this goes on, lawyers will make even more money: Companies will do everything through their lawyers, communication will fall under the lawyer-client privilege, and will be excluded from discovery.
The real conspiracy here has to be that Toyota planted Kane, Gilbert and Smith as the first panel of witnesses before the Energy and Commerce Committee. Their testimony was so absurdly self-defeating as to practically kill unintended acceleration as a political issue on the spot. No discrediting necessary.
“Sneak attack” on the US capitol planned by a Japanese car company?
Kamikaze Kanmuri!
No need to attack. Congress shot itself in the foot first.
Wasn’t it Napoleon who said, “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake”?
If anyone wants to challenge the Washington Post article it would be very easy – From Canada and with no connections to Toyota I produced 3 You tube videos on Kane and Gilbert well before Toyota made any public statements weeks or days later. Hundreds of internet posters likely did as well. Every video or post comes with a date after all. I’ll testify to that fact before congress if they like. Youtube is the third most visted website on the planet on a daily basis (according to Alexa)Don’t Washington Post reporters check simple things like this before they publish their stories?
They got one thing right – they used a PR firm. What did they miss? The big lie about the sticky pedal. The PR firm likely insisted on getting out in front of the story by offering a public admission of guilt, standard stuff for the rich and famous. Toyota knowing all along it didn’t have a problem since it was due to driver error and knowing they would never blame the customer, The PR firm and Toyota cooked up a “don’t blame the customer” with the “sticky easily fixed gas pedal story” mixed together as a recall. It is the only possible reason that explains why Toyota would issue a recall without ever having a single real world example of a true SUA incident. Toyota knew NHTSA won’t, can’t, say no to a recall if you tell them you want one. No other manufacturer has ever had a recall this size without a lot of arm twisting, threats and name calling but nobody seems to have noticed or covered why Toyota went to NHTSA instead of the other way around. It’s an invisible question I suppose.
The strict policy of not blaming the customer is so absolute that most people wouldn’t believe it. It is the core reason we have seen people going crazy looking for defective parts and wild theories about computer code etc. and finding nothing. Toyota said it had a faulty part when it really had a PR strategy dressed up as a recall.
I didn’t have the time (or patience) to sit thru the congressional hearings on Toyota. Wasn’t the point of Gilbert’s experiment on the Toyota to not show that SUA could happen in the real world under those same circumstances in his test, but to show that when an event does happen it does not set a fault code in the ECU? Gilbert is not responsible for how ABC presents their story. He has no editorial control (as anyone who has ever been interviewed by 60 minutes has found out). Remember, one of Toyota’s defenses is that after an accident they find nothing wrong with the car or ECU and no fault codes. Did or did not Gilbert say that his experiment wasn’t to show how it might happen but that if something did happen it would leave no “fingerprints” for investigators???
His point was that a “short” in the circuitry could cause SUA. Which was thoroughly debunked.
If Jim Sikes was hired by a PR company, that would be brilliant.