GM’s recent reinstatement of 661 culled dealers has put pressure back on Chrysler to come to arrangement with the dealers it shed during last year’s bankruptcy and bailout. Rep. Chris VanHollen, the sixth ranking Democrat in the House or Representatives, tells Automotive News [sub] that with GM buckling to dealer pressure, the time has come for Chrysler to follow suit. “There’s no quicker or easier way to build this network than to reinstate its terminated car dealerships,” says VanHollen, who drafted much of congress’s dealer arbitration legislation. The Committee to Restore Dealer Rights contacted Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne “to discuss the reinstatement of the rejected dealers who had their franchises so abruptly taken and were unfairly terminated.” The response?

We believe that all communications concerning the subject matter of the arbitration should be between counsel and request that your clients follow this procedure in the future. Please ask them not to send such communications to Mr. Marchionne or any other Chrysler personnel.

Oh snap! Chrysler isn’t going down without a fight… even if that means taking on the representatives who have oversight of the government’s eight percent stake in the automaker.
Read More >

Back from his hibachi-tour to the hill, and a trip to China, Akio Toyoda this afternoon paid his respects to Japan’s Transport Minister Seiji Maehara, to Economy Minister Masayuki Naoshima, and to the man himself, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. And what a difference it was compared to the enhanced interrogation in Washington. Read More >

This is left brain – right brain weekend. While the more image driven can submerge themselves in pictures of old car ads, the other faction can unleash their inner nerd with abandon. Yesterday, we covered how ABC had entered the grail of automotive disaster-fakery, previously populated by NBC and CBS. ABC’s smoking gun video had been torn to shreds.

Today, we turn our attention to the man who aided and abetted the tricksters: Associate professor David Gilbert of the renowned Southern Illinois University. His work has been inspected by Exponent, a research company hired by Toyota. Hired by Toyota? Well, that should discredit Exponent immediately. Not so fast.

Crash Sled thankfully has found a full copy of Exponent’s retort to Gilbert’s machinations. The report is hosted on the ABC website, so we can assume it passed ABC’s scrutiny, for what that may be worth. Let’s look at the report a little closer.

Warning: This discussion needs a basic understanding of electric circuitry. If that’s not your thing, then don’t waste you time reading further. We’ll leave you to Sunday’s pictures with the message that Gilbert is a charlatan extraordinaire, and that whoever put him on the stand to make a case against Toyota needs to have his or her head examined. However, should you own a 2010 Toyota Avalon, then you have slight cause for concern. Read More >

Last week, Professor David W. Gilbert testified at a house hearing and said he had replicated the unintended sudden acceleration in Toyota’s vehicles. Toyota, and their testing lab Exponent tried Gilberts method and said he was right. “But Toyota said it also created the same response in vehicles made by competitors, which it said rendered Mr. Gilbert’s findings misleading,” writes the Washington Post.

In a statement, Toyota says: “The analysis of Professor’s Gilbert’s demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory. There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world. As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles. “ When Exponent applied Gilbert’s test to five models, including a Honda Accord and a BMW 325i, all five vehicles reacted similarly. Read More >

Just as Paul Niedermeyer, Edmunds, Consumer Reports or anybody else who has the time to download and analyze 103.1 Mbytes worth of customer complaints to NHTSA, Toyota is pouring over the data. However, their attempts are being thoroughly frustrated.

According to The Nikkei [sub], Toyota found out that oftentimes complaints submitted to the NHTSA “either are unverifiable or lack vehicle-owner information required to facilitate follow-up.” In other words, a lot of the complaints look like they are bogus. Even if they are real, their validity cannot be ascertained.

And herein lies the rub: Read More >

Apparently eager to avoid uncertainties of the Congressional-mandated arbitration, GM announced that 661 of its 1,160 terminated dealers that sought arbitration would be back in business pronto. Automotive News quotes GM North America President Mark Reuss: We are eager to restore relationships with our dealers, and get back to doing what we do best — selling cars and taking care of customers,” “The arbitration process creates uncertainty in the market. We believe issuing these Letters of Intent is good for our customers, our dealers and GM.” Read More >

Instead of solving the truly pressing needs of the land, Republicans and Democrats are publicly squabbling over the relevance and veracity of the Biller “smoking gun” documents that claim to prove that Toyota hid safety problems. U.S. Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter on Feb. 26 to Yoshimi Inaba, president and chief executive officer of Toyota Motor North America Inc., that said the documents provided “evidence that Toyota deliberately withheld relevant electronic records that it was legally required to produce” in lawsuits. Towns went on to say that  the documents “shed some light on Toyota’s handling of the sudden unintended acceleration problem” and “indicate a systematic disregard for the law. Not so, says U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California. And he has a smoking gun of his own: Read More >

Chrysler’s troubled relations with its dealers took another turn for the nasty this week, as culled dealers teamed up with lawmakers to criticize Chrysler’s decision to open new dealerships near the sites of several culled dealers. As with GM’s dealer struggles, this latest controversy centers around Colorado, where culled dealers are protesting Chrysler’s behavior in the Denver Post. Culled dealers have seen franchises in their former areas awarded to chains like AutoNation before congressionally-mandated arbitration had even given them the opportunity to contest their culling during last year’s bankruptcy proceedings. “This is not right,” said one dealer. “We specifically asked (Chrysler) not to redistribute the franchise before our arbitration.”

Read More >

According to popular wisdom, the Koreans have no love lost for the Japanese. And likewise. What’s more, Koreans and Japanese car makers are bitter competitors for foreign market share. So wouldn’t it stand to reason that Korea would jump on the “down with Toyota” bandwagon with their 96 million feet? Just the opposite is true.

The Chosun Iibo, according to Wikipedia “one of the major newspapers in South Korea,” takes the position that Toyota could very well be “a scapegoat for U.S.-Japan squabbling.” Read More >

Yesterday I asked our Best and Brightest if congress should hear testimony from former Toyota lawyer Dimitrios Biller. The lack of unqualified endorsements mirrored my own skepticism about the testimony of a guy who has sued Toyota several times, and today it seems that congress may just agree. When the House Oversight Committee wrote Toyota’s Yoshimi Inaba asking for a response to Biller’s accusations, it attached several of Biller’s apparently damning documents to its letter [PDF of original letter and attached Biller documents here]. But, as the Detroit News reports, the letter has been reposted without the attached Biller documents after Toyota claimed they violated attorney-client privilege (the alleged internal memos all have non-disclosure requests attached). Senate hearings on the Toyota recall have just started, and are available at Cspan.org.

A quiet Sunday. Time to fire up Google and put in “Toyota AND [cause OR reason].” We come up with ample explanations why Toyota is not called Toyoda.  Or why Peiping turned into Peking, and then into Beijing. What about the causes of sudden acceleration? Let’s see what we find. (If you have other things to do on a  Sunday: We find a lot of questions and no answers.) Read More >

The Obama Administration warns that automakers could be hit with unintended acceleration of  their costs if Congress succeeds in blocking EPA greenhouse gas emissions. The Detroit News reports:

In a letter to congressional leaders, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s chief counsel, O. Kevin Vincent, said Congress would jeopardize a deal reached by automakers, California and the White House if it blocks the EPA from using its power to limit greenhouse gases.

California and a dozen states could go forward, each with its own rules, if Congress blocks EPA from setting national standards. That would have the impact of “creating confusion, encouraging renewed litigation, and driving up the cost of compliance to automobile manufacturers and consumers alike,” Vincent wrote.

Read More >

It’s been over ten days since GM’s Bob Lutz took to the local papers to complain that GM’s executives are “way, way, way underpaid,” and its still been less than a week since Ed Whitacre’s $9m compensation package was announced but politicians are only now starting to sit up and take notice. Barney Frank (D-MA) can usually be counted on to give greedy CEOs a good dressing-down, but at this point, Mama Frank seems to have given up on the government-owned automaker’s execs. The Detroit News reports Frank’s mild disappointment thusly:

“I don’t think Mr. Whitacre was going to go do something else” if he got paid less, Frank told reporters this afternoon after a hearing. “He’s having a good time there. I think they way overcompensate themselves.”

Read More >

No politician worthy of your vote will pass up on the chance of publicly bashing the heads of foreign corporate types with deep pockets. And so, the Senate will convene its Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation next Tuesday. They will repeat this week’s grilling until perfectly good Kobe steak is well done and reduced to dog food.

Tuesday’s cast will consist of familiar faces: Ray LaHood will again “go into the weeds” and hold Toyota’s “feet to the fire” until all cars – well, at least those of Toyota, will be “100 percent safe.”

Smooth Yoshimi Inaba, Prez. of Toyota Motor North America will bring his baritone to bear. The congress casting crew was obviously dissatisfied with Akio Toyoda playing the role of the duplicitous villain. He will not be called and can (phew…) go home to Toyota City. Read More >

The Toyota witch hunt inquiry is beginning to show its surely unintended effects – on American jobs, businesses, and lest we forget, tax revenue.

Toyota has notified its major parts suppliers that its North American production for the February-April period is expected to reach roughly 350,000 units, around 20 percent lower than the number originally planned for  in January, The Nikkei [sub] reports this morning in Tokyo. Read More >