With rumors of another GM executive shakeup flying thick and fast, we expected a downright miserable sales performance from The General in February. By the year-over-year numbers [full release here, sales numbers in PDF format here], there’s no such flow of red tape, as GM’s four “core brands” gained 32 percent and total sales (including Hummer, Pontiac, Saab and Saturn) were up 11.5 percent. But that’s in comparison to February of 2009, when GM’s sales were down 53 percent from the year earlier. In short, GM appears to have hit bottom in terms of volume, but it still has yet to recover to anything close to 2008 volume. Read More >
Motor Trend reports that former PT Cruiser stylist Brian Nesbitt has been relieved of his duties as the head of Cadillac, ending GM’s post-bankruptcy experiment of putting a stylist in charge of an entire division. But MT figures that Nesbitt’s ouster isn’t as simple as a failure to perform; according to their sources, the firing was political.
The shakeup has major implications for Bob Lutz’s future at GM. He hired Nesbitt away from Chrysler earlier last decade and made sure there was a place for the PT Cruiser designer at post-bankruptcy GM. Nesbitt’s departure would indicate Lutz’s role as one of three GM vice chairmen has diminished to almost nothing… Clearly, [recently-promoted sales boss and President of North American ops Mark Reuss] is putting his own team together, and it doesn’t include Nesbitt, who was posed as the aesthetic face of the Cadillac luxury division.
Meanwhile, at the Geneva Auto Salon, Bob Lutz confirmed that he is probably on the way out.
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.
We at TTAC, (well, me, only) have said that since everyone is raining a storm down on Toyota other recalls are slipping by without equal scrutiny. So when I read this article, I thought it fair, in the interests of journalism, to blog it. Not because of who it is, but the reasoning around it.
Toyota was listening closely to the “revolving doors” talk at last week’s hearings.
In today’s Senate committee hearing, Toyota will announce that former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater has come on board to lead Toyota’s new quality panel of independent experts, reports The Nikkei [sub] this morning.
Slater was Bill Clinton’s LaHood. He since joined the lobbying firm Patton Boggs and became a partner in James Lee Witt Associates, a risk management firm headed by former FEMA head James Lee Witt.
Tomorrow the Senate will be taking its shot at the Toyota scandal, with hearings scheduled before the Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. Giving testimony will be three Toyota executives including Yoshimi Inaba, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland and Clarence Ditlow of the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety. Conspicuously absent from the list is Dimitrios Biller, the former Toyota lawyer who claims that Toyota hid documents related to vehicle design from discovery in several suits against the automaker. The House Oversight Committee has reviewed a number of Toyota communications courtesy of Biller, and a letter from chairman Ed Towns (D-NY) demands that Toyota answer Biller’s charges [Towns’ letter and Biller documents in PDF format here, courtesy of DetNews]. By invoking Biller’s charges, Towns has dragged yet another witness into the fray whose story raises more questions than it answers [one of Biller’s several suits against Toyota can be found here.] And yet, probably because of his complex backstory] there are no plans for Biller to testify under oath before congress. Should he, or does his testimony just cloud the picture even further?
Shortly after emerging from bankruptcy last July, when GM’s sales were still showing few signs of recovery, then-Sales and Marketing boss Mark LaNeve had his marketing responsibilities stripped about a week before monthly sales came out. In a matter of months, LaNeve was out the door. Sales and marketing were rolled together again when Susan Docherty took over for LaNeve, but over the weekend it was once again stripped away, in one of the first signs that Docherty’s star is no longer rising at GM. And lets go ahead and start assuming that February sales must be looking fairly grim, because the only real explanation given to Automotive News [sub] is that
The shakeup shows that Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre is impatient to boost sales and for consumers to appreciate what he believes is the high quality of GM vehicles. When he became chief executive in December, Whitacre said his sales and marketing team would need to show results quickly.
The perception gap claims another victim! But Docherty’s downgrade is Mark Reuss’s gain. The former Holden boss, now GM’s President of North American operations, will assume the sales responsibilities, leaving Docherty time to focus on the marketing side and polish up her resumé.
Key quote: “What I have done is, I have shown that in the fault detection strategy of the Toyota systems, there’s a window of opportunity where [an error] could occur and not be detected.”
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.”
One of the most important lessons to come out of the last two days of congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls is that blaming individuals for unintended acceleration is too tough a task for our elected representatives. And yet the more we learn, the more necessary it seems to take human error into account when dealing with unintended acceleration. Nothing illustrates this quite like the case of the very first witness to give testimony before congress. Rhonda Smith of Sevierville, Tn told the House Energy Committee, under oath, that her Lexus ES350 became “possessed” and that its brakes and transmission failed to respond at precisely the moment that the car accelerated out of control. “Shame on you, Toyota, for being so greedy,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. But it turns out that the shame belongs almost entirely with Ms Smith.
The Wall Street Journal [sub] [via Jalopnik] reports that, despite her traumatic and inexplicable experience, Ms Smith sold her dangerous, out-of-control ES350 to another family, which has since put 27,000 trouble-free miles on the vehicle (according to just-auto [sub], Toyota has since taken possession of the vehicle). Which means she either lied under oath, or displayed a disregard for the safety of others that puts Toyota’s missteps into stunning context. Or both. In any case, her behavior adds to our growing suspicion that the vacuous, disingenuous, and self-serving congressional hearings have been the best thing to happen to Toyota PR since the recalls began. Shame on you, Rhonda Smith, shame on you.
It’s not likely that former Toyota exec Jim Press wishes he had been called down to congress instead of Jim Lentz, but he may just be trying to angle for a return his old company. Press took time out of his busy schedule of job-hunting and worrying about taxes to write an (apparently unsolicited) email to Automotive News [sub]. Judging by the portions that AN [sub] did publish, it should probably have gone straight to Toyota’s CEO… or the shredder.
Toyota doesn’t want me to speak out, but I can’t stand it anymore and somebody has to tell it like it is. Akio Toyoda is not only up for the job, but he is the only person who can save Toyota. He is very capable, and he embodies the virtues and character that built this great company. The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates. They didn’t have the character necessary to maintain a customer first focus. Akio does.
Bashing the buff books is a regular exercise for we bitter car bloggers who are forced to earn a living writing about cars without manufacturer junkets, auto show swag, or a steady stream of the latest, hottest vehicles to test. And one has only to look at their circulation numbers to see that they probably deserve much of what they get. But in the midst of a media frenzy about sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota’s, would you believe that Car & Driver has actually made a contribution to the national discourse that’s worth more than a week’s supply of frenzied-yet-ultimately-inaccurate headlines? Believe it. Not only do the paper-and-ink guys prove that a V6 Camry can be braked from 100-0 at full throttle in under a hundred feet more than it can at no throttle, but they even explain how to control a car that experiences unintended acceleration. You know, besides suing the manufacturer or giving self-righteous testimony under oath, before congress. Now that is auto journalism.
QOTD is a fairly irregular exercise for us, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t dust it off for today’s marathon hearings before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Needless to say, the ten-ish hour affair offered too rich a bounty of choice quotes to properly choose just one. And so we have two: the first and one of the last quotes of the day’s proceedings. The day opened with the following words from Chairman Edolphus Towns:
Good morning. I thank you all for being here. It is hard to imagine the horror of the event that took the lives of an entire family near San Diego, California on August the 28th, 2009. California highway patrolman, Mark Saylor, his wife, their 13 yr old daughter, and Mrs Saylor’s brother, Chris, were driving in a Toyota Lexus, a loaner car that the Toyota dealer provided while their car was being repaired. As they drove along the highway, suddenly the car… accelerating [sic] rapidly, he stood on the brakes, but nothing happened. No matter what he did, he could not stop the car from flying down the road, faster and faster. As this car reached top speed in just seconds, it was all he could do just to kep it under control. In a frantic call to 911, his brother-in-law, Chris, reported the gas pedal was stuck, the brakes did not work, and they were barreling down on an intersection. He yelled over the phone “hold one, hold on, hold on and pray. And those were his last words.”
Before Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood even took the stand before the House Energy Committee, the Washington Post [via TheCarConnection] reported that:
NHTSA officials told investigators that the agency doesn’t employ any electrical engineers or software engineers.
Down on the Potomac, zingers like that go over like an ounce of catnip in a phone booth full of rowdy toms. And sure enough, the question came up at LaHood’s testimony. In fact, it came up twice. And it was the closest thing to a real “gotcha” moment in a long day of testimony.
After a big buildup by expert witnesses, and Toyota’s Jim Lentz’s evasion of any evidence that his firm’s cars are afflicted with an untraceable electronic gremlin, the House Energy Committe turned its attention to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Because LaHood’s department falls under the congress’s oversight (and carries the government’s ultimate responsibility for the safety of American motorists), LaHood might well have been the main focus of the committee’s investigation. And indeed his last-in-line billing appears to make him the event’s headliner. Or at least it would have if his testimony didn’t make the previous several hours of Ahab-ing largely unnecessary, and possibly even highly embarrassing. Read More >
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