Japan’s Automobile Manufacturers Association said “hai, wakatta” (yes, we understand) to their government, and promised to “actively support the creation of an international mutual-recognition framework for passenger cars,” reports The Nikkei [sub].

Turns out, the Japanese government is behind the idea to agree on an International Whole Car Type Approval. The idea had been floated in Geneva, and received widespread agreement. No wonder: The Europeans are intimately familiar with the concept, due to their European Community Whole Vehicle Type Approval (ECWVTA). And the Americans aren’t part of the party. They are doing their own FMVSS thing. Read More >

While Toyota has recall troubles in one of their largest markets, elsewhere in the world, another carmaker has serious recall troubles in one of their biggest markets. We usually don’t comment on each and every recall everywhere, but this one warrants mention: Brazil’s Justice Ministry has fined Fiat’s Brazilian subsidiary 3 million Reais (about $1.7 million) for failing to comply with four recall orders. Fiat had been asked to recall Stilo models to fix a wheel problem that may (note the key word “may”) have caused 8 deaths since 2004, says Business Week. No recall followed. Read More >

On September 19, 2008, William Hippsley, 74, was behind the wheel in the parking lot of a shopping center in Brigg, South Humberside, UK. Outside, his wife Brenda, 69, helped him park his car. Suddenly, Hippsley’s car shot forward, dragged his wife 130ft across the parking lot – and killed her.

The car was a Toyota Prius. Read More >

Draw your own conclusions. [ABC San Diego via Jalopnik]

One of my pet gripes about the media and celebrities is the lack of follow-up and accountability. Remember all the hoopla about Steve Wozniak’s Prius with the mysterious electronics glitch that he could manipulate to create UA? My take was that obviously his cruise control had a minor bug that only showed up at over eighty mph. Woz readily admitted that he could disengage it with a tap on the brakes. Well, thanks to his celebrity status and the coverage, the story ended with Toyota agreeing to take his Prius for a week to test it thoroughly. So what happened? Read More >

Among the many unanswered questions as to what Prius owner James Sikes actually did or didn’t do to try to bring his runaway car to a stop, one claim of his definitely smells.  He says he received a recall letter from Toyota, and when he took it in to the dealer, he was told his car was not on the recall lists. Ouch! Read More >

An article in this week’s Advertising Age and Automotive News (they’re sister publications) investigates why the family in the new hit sitcom ‘Modern Family’ “still drives Toyota product.” The author found it “jarring” that the family “chatted happily while traveling in, of all things, a Toyota.” The answer: Toyota paid for product placement, the contract runs through the end of the season, and many of the episodes have already been shot.
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One of the main topics at the Toyota hearings held in recent weeks is the automaker’s practice of hiring former NHTSA officials to its lobbying team. At the time, we were inclined to believe that Toyota was hardly the only firm engaging in this practice, and thanks to some Washington Post reporting, our suspicions have been confirmed. Early controversy centered around Christopher Santucci and Chris Tinto, two NHTSA Office of Defect Investigation officials who now work for Toyota. In addition to these two, the WaPo has identified former NHTSA lawyers Kenneth Weinstein and Erika Jones as former NHTSA officials who also now work for Toyota. And then there are the former regulators who work for other automakers: Jacqueline Glassman, a former NHTSA chief counsel and then deputy administrator now works for a law firm that represents Nissan and Mercedes. And that’s not all:

Former agency compliance engineer Amanda Prescott now works for Ford. Former agency director of the Office of Crashworthiness Research, Ralph J. Hitchcock, now works for American Honda Motor Co. And past agency administrator Diane Steed is a partner at Strat@Comm, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm that represents General Motors Corp.

And once again, Toyota wriggles out of some of the most damning accusations against it, not by confirming that it actually holds itself to especially high quality and safety standards, but by proving that it’s just like every other automaker. As we noted some weeks ago, this loss of exceptionalism is the ultimate price that Toyota will pay for this scandal (not counting lawyer fees).

Thanks to the “optics” (if not the reality) of the latest Toyota sudden unintended acceleration scare, the story has new legs just as Toyota and Exponent were hoping to cut them off. But as much as dramatic, cop-calms-killer-Prius headlines keep the Great Toyota Panic alive, so to does the fact that the 89-odd class-action lawsuits filed against Toyota could be worth over $3b to plaintiffs and their counsel. And that’s not counting any of the incidents in which people were actually injured or killed (which are actually relatively rare). No, that $3b+ is going to the truly deserving… and their lawyers.

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Mazda doesn’t want to get caught in a “what did you know and when did you know it” and has decided to put brake override systems into all models to be launched anywhere in the world from now on, reports The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >

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Toyota and its contracted engineering auditing firm Exponent held a webcast today to refute the claims that Professor David Gilbert has leveled in an ABC report and recent congressional testimony. Gilbert claimed that he was able to induce sudden acceleration without triggering failsafe mode or an error code in Toyotas by hacking into a Toyota pedal. Toyota and Exponent’s central claims are that the conditions created in Gilbert’s test could not be replicated in real life and that similar tests produced identical results in competitor vehicles.

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When it comes to mountains of data like the NHTSA vehicle complaint data base, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure(trove).  Yes, there are limitations. But the remarkable degree of similarity of the UA rate between most badge engineered cars, and GM’s consistently low UA ratings speak of statistical relevance to some of us. One of those is David Lapidus, (TTAC handle: David42), whose data diving and Excel skills vastly overshadow mine.

In the last data dive, I used numbers from Edmunds to come up with a UA complaint rate for 117 cars from MY 2005-2010, excluding the flurry of complaints filed with NHTSA after the Toyota mat recall 0f 9/29/09. But those are cumulative, over the five years. David has taken it to the next level, to the individual model year. We may come back to the whole list another time, but initially we decided to focus on the Toyota Camry, since its large volume of sales and UA complaints would inherently increase the statistical accuracy of the numbers. And although this data dive may not solve the UA puzzle, it does raise serious questions about the most recent recalls and the Congressional barbecue of Toyota. Read More >

Toyota has just started a live webcast intended to rebut some of the allegations made by Professor Gilbert, among others. Click here to watch the webcast, already in progress.

The private company that operates speed cameras in Denver, Colorado is ignoring the provisions of state law designed to protect the public. Motorist Bill O’Neil used his cell phone camera to document the lack of warning signs around a photo radar van issuing tickets on First Avenue in January, KMGH-TV reported. City officials entrust Redflex Traffic Systems, an Australian company compensated based on the number of tickets it is able to issue, with the responsibility of placing the signs. A police spokesman told KMGH that signs were out, just on the other side of the road.

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