August 3, 2016 • 37 mins
In the summer and fall of 2009, hundreds of Toyota owners came forward with an alarming allegation: Their cars were suddenly and uncontrollably accelerating. Toyota was forced to recall 10 million vehicles, pay a fine of more than $1 billion, and settle countless lawsuits. The consensus was that there was something badly wrong with the world’s most popular cars. Except that there wasn’t. What happens when hysteria overtakes common sense?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand
and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in
Juleivis to California, just south of San Diego. Sailor was
forty five years old, a California HIWI Patrol officer. Ordinarily,
he drove a two thousand and six Lexus I S,
but his car had a problem with his CD player,
(00:37):
so that morning he took it to the dealership and
got a loaner a brand new Lexus E. Sailor finished
his shift at the HIGWI Patrol and went back home,
picked up his wife, daughter, and brother in law Chris Lostrella,
and they all set out for the daughter's soccer practice.
They were heading up Highway one twenty five and just
as they approached a town called Santi, Lostrella, who sitting
(01:00):
in the backseat, calls nine one one. What you're about
to hear? A morning you is harrowing and see what
are you reporting? Yeah, we're Alexis. I'm sorry your cell
phone cutting out. We're going one twenty five TV. I'm
sorry for alexceritor stuck well one twenty five great, okay,
(01:24):
northbound one twenty five. Where are you passing. We are
passing up? Where are we passing? Words? We're going on
a hundred and twenty mission. Gorge, We're in trouble. We
can't We're there's no break, okay, Gorge and three way
half mile okay. And you don't have the ability to
like turn the vehicle off or anything. Approaching an intersection.
We're approaching an intersection. Okay, We're pushing interfect hold on, pray, pray, Hello,
(01:52):
oh hello, the o o oh you here is this
Jella's horrified response to the Lexus spinning out of control,
hitting another vehicle, and plunging down a ravine. Everyone inside
the car was killed. The Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story.
(02:25):
I hesitated before playing it, but in the end I
concluded that you have to hear it to make sense
of what happened Next, the tape went viral. It was
played on the nightly news, written up in horrified news articles,
to the point where a wave of fear swept the country.
Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales due to
a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives in day runaway.
(02:49):
Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to one
hundred miles an hour. One died she crashed her camera
into a tree and a pole. A car had sped
up to more than one hundred miles per hour. Hundreds
of people came forward with horror stories about the Alexis
accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is a
brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings exposs whistleblowers. NASA
(03:15):
got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September two
thousand and nine and March two thousand and ten, totaling
millions of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated
to have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended
up paying a one point two billion dollars fine to
(03:36):
the US government. They spent another one point one billion
to settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've
settled something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest
automobile company was accused of a cover up, of putting
profits ahead of people, of having a culture of denial.
Toyota's conduct was shameful. He showed a blatant disregard for
(04:01):
systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers.
That's Eric Holder in March two and fourteen. He was
the Attorney General of the United States at the time.
It's a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement
officer of the land calls out one of the largest
companies in the world. My name is Malcolm Glaube. You're
(04:23):
listening to Revisionist History, where every week we go back
and examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted
to the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard
(04:45):
at least some part of that nine one one tape before.
Maybe you had a Toyota at the time and had
a sudden pang of worry. What I want to do
is go back to two thousand and nine and convince
you that something went very wrong in the way the
controversy played out very well. Let's go back for a
(05:08):
moment to the person we started with, Mark Sailor, California
Highway patrol officer. He's driving down the highway and he
can't stop his car. The accelerator is stuck. His brother
in law says. After the crash, another person comes forward
to the police and says he had driven the same
loner Lexus a few days before and had a similar incident.
(05:31):
It accelerated to get past a truck, and when he
pushed the throttle towards the floor, that's what car guys
called the accelerator pedal, the throttle stuck. What he realized
is that someone had put one of those big, thick
all weather rubber floor mats in the car, on top
of the floor mat that was already there. That second
big thick floor mat wasn't attached to those little hooks
(05:51):
that hold floor mats down. It slid around, and so
somehow the thick mat got wedged under the throttle. That
everyone decides is what happened to Sailor maybe he tried
to turn the car off, but the Lexus has one
of those push button ignitions, and what he may not
have realized is that you have to hold that button
down for three seconds if you're trying to stop the
(06:13):
car while it's in motion. Maybe he tried to put
the car in neutral, but it's not always obvious how
to do that, particularly if you're panicking. They crash. The
nine one one car goes viral and Toyota launches a
massive recall of floor mats across its model line. Problem solved, right. Well, No,
(06:35):
here's the problem. Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration
crisis thinks that floor mats are any more than a
small part of the story. It just doesn't make sense.
So that's an all weather matt. That's my producer, Jacob
Smith talking to Sean Kane. This is the killer format. Okay,
this is the format that brought Toyota to fame. Kane
(06:55):
runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research and Strategies.
Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean Kane's name
comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked closely with
many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's not buying
the floor matt theory. When the pedal was depressed fully
to the floor inkade the way this road here, the
(07:16):
pedal extended down to the point where the bottom edge
of it would catch here on this rubber piece. Okay,
and it would catch on the bottom edge and it
wouldn't return. But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell
the whole story. Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals.
So the way this would have to happen is you'd
have to depress your accelerator pedal nearly to the floor
all wide overthrooor to wide open throttle, you'd have to
(07:38):
mash that accelerator to the floor and to have that
catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Kane is saying that for the floor mat to trap
the accelerator, the driver has to floor it. But why
on earth is a guy driving his family to soccer
practice flooring it? Not to mention all the hundreds of
other people who complained about Toyota's with stuck accelerators, some
(08:00):
of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically,
since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her
camera down the street? Mark Sailor, he was driving with
what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while,
Why didn't he just reach down on a yank the
floormat away from the pedal? Right, I still have a
hard time believing, giving a long distance and the travel
(08:21):
of his car, that the floormat was the culprit. Kane
thinks that something else must have happened in that car.
And by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis ended
up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming number
of those cases, the car didn't even have an oversized,
thick plastic floormat. The cars had normal floormats. Something else
(08:41):
must have been happening, and a number of people believe
that something has to do with software. That there is
and was something wrong with the software that governs the
throttle in Toyotas in today's cars. Now we're looking at
code code that can be up to one hundred million
lines of code. The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter
is running about seven million lines of code. A luxury
(09:03):
car today can run a hundred million lines of code.
You what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got
a fifty thousand dollars car. In The complexity level of
the fifty thousand ar car is exponentially greater. Do you
think that that car is now going to be defect
free and software clear not likely? This is the argument
that Kane has made in lawsuits against Toyota. The cars
(09:24):
contain a bug in the lines of computer code that
control how the car starts and stops. Speeds up and
slows down. The La Times also pursued this question, resulting
in one of the most prestigious investigative reporting awards in
a country, the Lobe, for its work. If the La
Times and Sean Kane are right, then that's terrifying because
(09:44):
what it means is that what happened to Mark Sailor
could happen to you. I wanted to put this fear
to a test, that what happened to Mark Sailor could
easily happen to you or me. It's a terrible story,
(10:04):
after all, but how much should we be afraid that
our cars might do the same thing. To test this out,
my producer Jacob and I got ourselves a two thousand
and three camera two hundred and twenty five thousand miles
on it, the best selling Toyota, in fact, the best
selling car in America for eleven of the last twelve years.
(10:26):
A lot of the unintended acceleration cases happened in cameras.
After getting the car, we called up Car and Driver,
the premier automotive magazine in the United States. We wanted
them to help us figure out what was behind this
epidemic of unintended acceleration to try and replicate one of
those runaway car situations. So one chilly winter morning, Jacob
(10:53):
and I met up with three guys from Car and
Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds just west of Detroit. It's
a vast racetrack that Chrysler uses to do all of
its testing. I'm guessing a thousand acres big guardhouse at
the front. The whole time we were there, Christ had
someone in a jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on us,
making sure we didn't take photos of any of the
(11:13):
new cars they were testing. Oh look, there's the Q seven.
What the car Driver guys right there. Our guys are
Don Sherman, he's the technical director of Car and Driver,
and Casey Colwell, young guy Brooks with Don. Eddie Altiman
also came. He's the editor of Car and Driver, Cami, Don, Casey, Eddie.
(11:37):
They all car guys, which matters because one of the
notable facts about sudden acceleration is how the car guys
see things differently from the non car guys. Incidentally, Jacob
and I would also describe ourselves as car guys, although
not quite at the level of the Car and Driver folks.
True story, when I was thirteen, I rode away for
(12:00):
promotional brochures on every car sold in the world, except
for the Soviet zeal which was really hard to get.
I still have every one of those brochures. Anyway, back
to the racetrack in Detroit, Silver camera entering VDF, staying
out of your way like we were before. The plan
(12:21):
is to take the camera up to some serious speeds,
keep the throttle wide open, as if the accelerator pedal
is somehow stuck, and then see if we can stop
the car. What happens if you have your foot full
on the accelerator pedal and then you also slam on
the brakes at the same time, because intuitively you'd think
(12:41):
that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your car surges uncontrollably,
you slam on the brakes. We want to figure out
what that looks like. You're gonna make it go wide
open throttle, then quickly you apply the brakes, not really
a panic, but just stop at the best you can.
So Jacob goes out first with Casey behind the wheel.
(13:02):
He accelerates so bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two,
sixty three five, sixty seven, eight nine, seventy and about
to do it. All right, We're gonna put the throttle down,
so the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
the break with the gas pedal still down and we
(13:25):
locked up a little bit. But what I mean that's
what the car stops? Oh? Yeah, car stops. But no
loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back. Jacob asks
Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape are they in?
Is it a little cooked or no, it's not. I
don't think the brakes are cooked. They smell like we'll
know in a second. Don't even sell. Okay, if you
(13:49):
have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine, the brakes win.
Then it's my turn. I get into Camray with Eddie Aultraman.
He's driving. We take the car down straight away? Can
we go a little fast? Let me favor? At seventy,
Ultiman hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to
(14:12):
a halt, throttles open. We've got a really old, not
a terribly good shape car, filled with three people and
a bunch of equipment and it's still stopping. So what's
the What is the difference between breaking with your foot
(14:35):
completely off the accelerator and breaking like this. What I
mean is how much longer does it take to stop
a car with a throttle wide open? About ten feet
if you want to quantify it, it can be a
little bit more, but not so much that you'd notice.
Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
(14:56):
Driver do a version of this very same test. We
basically did this with a variety of cars, and we
found actually that with the throttle stuck open or going
in seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty close
to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that had
his thrill closed. A camera with the accelerator stuck wide
(15:19):
open stops basically as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
It's not a big deal. Yeah, but of course we're
not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
carsons as my demons and we're in a closed kind
of situation. But you can see, I'll get it up
(15:43):
to seventy Not a big deal. Yeah, it's the most
undramatic you try. I would love to truck. Yeah. We
were out on the testing ground for two hours. We
tried every trick in the book. The car stopped, We
(16:06):
loaded up the camera with three adults and a ton
of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine while
the car was in motion. It stopped once. We took
the camera up to one hundred miles an hour. What
do we at getting there? It took forever, but it stopped. Afterwards,
(16:26):
Don Sherman and I talked about the strangely normal experience
of bringing a camera to a full stop with the
accelerator to the floor. The brakes are powerful. You got
four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them. Think
of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline to
power and move all that breaking is relatively easy to do,
(16:47):
it much more powerful. That's why people don't acknowledge that
all the capability built into their car. When Car and
Driver did their version of this experiment right after the
Sailor crash, they went so far as to do a
(17:07):
full throttle braking to on a Ruche Stage three Mustang.
If you aren't a car guy, I should explain. Ruche
is an independent company that takes sports cars and basically
puts them on steroids. The engine of the Stage three
Ruche has five hundred and forty horsepower. That's two to
three times more powerful than the typical car on the road.
(17:31):
A monster a rouche would take a camera and chop
it into little, tiny pieces. So car and driver take
the ruche Mustang up to one hundred pounds an hour,
keep their foot on the accelerator at the same time
they slam on the brakes, and what happens. The car stops.
Now it takes a good nine hundred feet to come
(17:51):
to a full stop. There's all kinds of huffing and puffing,
but it stops. Breaks go up against one of the
most powerful engines on the road, and the brakes win.
I think you can now understand how crucial this pointed
Toyota gets embroiled in a massive controversy. They pay billions
(18:15):
of dollars in fines, They face allegations of a cover up,
all because their cars are supposed to be suddenly and
mysteriously accelerating. But if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating,
all you have to do is step on the brakes,
because brakes beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailor stop
(18:35):
his Lexus that day as he sped down Higway one
twenty five. I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but
it's the only logical explanation because he never put his
foot on the brake. Maybe the most important person in
this whole story is a man named Dick Schmidt. Sadly,
(18:58):
Schmidt died last fall, which is a real loss, because
Schmidt was a really remarkable man. As a kid, he
was a champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub
three hour marathoner. He owned five porsches, He raced cars,
a car guy. He was also a professor at UCLA
who becomes an important figure in what's called human performance research.
(19:22):
Human performance research asks how do people move and act
and interact with the physical world. Schmidt starts the Journal
of Motor Behavior, and along the way he becomes maybe
the world's leading expert on the way your feet behave
when you drive a car. I talked to Schmidt about
a year before he died. He was in a wheelchair.
By that point, he had a neurological disease and you'll
(19:44):
hear a little bit of his illness in his speech.
I'm going to have to repeat what he says because
it's really important and I want to make sure you
understand it. Schmidt got involved in the sudden acceleration issue
years ago when he got a call from an attorney
in Washington, d C. It was a case involving a
taxi driver who picked up some people outside a hotel.
(20:06):
Nathan knows he's run full rattled on Parkway. What Schmidt's
saying is, next thing you know, he's running full throttle
down the street and he makes a left turn and realizes,
oh god, I'm coming to a big traffic circle, and
he ends up putting the car into a wall. That
(20:27):
was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal, but
it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously,
the driver can't stop. It. Was there ever a moment
when you suspected it might be a mechanical cause to
these incidents? No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever
suspected that the problem might be with the car, a malfunction,
(20:51):
a faulty bit of software, an engineering failure. And Schmidt,
one of the world's leading experts in human factors, is
saying that never once crossed his mind. Why Because everything
about sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver
the car. He starts to look at other cases and
(21:18):
discovers that there are some pretty clear patterns. But those
patterns don't involve a particular make or model of car.
Nothing that could make you say, oh, there's something wrong
with that kind of car. Every carmaker gets hit with
complaints of sudden acceleration. When it is a high profile
case like the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand,
like Toyota, but that's just the effect of publicity. It
(21:41):
happens to everyone. The patterns involve the kinds of people
who have sudden acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances
that lead to sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to
be older, they tend to be shorter, They tend to
be people, and this is really important, they tend to
(22:01):
be people who are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance,
parking lot attendance, and the majority of these incidents happen
right after someone gets into a car for the first time,
or when they're parking or driving at very low speeds.
Now you have to make sense of these patterns. You
(22:25):
could argue, i mean, against all reason, but you could
argue that cars just get really upset and misbehave when
they're being driven by parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous.
The patterns Schmidt found mean it's not the car. What
Schmidt concludes is that people are getting into strange cars,
and maybe because those people are too short and didn't
(22:45):
adjust the seat properly, they were a little further away
from the pedal than usual. Or maybe they're trying to
park and because they're doing the stopping and starting and
getting in and out of a parking space, they get
thrown just a little out of their comfort zone. They
start making stabbing motions with their right foot, like someone
groping in the dark. The term Dick Schmidt uses to
(23:07):
describe this is impulse ability. Your brain requests a very
specific action, but your body fails to deliver exactly what
it's told to do. You mean to say that even
when producing a very familiar physical movement, Yeah, there is
variability in how I move my limbs in the force
(23:28):
with which I so. Baseball players swinging a bat at
a fastball may feel that he's reproducing his swing every time,
but he's not. That's why even the greatest golfers in
the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough, or
the best basketball players in the world miss a free throw.
I don't think the far is confused if which is
(23:51):
a very pedal, which is excelera pally knows, but he
is a guess. Schmidt says, I don't think the driver
is confused. If you ask him which is the brake
pedal and which is the accelerator pedal, he knows, but
he gets in this state where he feels like he's
acting normally and he's not. In other words, somewhere between
(24:13):
intention and action, there's a garble, a glitch on what happens.
The driver puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's
the break. He wants to stop the car, but in
fact he's speeding it up. So back to floor mats.
(24:35):
Why do they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because
they throw off the expected geometry of the car. A
big thick winter mat stacked on top of an existing
mat raises the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator
and break seem much closer to your right foot, And
if you're in a strange car, that just increases the
(24:58):
odds of impulse variability. It's one of those little things
that leads to a garble between intention and action. Once
you understand Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds
of scenarios that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor.
(25:18):
Let me give you one. He's driving down the highway
with the cruise control on. Both of his feet are
on the floor mat. He comes up behind a car
going slower than he is, so he puts his right
foot back on the accelerator hard but as he does that,
the floor mat slides under the throttle, locking it open.
(25:40):
Now comes the crucial part. He takes his foot off
the accelerator to return to his cruise control speed, but
the car doesn't slow down. It surges forward. The throttle
is locked open by the floor mat. He's alarmed. He
picks his foot up to hit the brake, but it's
a car he's not familiar with. It's a loaner, and
(26:00):
he puts his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake,
and he presses it down, expecting the car to slow,
but it doesn't. That's why Listrella says. The brakes don't work,
and Sailor freaks out, so he presses down harder and
the car goes even faster, and he freaks out even more.
(26:21):
I think it's important to note here that sailor isn't negligent.
He's not a fault. He's not speeding or running a
red light, or drunk. He's making the mistake that almost
any of us could make under the circumstances. What happened
to him in that moment is confusion. So they're going
into a kind of panic state where instead of asking
(26:41):
the question is my foot on the red pedal? They
think the problem is not pushing the brake hard enough.
Yea perception that the brakes have failed as pedal goes
to the floor and the card of the stop. Schmidt says,
the perception is that the brakes have failed because the
pedal goes to the floor and the car doesn't stop.
(27:03):
Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some kind of far fetched theory here.
In February twenty eleven, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
released its report on the whole Toyota business that's the
one NASA got involved in, and they basically agreed with Schmidt.
They concluded that the overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases
(27:23):
were clearly pedal air. The agency knows this because every
car has a black box that records when the break
and when the accelerator are used time and again. In
these cases, the black boxes showed that the brakes hadn't
even been touched. So here's my question, why is it
(27:47):
so hard for people to accept the fact that there
is a really simple, straightforward explanation for what happened in
the sudden acceleration cases? Because it was hard. Right after
the Sailor case, the Secretary of Transportation Rail Hood went
before Congress and said, my advice is, if anybody owns
one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to
(28:09):
Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it.
Do you realize how insane that is. This is the
guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is
completely deluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
(28:30):
cars again and again what we've established with this type
of In February of twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC
News does a story on a runaway avalon. It's about
how the software in Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Ooh,
it's like that. But of course, all you have to
do if a Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is used the brakes,
(28:54):
So ABC rigs up an avalon and essentially stages an
episode of unintended acceleration. Grace don't work, Grace give out Gee.
The fakery was later uncovered by the website Jelopnik. Here's
the editor of Jelopnick, Patrick George. They got a university
professor to cut three wires within the electronic throttle control system,
(29:15):
then connected two of the wires to each other in
a specific pattern and with a specific resistor to create
a link between two final wires with a switch in between,
so that he can control it. In other words, this
car was rigged. It was rigged in away that you
would never produce these results in real life. At the
same time, they fake a video, or if you ask ABC,
they make an editing error that makes it look like
(29:37):
the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact, the cars
in park in the video you can actually see that
the brake light is on the whole time. They go
to all of this trouble of splicing wires and revving engines.
All that because they're trying to avoid the simplest and
most plausible explanation, which is people are hitting the wrong
(29:59):
pedal crazy. It gets worse at the height of the
Toyota controversy. Consumer Reports releases a video telling driver is
what to do in the case of unintended acceleration. So
this is one of the most trusted and irreputable brands
in the United States. Millions of people look to Consumer
Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of automotive testing,
(30:24):
Jake Fisher, has to say. A car accelerating out of
control is a very serious and scary situation for anyone.
A gas pedal could get stuck because of a malfunction,
because a broken throttle return spring, or even a jam floormat. Fortunately,
to remain calm and follow a few steps, you can
easily avoid tragedy. Wait, stop right there. He lists a
(30:45):
series of reasons why a car might accelerate out of control,
and he neglects to mention the number one cause, which
is that a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay,
on to the next problem. Here at our track, We're
going to demonstrate to you what you should do, and
more importantly, what you shouldn't do. If you're ever in
this unfortunate situation, if you find that your car is
(31:09):
chlorating hard, even after you're taking your foot off the
gas pedal, your first and stink's probably the right one.
Step one, put your foot on the brake firmly and
don't lift off. It's extremely important not to lift your
foot off the brake. Wait wait, wait, this is even
crazier than an ABC reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon
Fisher says it's extremely important not to lift your foot
(31:31):
off the brake. No, no, no. The whole problem of
unintended acceleration is caused by the fact that people mistakenly
think they have their foot firmly on the brake when
they don't. He needs to say the exact opposite. He
needs to say, it is extremely important to lift your
foot off whatever pedal it is on, because chances are
(31:53):
you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now place it back
on the brake firmly. This is an advice, This is maultpractice.
In the spring of two thousand and ten, the people
who run the autowebsite edmonds dot com got really frustrated
(32:15):
with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration have become,
so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
the car was the culprit and sudden acceleration that is
an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
a floor mat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them
a million dollars. A million dollars they put together a
(32:37):
panel of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who
came forward to win? I asked Dan Edmonds, who heads
up the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a
grand total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even
met the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five,
(32:57):
one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again,
and the rest, he says, are just nonsense, so they
can't award the prize. The million dollars is still sitting
there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits
filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the
(33:19):
software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any
of those plain to Flayers. No, we didn't hear from
any anybody of that sort. I think because of the
nature of litigation. I mean, this is me speculating. They
probably wanted to focus on that. Maybe a million dollars
wasn't enough to attract their attention. Remember Sean Kaine, mister
(33:43):
sudden acceleration, the guy with the software coding gone awry theory.
Not even he wants the million dollars. It was nothing
more than than, you know, media circus, and it was.
It was ridiculous, a media circus. Kane doesn't want to
try and win a million dollars because it's a media circus.
I'll tell you what a media circus was the entire
(34:05):
Toyota sudden acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kane insisted
that some elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, because
people like Sean Kane couldn't admit that this was just
overwhelmingly a matter of human air. I've used the phrase
(34:26):
car guys in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt
was a car guy. The three people from Car and
Driver or car guys. And what's interesting about the car
guys is that none of them doubted ever that This
is a problem caused by drivers because they understand what
a car is. It's a complicated mechanical object that requires
(34:47):
attention and skill to be operated safely, and non car
people have lost sight of that fact. Here is Eddie
Altiman of Car and Driver All more time. I think
there is that really really depressing sense of exasperation about
how customers expect the car to take care of them,
(35:09):
and how the average driver just expects the car to
be completely flawless and to save their lives under any circumstances.
What the car guys want the rest of us to
(35:30):
acknowledge is that driving is a complicated and dangerous act.
It is not just the negligent or the reckless who
make fatal mistakes. Ordinary people do under seemingly ordinary circumstances.
Mark Sailor did nothing wrong. Nothing. What happened to him
could have happened to any of us and will happen
(35:51):
again unless we can finally have an honest conversation about
what a car is and what it is, and what
the responsibility of a driver is when things go awrve.
Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
just does what the driver tells it to do all right,
(36:11):
So here we are, we're in our what is this?
What is two thousands three camper? Is a two thousand
and three or two thousand and four twenty two thousand miles? Okay,
get ready? That was I was completely surprised that that
(36:33):
was the most un unremarkable, not remarkable thing. And let's
right again, Sigernel hold at sixty. You've been listening to
Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do
(36:55):
us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can
get more information about this and other episodes at revisionist
history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky, and Jacob Smith.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Our
(37:19):
fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks to Eddie Altman,
Don Sherman, and Casey Colwell a car and driver for
helping us to find and buy a two thousand and
three camera and taking a day off to hostess. Also
thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for braving the break tests.
The Penemptly management team is Laura Mayor Andy Bowers in
(37:41):
Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand
and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in
Juleivis to California, just south of San Diego. Sailor was
forty five years old, a California HIWI Patrol officer. Ordinarily,
he drove a two thousand and six Lexus I S,
but his car had a problem with his CD player,
(00:37):
so that morning he took it to the dealership and
got a loaner a brand new Lexus E. Sailor finished
his shift at the HIGWI Patrol and went back home,
picked up his wife, daughter, and brother in law Chris Lostrella,
and they all set out for the daughter's soccer practice.
They were heading up Highway one twenty five and just
as they approached a town called Santi, Lostrella, who sitting
(01:00):
in the backseat, calls nine one one. What you're about
to hear? A morning you is harrowing and see what
are you reporting? Yeah, we're Alexis. I'm sorry your cell
phone cutting out. We're going one twenty five TV. I'm
sorry for alexceritor stuck well one twenty five great, okay,
(01:24):
northbound one twenty five. Where are you passing. We are
passing up? Where are we passing? Words? We're going on
a hundred and twenty mission. Gorge, We're in trouble. We
can't We're there's no break, okay, Gorge and three way
half mile okay. And you don't have the ability to
like turn the vehicle off or anything. Approaching an intersection.
We're approaching an intersection. Okay, We're pushing interfect hold on, pray, pray, Hello,
(01:52):
oh hello, the o o oh you here is this
Jella's horrified response to the Lexus spinning out of control,
hitting another vehicle, and plunging down a ravine. Everyone inside
the car was killed. The Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story.
(02:25):
I hesitated before playing it, but in the end I
concluded that you have to hear it to make sense
of what happened Next, the tape went viral. It was
played on the nightly news, written up in horrified news articles,
to the point where a wave of fear swept the country.
Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales due to
a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives in day runaway.
(02:49):
Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to one
hundred miles an hour. One died she crashed her camera
into a tree and a pole. A car had sped
up to more than one hundred miles per hour. Hundreds
of people came forward with horror stories about the Alexis
accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is a
brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings exposs whistleblowers. NASA
(03:15):
got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September two
thousand and nine and March two thousand and ten, totaling
millions of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated
to have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended
up paying a one point two billion dollars fine to
(03:36):
the US government. They spent another one point one billion
to settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've
settled something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest
automobile company was accused of a cover up, of putting
profits ahead of people, of having a culture of denial.
Toyota's conduct was shameful. He showed a blatant disregard for
(04:01):
systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers.
That's Eric Holder in March two and fourteen. He was
the Attorney General of the United States at the time.
It's a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement
officer of the land calls out one of the largest
companies in the world. My name is Malcolm Glaube. You're
(04:23):
listening to Revisionist History, where every week we go back
and examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted
to the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard
(04:45):
at least some part of that nine one one tape before.
Maybe you had a Toyota at the time and had
a sudden pang of worry. What I want to do
is go back to two thousand and nine and convince
you that something went very wrong in the way the
controversy played out very well. Let's go back for a
(05:08):
moment to the person we started with, Mark Sailor, California
Highway patrol officer. He's driving down the highway and he
can't stop his car. The accelerator is stuck. His brother
in law says. After the crash, another person comes forward
to the police and says he had driven the same
loner Lexus a few days before and had a similar incident.
(05:31):
It accelerated to get past a truck, and when he
pushed the throttle towards the floor, that's what car guys
called the accelerator pedal, the throttle stuck. What he realized
is that someone had put one of those big, thick
all weather rubber floor mats in the car, on top
of the floor mat that was already there. That second
big thick floor mat wasn't attached to those little hooks
(05:51):
that hold floor mats down. It slid around, and so
somehow the thick mat got wedged under the throttle. That
everyone decides is what happened to Sailor maybe he tried
to turn the car off, but the Lexus has one
of those push button ignitions, and what he may not
have realized is that you have to hold that button
down for three seconds if you're trying to stop the
(06:13):
car while it's in motion. Maybe he tried to put
the car in neutral, but it's not always obvious how
to do that, particularly if you're panicking. They crash. The
nine one one car goes viral and Toyota launches a
massive recall of floor mats across its model line. Problem solved, right. Well, No,
(06:35):
here's the problem. Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration
crisis thinks that floor mats are any more than a
small part of the story. It just doesn't make sense.
So that's an all weather matt. That's my producer, Jacob
Smith talking to Sean Kane. This is the killer format. Okay,
this is the format that brought Toyota to fame. Kane
(06:55):
runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research and Strategies.
Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean Kane's name
comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked closely with
many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's not buying
the floor matt theory. When the pedal was depressed fully
to the floor inkade the way this road here, the
(07:16):
pedal extended down to the point where the bottom edge
of it would catch here on this rubber piece. Okay,
and it would catch on the bottom edge and it
wouldn't return. But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell
the whole story. Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals.
So the way this would have to happen is you'd
have to depress your accelerator pedal nearly to the floor
all wide overthrooor to wide open throttle, you'd have to
(07:38):
mash that accelerator to the floor and to have that
catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Kane is saying that for the floor mat to trap
the accelerator, the driver has to floor it. But why
on earth is a guy driving his family to soccer
practice flooring it? Not to mention all the hundreds of
other people who complained about Toyota's with stuck accelerators, some
(08:00):
of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically,
since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her
camera down the street? Mark Sailor, he was driving with
what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while,
Why didn't he just reach down on a yank the
floormat away from the pedal? Right, I still have a
hard time believing, giving a long distance and the travel
(08:21):
of his car, that the floormat was the culprit. Kane
thinks that something else must have happened in that car.
And by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis ended
up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming number
of those cases, the car didn't even have an oversized,
thick plastic floormat. The cars had normal floormats. Something else
(08:41):
must have been happening, and a number of people believe
that something has to do with software. That there is
and was something wrong with the software that governs the
throttle in Toyotas in today's cars. Now we're looking at
code code that can be up to one hundred million
lines of code. The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter
is running about seven million lines of code. A luxury
(09:03):
car today can run a hundred million lines of code.
You what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got
a fifty thousand dollars car. In The complexity level of
the fifty thousand ar car is exponentially greater. Do you
think that that car is now going to be defect
free and software clear not likely? This is the argument
that Kane has made in lawsuits against Toyota. The cars
(09:24):
contain a bug in the lines of computer code that
control how the car starts and stops. Speeds up and
slows down. The La Times also pursued this question, resulting
in one of the most prestigious investigative reporting awards in
a country, the Lobe, for its work. If the La
Times and Sean Kane are right, then that's terrifying because
(09:44):
what it means is that what happened to Mark Sailor
could happen to you. I wanted to put this fear
to a test, that what happened to Mark Sailor could
easily happen to you or me. It's a terrible story,
(10:04):
after all, but how much should we be afraid that
our cars might do the same thing. To test this out,
my producer Jacob and I got ourselves a two thousand
and three camera two hundred and twenty five thousand miles
on it, the best selling Toyota, in fact, the best
selling car in America for eleven of the last twelve years.
(10:26):
A lot of the unintended acceleration cases happened in cameras.
After getting the car, we called up Car and Driver,
the premier automotive magazine in the United States. We wanted
them to help us figure out what was behind this
epidemic of unintended acceleration to try and replicate one of
those runaway car situations. So one chilly winter morning, Jacob
(10:53):
and I met up with three guys from Car and
Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds just west of Detroit. It's
a vast racetrack that Chrysler uses to do all of
its testing. I'm guessing a thousand acres big guardhouse at
the front. The whole time we were there, Christ had
someone in a jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on us,
making sure we didn't take photos of any of the
(11:13):
new cars they were testing. Oh look, there's the Q seven.
What the car Driver guys right there. Our guys are
Don Sherman, he's the technical director of Car and Driver,
and Casey Colwell, young guy Brooks with Don. Eddie Altiman
also came. He's the editor of Car and Driver, Cami, Don, Casey, Eddie.
(11:37):
They all car guys, which matters because one of the
notable facts about sudden acceleration is how the car guys
see things differently from the non car guys. Incidentally, Jacob
and I would also describe ourselves as car guys, although
not quite at the level of the Car and Driver folks.
True story, when I was thirteen, I rode away for
(12:00):
promotional brochures on every car sold in the world, except
for the Soviet zeal which was really hard to get.
I still have every one of those brochures. Anyway, back
to the racetrack in Detroit, Silver camera entering VDF, staying
out of your way like we were before. The plan
(12:21):
is to take the camera up to some serious speeds,
keep the throttle wide open, as if the accelerator pedal
is somehow stuck, and then see if we can stop
the car. What happens if you have your foot full
on the accelerator pedal and then you also slam on
the brakes at the same time, because intuitively you'd think
(12:41):
that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your car surges uncontrollably,
you slam on the brakes. We want to figure out
what that looks like. You're gonna make it go wide
open throttle, then quickly you apply the brakes, not really
a panic, but just stop at the best you can.
So Jacob goes out first with Casey behind the wheel.
(13:02):
He accelerates so bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two,
sixty three five, sixty seven, eight nine, seventy and about
to do it. All right, We're gonna put the throttle down,
so the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
the break with the gas pedal still down and we
(13:25):
locked up a little bit. But what I mean that's
what the car stops? Oh? Yeah, car stops. But no
loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back. Jacob asks
Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape are they in?
Is it a little cooked or no, it's not. I
don't think the brakes are cooked. They smell like we'll
know in a second. Don't even sell. Okay, if you
(13:49):
have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine, the brakes win.
Then it's my turn. I get into Camray with Eddie Aultraman.
He's driving. We take the car down straight away? Can
we go a little fast? Let me favor? At seventy,
Ultiman hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to
(14:12):
a halt, throttles open. We've got a really old, not
a terribly good shape car, filled with three people and
a bunch of equipment and it's still stopping. So what's
the What is the difference between breaking with your foot
(14:35):
completely off the accelerator and breaking like this. What I
mean is how much longer does it take to stop
a car with a throttle wide open? About ten feet
if you want to quantify it, it can be a
little bit more, but not so much that you'd notice.
Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
(14:56):
Driver do a version of this very same test. We
basically did this with a variety of cars, and we
found actually that with the throttle stuck open or going
in seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty close
to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that had
his thrill closed. A camera with the accelerator stuck wide
(15:19):
open stops basically as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
It's not a big deal. Yeah, but of course we're
not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
carsons as my demons and we're in a closed kind
of situation. But you can see, I'll get it up
(15:43):
to seventy Not a big deal. Yeah, it's the most
undramatic you try. I would love to truck. Yeah. We
were out on the testing ground for two hours. We
tried every trick in the book. The car stopped, We
(16:06):
loaded up the camera with three adults and a ton
of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine while
the car was in motion. It stopped once. We took
the camera up to one hundred miles an hour. What
do we at getting there? It took forever, but it stopped. Afterwards,
(16:26):
Don Sherman and I talked about the strangely normal experience
of bringing a camera to a full stop with the
accelerator to the floor. The brakes are powerful. You got
four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them. Think
of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline to
power and move all that breaking is relatively easy to do,
(16:47):
it much more powerful. That's why people don't acknowledge that
all the capability built into their car. When Car and
Driver did their version of this experiment right after the
Sailor crash, they went so far as to do a
(17:07):
full throttle braking to on a Ruche Stage three Mustang.
If you aren't a car guy, I should explain. Ruche
is an independent company that takes sports cars and basically
puts them on steroids. The engine of the Stage three
Ruche has five hundred and forty horsepower. That's two to
three times more powerful than the typical car on the road.
(17:31):
A monster a rouche would take a camera and chop
it into little, tiny pieces. So car and driver take
the ruche Mustang up to one hundred pounds an hour,
keep their foot on the accelerator at the same time
they slam on the brakes, and what happens. The car stops.
Now it takes a good nine hundred feet to come
(17:51):
to a full stop. There's all kinds of huffing and puffing,
but it stops. Breaks go up against one of the
most powerful engines on the road, and the brakes win.
I think you can now understand how crucial this pointed
Toyota gets embroiled in a massive controversy. They pay billions
(18:15):
of dollars in fines, They face allegations of a cover up,
all because their cars are supposed to be suddenly and
mysteriously accelerating. But if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating,
all you have to do is step on the brakes,
because brakes beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailor stop
(18:35):
his Lexus that day as he sped down Higway one
twenty five. I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but
it's the only logical explanation because he never put his
foot on the brake. Maybe the most important person in
this whole story is a man named Dick Schmidt. Sadly,
(18:58):
Schmidt died last fall, which is a real loss, because
Schmidt was a really remarkable man. As a kid, he
was a champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub
three hour marathoner. He owned five porsches, He raced cars,
a car guy. He was also a professor at UCLA
who becomes an important figure in what's called human performance research.
(19:22):
Human performance research asks how do people move and act
and interact with the physical world. Schmidt starts the Journal
of Motor Behavior, and along the way he becomes maybe
the world's leading expert on the way your feet behave
when you drive a car. I talked to Schmidt about
a year before he died. He was in a wheelchair.
By that point, he had a neurological disease and you'll
(19:44):
hear a little bit of his illness in his speech.
I'm going to have to repeat what he says because
it's really important and I want to make sure you
understand it. Schmidt got involved in the sudden acceleration issue
years ago when he got a call from an attorney
in Washington, d C. It was a case involving a
taxi driver who picked up some people outside a hotel.
(20:06):
Nathan knows he's run full rattled on Parkway. What Schmidt's
saying is, next thing you know, he's running full throttle
down the street and he makes a left turn and realizes,
oh god, I'm coming to a big traffic circle, and
he ends up putting the car into a wall. That
(20:27):
was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal, but
it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously,
the driver can't stop. It. Was there ever a moment
when you suspected it might be a mechanical cause to
these incidents? No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever
suspected that the problem might be with the car, a malfunction,
(20:51):
a faulty bit of software, an engineering failure. And Schmidt,
one of the world's leading experts in human factors, is
saying that never once crossed his mind. Why Because everything
about sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver
the car. He starts to look at other cases and
(21:18):
discovers that there are some pretty clear patterns. But those
patterns don't involve a particular make or model of car.
Nothing that could make you say, oh, there's something wrong
with that kind of car. Every carmaker gets hit with
complaints of sudden acceleration. When it is a high profile
case like the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand,
like Toyota, but that's just the effect of publicity. It
(21:41):
happens to everyone. The patterns involve the kinds of people
who have sudden acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances
that lead to sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to
be older, they tend to be shorter, They tend to
be people, and this is really important, they tend to
(22:01):
be people who are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance,
parking lot attendance, and the majority of these incidents happen
right after someone gets into a car for the first time,
or when they're parking or driving at very low speeds.
Now you have to make sense of these patterns. You
(22:25):
could argue, i mean, against all reason, but you could
argue that cars just get really upset and misbehave when
they're being driven by parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous.
The patterns Schmidt found mean it's not the car. What
Schmidt concludes is that people are getting into strange cars,
and maybe because those people are too short and didn't
(22:45):
adjust the seat properly, they were a little further away
from the pedal than usual. Or maybe they're trying to
park and because they're doing the stopping and starting and
getting in and out of a parking space, they get
thrown just a little out of their comfort zone. They
start making stabbing motions with their right foot, like someone
groping in the dark. The term Dick Schmidt uses to
(23:07):
describe this is impulse ability. Your brain requests a very
specific action, but your body fails to deliver exactly what
it's told to do. You mean to say that even
when producing a very familiar physical movement, Yeah, there is
variability in how I move my limbs in the force
(23:28):
with which I so. Baseball players swinging a bat at
a fastball may feel that he's reproducing his swing every time,
but he's not. That's why even the greatest golfers in
the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough, or
the best basketball players in the world miss a free throw.
I don't think the far is confused if which is
(23:51):
a very pedal, which is excelera pally knows, but he
is a guess. Schmidt says, I don't think the driver
is confused. If you ask him which is the brake
pedal and which is the accelerator pedal, he knows, but
he gets in this state where he feels like he's
acting normally and he's not. In other words, somewhere between
(24:13):
intention and action, there's a garble, a glitch on what happens.
The driver puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's
the break. He wants to stop the car, but in
fact he's speeding it up. So back to floor mats.
(24:35):
Why do they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because
they throw off the expected geometry of the car. A
big thick winter mat stacked on top of an existing
mat raises the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator
and break seem much closer to your right foot, And
if you're in a strange car, that just increases the
(24:58):
odds of impulse variability. It's one of those little things
that leads to a garble between intention and action. Once
you understand Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds
of scenarios that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor.
(25:18):
Let me give you one. He's driving down the highway
with the cruise control on. Both of his feet are
on the floor mat. He comes up behind a car
going slower than he is, so he puts his right
foot back on the accelerator hard but as he does that,
the floor mat slides under the throttle, locking it open.
(25:40):
Now comes the crucial part. He takes his foot off
the accelerator to return to his cruise control speed, but
the car doesn't slow down. It surges forward. The throttle
is locked open by the floor mat. He's alarmed. He
picks his foot up to hit the brake, but it's
a car he's not familiar with. It's a loaner, and
(26:00):
he puts his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake,
and he presses it down, expecting the car to slow,
but it doesn't. That's why Listrella says. The brakes don't work,
and Sailor freaks out, so he presses down harder and
the car goes even faster, and he freaks out even more.
(26:21):
I think it's important to note here that sailor isn't negligent.
He's not a fault. He's not speeding or running a
red light, or drunk. He's making the mistake that almost
any of us could make under the circumstances. What happened
to him in that moment is confusion. So they're going
into a kind of panic state where instead of asking
(26:41):
the question is my foot on the red pedal? They
think the problem is not pushing the brake hard enough.
Yea perception that the brakes have failed as pedal goes
to the floor and the card of the stop. Schmidt says,
the perception is that the brakes have failed because the
pedal goes to the floor and the car doesn't stop.
(27:03):
Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some kind of far fetched theory here.
In February twenty eleven, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
released its report on the whole Toyota business that's the
one NASA got involved in, and they basically agreed with Schmidt.
They concluded that the overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases
(27:23):
were clearly pedal air. The agency knows this because every
car has a black box that records when the break
and when the accelerator are used time and again. In
these cases, the black boxes showed that the brakes hadn't
even been touched. So here's my question, why is it
(27:47):
so hard for people to accept the fact that there
is a really simple, straightforward explanation for what happened in
the sudden acceleration cases? Because it was hard. Right after
the Sailor case, the Secretary of Transportation Rail Hood went
before Congress and said, my advice is, if anybody owns
one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to
(28:09):
Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it.
Do you realize how insane that is. This is the
guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is
completely deluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
(28:30):
cars again and again what we've established with this type
of In February of twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC
News does a story on a runaway avalon. It's about
how the software in Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Ooh,
it's like that. But of course, all you have to
do if a Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is used the brakes,
(28:54):
So ABC rigs up an avalon and essentially stages an
episode of unintended acceleration. Grace don't work, Grace give out Gee.
The fakery was later uncovered by the website Jelopnik. Here's
the editor of Jelopnick, Patrick George. They got a university
professor to cut three wires within the electronic throttle control system,
(29:15):
then connected two of the wires to each other in
a specific pattern and with a specific resistor to create
a link between two final wires with a switch in between,
so that he can control it. In other words, this
car was rigged. It was rigged in away that you
would never produce these results in real life. At the
same time, they fake a video, or if you ask ABC,
they make an editing error that makes it look like
(29:37):
the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact, the cars
in park in the video you can actually see that
the brake light is on the whole time. They go
to all of this trouble of splicing wires and revving engines.
All that because they're trying to avoid the simplest and
most plausible explanation, which is people are hitting the wrong
(29:59):
pedal crazy. It gets worse at the height of the
Toyota controversy. Consumer Reports releases a video telling driver is
what to do in the case of unintended acceleration. So
this is one of the most trusted and irreputable brands
in the United States. Millions of people look to Consumer
Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of automotive testing,
(30:24):
Jake Fisher, has to say. A car accelerating out of
control is a very serious and scary situation for anyone.
A gas pedal could get stuck because of a malfunction,
because a broken throttle return spring, or even a jam floormat. Fortunately,
to remain calm and follow a few steps, you can
easily avoid tragedy. Wait, stop right there. He lists a
(30:45):
series of reasons why a car might accelerate out of control,
and he neglects to mention the number one cause, which
is that a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay,
on to the next problem. Here at our track, We're
going to demonstrate to you what you should do, and
more importantly, what you shouldn't do. If you're ever in
this unfortunate situation, if you find that your car is
(31:09):
chlorating hard, even after you're taking your foot off the
gas pedal, your first and stink's probably the right one.
Step one, put your foot on the brake firmly and
don't lift off. It's extremely important not to lift your
foot off the brake. Wait wait, wait, this is even
crazier than an ABC reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon
Fisher says it's extremely important not to lift your foot
(31:31):
off the brake. No, no, no. The whole problem of
unintended acceleration is caused by the fact that people mistakenly
think they have their foot firmly on the brake when
they don't. He needs to say the exact opposite. He
needs to say, it is extremely important to lift your
foot off whatever pedal it is on, because chances are
(31:53):
you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now place it back
on the brake firmly. This is an advice, This is maultpractice.
In the spring of two thousand and ten, the people
who run the autowebsite edmonds dot com got really frustrated
(32:15):
with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration have become,
so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
the car was the culprit and sudden acceleration that is
an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
a floor mat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them
a million dollars. A million dollars they put together a
(32:37):
panel of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who
came forward to win? I asked Dan Edmonds, who heads
up the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a
grand total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even
met the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five,
(32:57):
one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again,
and the rest, he says, are just nonsense, so they
can't award the prize. The million dollars is still sitting
there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits
filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the
(33:19):
software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any
of those plain to Flayers. No, we didn't hear from
any anybody of that sort. I think because of the
nature of litigation. I mean, this is me speculating. They
probably wanted to focus on that. Maybe a million dollars
wasn't enough to attract their attention. Remember Sean Kaine, mister
(33:43):
sudden acceleration, the guy with the software coding gone awry theory.
Not even he wants the million dollars. It was nothing
more than than, you know, media circus, and it was.
It was ridiculous, a media circus. Kane doesn't want to
try and win a million dollars because it's a media circus.
I'll tell you what a media circus was the entire
(34:05):
Toyota sudden acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kane insisted
that some elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, because
people like Sean Kane couldn't admit that this was just
overwhelmingly a matter of human air. I've used the phrase
(34:26):
car guys in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt
was a car guy. The three people from Car and
Driver or car guys. And what's interesting about the car
guys is that none of them doubted ever that This
is a problem caused by drivers because they understand what
a car is. It's a complicated mechanical object that requires
(34:47):
attention and skill to be operated safely, and non car
people have lost sight of that fact. Here is Eddie
Altiman of Car and Driver All more time. I think
there is that really really depressing sense of exasperation about
how customers expect the car to take care of them,
(35:09):
and how the average driver just expects the car to
be completely flawless and to save their lives under any circumstances.
What the car guys want the rest of us to
(35:30):
acknowledge is that driving is a complicated and dangerous act.
It is not just the negligent or the reckless who
make fatal mistakes. Ordinary people do under seemingly ordinary circumstances.
Mark Sailor did nothing wrong. Nothing. What happened to him
could have happened to any of us and will happen
(35:51):
again unless we can finally have an honest conversation about
what a car is and what it is, and what
the responsibility of a driver is when things go awrve.
Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
just does what the driver tells it to do all right,
(36:11):
So here we are, we're in our what is this?
What is two thousands three camper? Is a two thousand
and three or two thousand and four twenty two thousand miles? Okay,
get ready? That was I was completely surprised that that
(36:33):
was the most un unremarkable, not remarkable thing. And let's
right again, Sigernel hold at sixty. You've been listening to
Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do
(36:55):
us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can
get more information about this and other episodes at revisionist
history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky, and Jacob Smith.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Our
(37:19):
fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks to Eddie Altman,
Don Sherman, and Casey Colwell a car and driver for
helping us to find and buy a two thousand and
three camera and taking a day off to hostess. Also
thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for braving the break tests.
The Penemptly management team is Laura Mayor Andy Bowers in
(37:41):
Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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