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 Julivista, California,
just south of San Diego. Sailor was forty five years old,
a California Higway Patrol officer. Ordinarily, he drove a two
thousand and six Lexus ISS, but his car had a
(00:35):
problem with his CD player, so that morning he took
it to the dealership and got a loaner a brand
new Lexus ES. Sailor finished his shift at the highway
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
(00:57):
town called Santi Lostrella, who's sitting in the backseat, calls
nine one one. What you're about to hear? A mourning
you is harrowing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Nine Montier and see what are you're reporting? Yeah, we're
the lection start. I'm sorry your cell phone cutting out.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
We're going north one twenty five.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Hit our suck, I'm sorry for.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Our accelerator stuck well one twenty five blake.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Okay, north found one twenty five. Where are you passing?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
We are passing out?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Where are we passing? We're we're we're going one hundred
twenty mission.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Gorge, We're we're in trouble.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
We can't We're there's no.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Break, okay, Gorge and three or a half mile okay,
And you don't have the ability to like turn the
vehicle off or anything.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
Approaching an intersection.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
We're approaching the intersection. Okay, we're approaching intersection. Hold on, pray, pray,
shot Oh oh hello.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
The ooo you hear is Listrella'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
(02:23):
Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story. 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, was played on the nightly news, written
up in horrified news articles, to the point where a
wave of fear swept the country.
Speaker 7 (02:42):
Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales.
Speaker 8 (02:44):
Due to a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives
in days.
Speaker 9 (02:48):
Runaway Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to
one hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 10 (02:53):
A woman died she crashed her camera into a tree
and a pole.
Speaker 11 (02:57):
A car had sped up to more than one hundred
miles per hour.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Hundreds of people came forward with horror stories about their
Lexus accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is
a brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings Expose's whistleblowers.
NASA got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September
two thousand and nine and March twenty ten, totaling millions
(03:22):
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 dollar fine to the
US government. They spent another one point one billion to
settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've settled
(03:43):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
Toyota's conduct was shameful.
Speaker 9 (03:59):
He showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed
to look after the safety of consumers.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's Eric Holder in March twenty 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 Gladwell. You're listening
to Revisionist History, or every week we go back and
(04:26):
examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted to
the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard at
least some part of that nine to one before. Maybe
(04:48):
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 moment
(05:08):
to 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. He'd accelerated to
(05:32):
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 that hold floor mats down.
(05:53):
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 car while it's in motion.
(06:15):
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 call goes
viral and Toyota launches a massive recall of floormats across
its model line. Problem solved, right, Well, No, here's the problem.
(06:36):
Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration crisis thinks that
floormats are any more than a small part of the story.
It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
So that's an all weather matt.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
That's my producer, Jacob Smith talking to Sean kin.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
This is the killer format. Okay, this is the format
that brought Toyota to fame.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Cain runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research
and Strategies. Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean
Kain'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 mat theory.
Speaker 6 (07:12):
When the pedal was depressed fully to the floor, okay,
the way this road here, the 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.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell the whole story.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals. So the
way this was have to happen is you'd have to
depress your accelerator pedal newly to the floor all the
wide through to wide open throttle. You'd have to mash
that accelerator to the floor and to have that.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Cain 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
of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically,
(08:04):
since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her
camera down the streets? Mark Sailor, he was driving with
what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while.
Why didn't he just reach down and yank the format
away from the pedal? Right?
Speaker 6 (08:18):
I still have a hard time believing, giving a long
distance in the Travelers car, that the format was the culprit.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Caine 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
must have been happening, and a number of people believe
(08:44):
that something has to do with software. That there is
and was something wrong with the software that governs the
throttle in Toyotas.
Speaker 6 (08:52):
In today's cars. Now we're looking at code, code that
can 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 car today can
run one hundred million lines of code. You got a
what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got a
fifty one thousand dollars car. In the complexity level of
the fifty thousand dollars car is exponentially greater. Do you
(09:14):
think that that car is now going to be defect
free and software clear not likely.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
This is the argument that Kane has made in lawsuits
against Toyota. The cars 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 the country, the Lobe, for its work.
If the La Times and Sean Kin are right, then
(09:43):
that's terrifying, because 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
(10:04):
a terrible story, 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
(10:24):
of the last twelve years. 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
(10:51):
one Chili winter morning, Jacob 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, I had someone in a jeep Cherokee
keeping an eye on us, making sure we didn't take
(11:13):
photos of any of the new cars they were testing.
Oh look, there's the Q seven. Those are 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 works with Don. Eddie Altman also came. He's
the editor of Car and Driver. Oh that's that Camra
(11:35):
side Don, Casey Eddie. They're 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 lift up on that.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
We were all had come on last.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It was over a second true story. When I was thirteen,
I wrote away for 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.
Speaker 11 (12:12):
Detroit, Silver Camera Entering VDF, staying out of your way
like we were before, happy.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
The plan 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 that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your
(12:44):
car surges uncontrollably, you slam on the brakes. We want
to figure out what that looks like.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
You're going to make a go wide open throttle, then
quickly you apply the brakes, not really a panic, but
just stop at the best you can.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
So Jacob goes out first, with Casey behind the wheel,
he accelerates.
Speaker 12 (13:03):
So bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two, sixty three,
sixty five, sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy and
about to do it all right, We're gonna put the
throttle down.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
the brake with the gas pedal still.
Speaker 7 (13:23):
Down, and we locked up a little bit. But but
I mean that's the car stops. Oh yeah, car stops.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
But no loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back.
Jacob asks Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape
are they in?
Speaker 7 (13:39):
Is it a little cooked or no, it's it's not.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I don't think the brakes are cooked.
Speaker 9 (13:43):
Why do they smell leg We'll know in a second.
Speaker 7 (13:47):
Don't even smell about.
Speaker 12 (13:48):
Okay, if you have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine,
the breaks win.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Then it's my turn. I get into camera with Eddie Altraman.
He's driving. We take the car down straight.
Speaker 7 (13:59):
Away, Can we go a little faster? Let me get
the pass of the favorite.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Seventy Ultimate hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come
to a halt.
Speaker 7 (14:13):
Throttles open. We've got.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
A really old not a terribly good shaped car filled
with three people and a bunch of equipment, and.
Speaker 7 (14:27):
It's still stopping. So what's that?
Speaker 1 (14:32):
What is the difference between breaking with your foot 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?
Speaker 7 (14:44):
About ten feet if you want to quantify it.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
It can be a little bit more, but not so
much that you notice.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
Driver do a version of this very same test.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
We basically did this with a variety of cars, and
we found actually that with the throttle stuck open, or
going at seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty
close to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that
had his throng closed.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
A camera with the accelerator stuck wide open stops basically
as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
Speaker 13 (15:24):
It's not a big deal. Yeah, But of course we're
not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
cars goss as my demons and we're in a closed
kind of situation. But you can see, I'll get it
up to seventy.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Okay, not a big deal, Yeah, Yeah, it's the most undramatic.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
You want to try it?
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I would love to truck it.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
We were out on the testing ground for two hours.
We tried every trick in the book. The car stopped.
We 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 are we at ninety to getting there? It took forever,
(16:22):
but it stopped. Afterwards, Don Sherman and I talked about
the strangely normal experience of bringing a camera to a
full stop with the accelerator to the floor.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
The brakes are powerful.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
You've 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 braking is relatively easy
to do, it much more powerful.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
That's what people.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Don't acknowledge, that all the capability built into their car.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
When Car and Driver did their version of this experiment
right after the Sailor crash, they went so far as
to do a full throttle breaking town on a Rushe
Stage three Mustang. If you aren't a car guy, I
should explain. Rush is an independent company that takes sports
cars and basically puts them on steroids. The engine of
(17:22):
the Stage three Rouche has five hundred and forty horse power.
That's two to three times more powerful than the typical
car on the road. A monster. A roush would take
a camera and chop it into little, tiny pieces. So
car and driver take the Rush Mustang up to one
hundred miles an hour, keep their foot on the accelerator
(17:44):
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 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 breaks win. I think you can
(18:07):
now understand how crucial this point is. Toyota gets embroiled
in a massive controversy. They pay billions 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
(18:29):
have to do is step on the brakes because breaks
beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailors stop his lexus
that day as he sped down Highway 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
(18:56):
story is a man named Dick Schmid. Sadly, 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
(19:18):
important figure in what's called human performance research. Human performance
research asks how do people move and act and interact
with the physical world. Schmid 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 Schmid about a year before
(19:39):
he died. He was in a wheelchair. By that point,
he had a neurological disease, and you'll 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. Schmid
got involved in the sudden acceleration issue years ago when
he got a call from an attorney in Washington, d C.
(20:01):
It was a case involving a taxi driver who picked
up some people outside a hotel. Nathan knows he's running
of parkway. What Schmid'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
(20:23):
car into a wall.
Speaker 14 (20:24):
He splits a car at a wall.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
That 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.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
It.
Speaker 14 (20:38):
Was there ever a moment when you suspected there might
be a mechanical cause to these incidents?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever suspected that
the problem might be with the car, a malfunction, 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
(21:04):
sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver the car.
He starts to look at other cases and discovers that
there are some pretty clear patterns. But those patterns don't
involve a particular make or model of car. Nothing that
(21:25):
could make you say, oh, there's something wrong with that
kind of car. Every car maker gets hit with complaints
of sudden acceleration. When it's 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 happens to everyone.
(21:46):
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 be people who
are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance, parking lot attendants.
(22:09):
This 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 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
(22:32):
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 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
(22:53):
the stoping and starting of 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 describe this is impulse very ability.
Your brain requests a very specific action, but your body
(23:14):
fails to deliver exactly what it's told to do.
Speaker 14 (23:17):
I mean to say that even when producing a very
familiar physical movement, there is variability in how I move
my limbs and the force with which I use. So
baseball players swinging a bat at a fastball may feel
like he's reproducing his swing.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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.
Speaker 14 (23:47):
I don't think the is confused.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Which the brake pedal, which is accelerator pedally knows.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
But Schmid says, I don't think the driver's 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 intention and action,
(24:15):
there's a garble, a glitch, And 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. Why do
(24:36):
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 odds of
(24:59):
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. Let me
give you one. He's driving down the highway with the
(25:22):
cruise control on. Both of his feet are on the floormat.
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. Now comes the crucial part.
(25:42):
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 he puts his foot on the
accelerator instead of the brake, and he presses it down
(26:05):
expecting the car to slow, but it doesn't. That's why
Listrella says, the breaks don't work, and Sailor freaks out,
so he presses down harder and the car goes even
faster and he freaks out even more. 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
(26:28):
or drunk. He's making a mistake that almost any of
us could make under the circumstances. What happened to him
in that moment is confusion.
Speaker 14 (26:37):
So they're going into a kind of panic state where
instead of asking the question is my foot of the
right pedal? They think the problem is are not pushing
the break hard enough, so the perception that the brakes
have failed has pedal goes to the floor and.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
The car stop. Schmid says, the perception is that the
brakes have failed because the pedal goes to the floor
and the car doesn't stop. Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some
kind of far fetched theory here. In February twenty eleven,
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its report on the
whole Toyota business. That's the one NASA got involved in,
(27:16):
and they basically agreed with Schmidt. They concluded that the
overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases were clearly pedal error.
The agency knows this because every car has a black
box that records when the brake 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
(27:45):
here's my question, why is it 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 Railer Hood went before Congress and said, my.
Speaker 14 (28:03):
Advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop
driving it, take it to Toyota dealer, because they believe
they have the fix for it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Do you realize how insane that is. This is the
guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is
completely diluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
Speaker 6 (28:27):
They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
cars again and again.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
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. Wow, it's like that. Uh,
But of course all you have to do if a
Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is use the brakes. So ABC rigs
(28:55):
up an Avalon and essentially stages an episode of unintended
acceleration brace don't work Frank's get out Gee. The fakery
was later uncovered by the website Jeelopnik. Here's the editor
of Jeelopnik, Patrick George.
Speaker 11 (29:10):
They got a university professor to cut three wires within
the electronic throttle control system, 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 a way that you would would never
produce these results in real life.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
At the same time, they fake a video, or if
you ask ABC, they make an editing error that makes
it look like 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
(29:54):
the simplest and most plausible explanation, which is people are
hitting the wrong pedal crazy. It gets worse at the
height of the Toyota controversy, Consumer Reports releases a video
telling driver what to do in the case of unintended acceleration.
So this is one of the most trusted and irreputable
(30:14):
brands in the United States. Millions of people look to
Consumer Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of
automotive testing, Jake Fisher, has to say.
Speaker 9 (30:25):
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 jammed floormat. Fortunately, if remain calm and
follow a few steps, you can easily avoid tragedy.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Wait, stop right there. He lists a 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.
Speaker 9 (30:58):
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 explorating hard, even after you
take your foot off the gas pedal, your first instinct
is probably the right one. Step one, put your foot
on the brake firmly and don't lift off. It's extremely
(31:19):
important not to lift your foot off the brake.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
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 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
(31:44):
the exact opposite. He needs to say it is extremely
important to lift your foot off whatever pedal it is on,
because chances are you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now
place it back on the brake firmly. This is an advice,
This is malpractice. In the spring of twenty ten, the
(32:11):
people who run the autowebsite Edmunds dot com got really
frustrated with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration had become,
so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
the car was the culprit in sudden acceleration that is
an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
a floormat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them a
(32:32):
million dollars. A million dollars they put together a panel
of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who came
forward to win? I asked Dan Edmons, who heads up
the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a grand
total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even met
(32:53):
the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five,
one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again,
and the rest, he says, are just nonsense. So they
can't avoid the prize. The million dollars is still sitting
there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits
(33:14):
filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the
software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any
of those plan defloyers.
Speaker 10 (33:25):
No, we didn't hear from 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.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Remember Sean Kin, Mister sudden acceleration, the guy with the
software coding gone awry theory, Not even he wants the
million dollars.
Speaker 6 (33:49):
It was nothing more than a media circus, and it
was ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
A media circus. Kin 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 Toyota sudden
acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kain insisted that some
elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, Because people like
Sean Kin couldn't admit that this was just overwhelmingly a
(34:19):
matter of human error. I've used the phrase car guys
in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt was a
car guy. The three people from Car and Driver are
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.
(34:44):
It's a complicated mechanical object that requires attention and skill
to be operated safely, and non car people have lost
sight of that fact. Here is Eddie Altaman of Car
and Driver one more time.
Speaker 8 (34:59):
I think there is that really really depressing sense of
exasperation about how customers expect the car to take care
of them, and how the average driver just expects the
car to be completely flawless and to save their lives
under any circumstances.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
What the car guys want the rest of us to
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 awry.
Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
just does what the driver tells it to do.
Speaker 7 (36:11):
All right.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
So here we are, we're in our what is this?
What is this? Two thousand and three camera?
Speaker 4 (36:16):
This is it two thousand and three or two thousand
and four? Twenty two thousand miles?
Speaker 7 (36:21):
Is okay? I'll love to fifty five miles of four?
Get ready?
Speaker 1 (36:31):
That was I was completely surprised to that. That was
the most un unremarkable, that remarkable thing.
Speaker 7 (36:37):
And let's try it again. Say your nail hold it
a sixty.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
other episodes at Revisionististory 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
(37:13):
composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Laonon Williams is
our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks
to Eddie Altman, Don Sherman, and Casey Cowell. 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
(37:35):
braving the break tests. The Penalty management team is Laura Mayor,
Andy Bauers, and 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 Julivista, California,
just south of San Diego. Sailor was forty five years old,
a California Higway Patrol officer. Ordinarily, he drove a two
thousand and six Lexus ISS, but his car had a
(00:35):
problem with his CD player, so that morning he took
it to the dealership and got a loaner a brand
new Lexus ES. Sailor finished his shift at the highway
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
(00:57):
town called Santi Lostrella, who's sitting in the backseat, calls
nine one one. What you're about to hear? A mourning
you is harrowing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Nine Montier and see what are you're reporting? Yeah, we're
the lection start. I'm sorry your cell phone cutting out.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
We're going north one twenty five.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Hit our suck, I'm sorry for.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Our accelerator stuck well one twenty five blake.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Okay, north found one twenty five. Where are you passing?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
We are passing out?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Where are we passing? We're we're we're going one hundred
twenty mission.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Gorge, We're we're in trouble.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
We can't We're there's no.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Break, okay, Gorge and three or a half mile okay,
And you don't have the ability to like turn the
vehicle off or anything.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
Approaching an intersection.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
We're approaching the intersection. Okay, we're approaching intersection. Hold on, pray, pray,
shot Oh oh hello.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
The ooo you hear is Listrella'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
(02:23):
Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story. 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, was played on the nightly news, written
up in horrified news articles, to the point where a
wave of fear swept the country.
Speaker 7 (02:42):
Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales.
Speaker 8 (02:44):
Due to a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives
in days.
Speaker 9 (02:48):
Runaway Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to
one hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 10 (02:53):
A woman died she crashed her camera into a tree
and a pole.
Speaker 11 (02:57):
A car had sped up to more than one hundred
miles per hour.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Hundreds of people came forward with horror stories about their
Lexus accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is
a brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings Expose's whistleblowers.
NASA got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September
two thousand and nine and March twenty ten, totaling millions
(03:22):
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 dollar fine to the
US government. They spent another one point one billion to
settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've settled
(03:43):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
Toyota's conduct was shameful.
Speaker 9 (03:59):
He showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed
to look after the safety of consumers.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's Eric Holder in March twenty 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 Gladwell. You're listening
to Revisionist History, or every week we go back and
(04:26):
examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted to
the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard at
least some part of that nine to one before. Maybe
(04:48):
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 moment
(05:08):
to 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. He'd accelerated to
(05:32):
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 that hold floor mats down.
(05:53):
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 car while it's in motion.
(06:15):
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 call goes
viral and Toyota launches a massive recall of floormats across
its model line. Problem solved, right, Well, No, here's the problem.
(06:36):
Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration crisis thinks that
floormats are any more than a small part of the story.
It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
So that's an all weather matt.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
That's my producer, Jacob Smith talking to Sean kin.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
This is the killer format. Okay, this is the format
that brought Toyota to fame.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Cain runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research
and Strategies. Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean
Kain'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 mat theory.
Speaker 6 (07:12):
When the pedal was depressed fully to the floor, okay,
the way this road here, the 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.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell the whole story.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals. So the
way this was have to happen is you'd have to
depress your accelerator pedal newly to the floor all the
wide through to wide open throttle. You'd have to mash
that accelerator to the floor and to have that.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Cain 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
of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically,
(08:04):
since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her
camera down the streets? Mark Sailor, he was driving with
what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while.
Why didn't he just reach down and yank the format
away from the pedal? Right?
Speaker 6 (08:18):
I still have a hard time believing, giving a long
distance in the Travelers car, that the format was the culprit.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Caine 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
must have been happening, and a number of people believe
(08:44):
that something has to do with software. That there is
and was something wrong with the software that governs the
throttle in Toyotas.
Speaker 6 (08:52):
In today's cars. Now we're looking at code, code that
can 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 car today can
run one hundred million lines of code. You got a
what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got a
fifty one thousand dollars car. In the complexity level of
the fifty thousand dollars car is exponentially greater. Do you
(09:14):
think that that car is now going to be defect
free and software clear not likely.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
This is the argument that Kane has made in lawsuits
against Toyota. The cars 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 the country, the Lobe, for its work.
If the La Times and Sean Kin are right, then
(09:43):
that's terrifying, because 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
(10:04):
a terrible story, 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
(10:24):
of the last twelve years. 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
(10:51):
one Chili winter morning, Jacob 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, I had someone in a jeep Cherokee
keeping an eye on us, making sure we didn't take
(11:13):
photos of any of the new cars they were testing.
Oh look, there's the Q seven. Those are 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 works with Don. Eddie Altman also came. He's
the editor of Car and Driver. Oh that's that Camra
(11:35):
side Don, Casey Eddie. They're 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 lift up on that.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
We were all had come on last.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It was over a second true story. When I was thirteen,
I wrote away for 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.
Speaker 11 (12:12):
Detroit, Silver Camera Entering VDF, staying out of your way
like we were before, happy.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
The plan 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 that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your
(12:44):
car surges uncontrollably, you slam on the brakes. We want
to figure out what that looks like.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
You're going to make a go wide open throttle, then
quickly you apply the brakes, not really a panic, but
just stop at the best you can.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
So Jacob goes out first, with Casey behind the wheel,
he accelerates.
Speaker 12 (13:03):
So bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two, sixty three,
sixty five, sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy and
about to do it all right, We're gonna put the
throttle down.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
So the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
the brake with the gas pedal still.
Speaker 7 (13:23):
Down, and we locked up a little bit. But but
I mean that's the car stops. Oh yeah, car stops.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
But no loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back.
Jacob asks Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape
are they in?
Speaker 7 (13:39):
Is it a little cooked or no, it's it's not.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I don't think the brakes are cooked.
Speaker 9 (13:43):
Why do they smell leg We'll know in a second.
Speaker 7 (13:47):
Don't even smell about.
Speaker 12 (13:48):
Okay, if you have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine,
the breaks win.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Then it's my turn. I get into camera with Eddie Altraman.
He's driving. We take the car down straight.
Speaker 7 (13:59):
Away, Can we go a little faster? Let me get
the pass of the favorite.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Seventy Ultimate hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come
to a halt.
Speaker 7 (14:13):
Throttles open. We've got.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
A really old not a terribly good shaped car filled
with three people and a bunch of equipment, and.
Speaker 7 (14:27):
It's still stopping. So what's that?
Speaker 1 (14:32):
What is the difference between breaking with your foot 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?
Speaker 7 (14:44):
About ten feet if you want to quantify it.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
It can be a little bit more, but not so
much that you notice.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
Driver do a version of this very same test.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
We basically did this with a variety of cars, and
we found actually that with the throttle stuck open, or
going at seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty
close to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that
had his throng closed.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
A camera with the accelerator stuck wide open stops basically
as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
Speaker 13 (15:24):
It's not a big deal. Yeah, But of course we're
not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
cars goss as my demons and we're in a closed
kind of situation. But you can see, I'll get it
up to seventy.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Okay, not a big deal, Yeah, Yeah, it's the most undramatic.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
You want to try it?
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I would love to truck it.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
We were out on the testing ground for two hours.
We tried every trick in the book. The car stopped.
We 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 are we at ninety to getting there? It took forever,
(16:22):
but it stopped. Afterwards, Don Sherman and I talked about
the strangely normal experience of bringing a camera to a
full stop with the accelerator to the floor.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
The brakes are powerful.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
You've 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 braking is relatively easy
to do, it much more powerful.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
That's what people.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Don't acknowledge, that all the capability built into their car.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
When Car and Driver did their version of this experiment
right after the Sailor crash, they went so far as
to do a full throttle breaking town on a Rushe
Stage three Mustang. If you aren't a car guy, I
should explain. Rush is an independent company that takes sports
cars and basically puts them on steroids. The engine of
(17:22):
the Stage three Rouche has five hundred and forty horse power.
That's two to three times more powerful than the typical
car on the road. A monster. A roush would take
a camera and chop it into little, tiny pieces. So
car and driver take the Rush Mustang up to one
hundred miles an hour, keep their foot on the accelerator
(17:44):
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 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 breaks win. I think you can
(18:07):
now understand how crucial this point is. Toyota gets embroiled
in a massive controversy. They pay billions 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
(18:29):
have to do is step on the brakes because breaks
beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailors stop his lexus
that day as he sped down Highway 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
(18:56):
story is a man named Dick Schmid. Sadly, 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
(19:18):
important figure in what's called human performance research. Human performance
research asks how do people move and act and interact
with the physical world. Schmid 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 Schmid about a year before
(19:39):
he died. He was in a wheelchair. By that point,
he had a neurological disease, and you'll 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. Schmid
got involved in the sudden acceleration issue years ago when
he got a call from an attorney in Washington, d C.
(20:01):
It was a case involving a taxi driver who picked
up some people outside a hotel. Nathan knows he's running
of parkway. What Schmid'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
(20:23):
car into a wall.
Speaker 14 (20:24):
He splits a car at a wall.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
That 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.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
It.
Speaker 14 (20:38):
Was there ever a moment when you suspected there might
be a mechanical cause to these incidents?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever suspected that
the problem might be with the car, a malfunction, 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
(21:04):
sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver the car.
He starts to look at other cases and discovers that
there are some pretty clear patterns. But those patterns don't
involve a particular make or model of car. Nothing that
(21:25):
could make you say, oh, there's something wrong with that
kind of car. Every car maker gets hit with complaints
of sudden acceleration. When it's 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 happens to everyone.
(21:46):
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 be people who
are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance, parking lot attendants.
(22:09):
This 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 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
(22:32):
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 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
(22:53):
the stoping and starting of 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 describe this is impulse very ability.
Your brain requests a very specific action, but your body
(23:14):
fails to deliver exactly what it's told to do.
Speaker 14 (23:17):
I mean to say that even when producing a very
familiar physical movement, there is variability in how I move
my limbs and the force with which I use. So
baseball players swinging a bat at a fastball may feel
like he's reproducing his swing.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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.
Speaker 14 (23:47):
I don't think the is confused.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Which the brake pedal, which is accelerator pedally knows.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
But Schmid says, I don't think the driver's 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 intention and action,
(24:15):
there's a garble, a glitch, And 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. Why do
(24:36):
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 odds of
(24:59):
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. Let me
give you one. He's driving down the highway with the
(25:22):
cruise control on. Both of his feet are on the floormat.
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. Now comes the crucial part.
(25:42):
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 he puts his foot on the
accelerator instead of the brake, and he presses it down
(26:05):
expecting the car to slow, but it doesn't. That's why
Listrella says, the breaks don't work, and Sailor freaks out,
so he presses down harder and the car goes even
faster and he freaks out even more. 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
(26:28):
or drunk. He's making a mistake that almost any of
us could make under the circumstances. What happened to him
in that moment is confusion.
Speaker 14 (26:37):
So they're going into a kind of panic state where
instead of asking the question is my foot of the
right pedal? They think the problem is are not pushing
the break hard enough, so the perception that the brakes
have failed has pedal goes to the floor and.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
The car stop. Schmid says, the perception is that the
brakes have failed because the pedal goes to the floor
and the car doesn't stop. Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some
kind of far fetched theory here. In February twenty eleven,
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its report on the
whole Toyota business. That's the one NASA got involved in,
(27:16):
and they basically agreed with Schmidt. They concluded that the
overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases were clearly pedal error.
The agency knows this because every car has a black
box that records when the brake 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
(27:45):
here's my question, why is it 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 Railer Hood went before Congress and said, my.
Speaker 14 (28:03):
Advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop
driving it, take it to Toyota dealer, because they believe
they have the fix for it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Do you realize how insane that is. This is the
guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is
completely diluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
Speaker 6 (28:27):
They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
cars again and again.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
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. Wow, it's like that. Uh,
But of course all you have to do if a
Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is use the brakes. So ABC rigs
(28:55):
up an Avalon and essentially stages an episode of unintended
acceleration brace don't work Frank's get out Gee. The fakery
was later uncovered by the website Jeelopnik. Here's the editor
of Jeelopnik, Patrick George.
Speaker 11 (29:10):
They got a university professor to cut three wires within
the electronic throttle control system, 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 a way that you would would never
produce these results in real life.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
At the same time, they fake a video, or if
you ask ABC, they make an editing error that makes
it look like 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
(29:54):
the simplest and most plausible explanation, which is people are
hitting the wrong pedal crazy. It gets worse at the
height of the Toyota controversy, Consumer Reports releases a video
telling driver what to do in the case of unintended acceleration.
So this is one of the most trusted and irreputable
(30:14):
brands in the United States. Millions of people look to
Consumer Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of
automotive testing, Jake Fisher, has to say.
Speaker 9 (30:25):
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 jammed floormat. Fortunately, if remain calm and
follow a few steps, you can easily avoid tragedy.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Wait, stop right there. He lists a 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.
Speaker 9 (30:58):
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 explorating hard, even after you
take your foot off the gas pedal, your first instinct
is probably the right one. Step one, put your foot
on the brake firmly and don't lift off. It's extremely
(31:19):
important not to lift your foot off the brake.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
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 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
(31:44):
the exact opposite. He needs to say it is extremely
important to lift your foot off whatever pedal it is on,
because chances are you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now
place it back on the brake firmly. This is an advice,
This is malpractice. In the spring of twenty ten, the
(32:11):
people who run the autowebsite Edmunds dot com got really
frustrated with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration had become,
so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
the car was the culprit in sudden acceleration that is
an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
a floormat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them a
(32:32):
million dollars. A million dollars they put together a panel
of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who came
forward to win? I asked Dan Edmons, who heads up
the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a grand
total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even met
(32:53):
the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five,
one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again,
and the rest, he says, are just nonsense. So they
can't avoid the prize. The million dollars is still sitting
there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits
(33:14):
filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the
software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any
of those plan defloyers.
Speaker 10 (33:25):
No, we didn't hear from 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.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Remember Sean Kin, Mister sudden acceleration, the guy with the
software coding gone awry theory, Not even he wants the
million dollars.
Speaker 6 (33:49):
It was nothing more than a media circus, and it
was ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
A media circus. Kin 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 Toyota sudden
acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kain insisted that some
elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, Because people like
Sean Kin couldn't admit that this was just overwhelmingly a
(34:19):
matter of human error. I've used the phrase car guys
in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt was a
car guy. The three people from Car and Driver are
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.
(34:44):
It's a complicated mechanical object that requires attention and skill
to be operated safely, and non car people have lost
sight of that fact. Here is Eddie Altaman of Car
and Driver one more time.
Speaker 8 (34:59):
I think there is that really really depressing sense of
exasperation about how customers expect the car to take care
of them, and how the average driver just expects the
car to be completely flawless and to save their lives
under any circumstances.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
What the car guys want the rest of us to
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 awry.
Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
just does what the driver tells it to do.
Speaker 7 (36:11):
All right.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
So here we are, we're in our what is this?
What is this? Two thousand and three camera?
Speaker 4 (36:16):
This is it two thousand and three or two thousand
and four? Twenty two thousand miles?
Speaker 7 (36:21):
Is okay? I'll love to fifty five miles of four?
Get ready?
Speaker 1 (36:31):
That was I was completely surprised to that. That was
the most un unremarkable, that remarkable thing.
Speaker 7 (36:37):
And let's try it again. Say your nail hold it
a sixty.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
other episodes at Revisionististory 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
(37:13):
composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Laonon Williams is
our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks
to Eddie Altman, Don Sherman, and Casey Cowell. 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
(37:35):
braving the break tests. The Penalty management team is Laura Mayor,
Andy Bauers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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