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Old 30th October 2010, 02:10   #226
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Originally Posted by vinaydas View Post
But not many have the courage or the guts to do what toyota did.
I would not call it courage. Lot of links have been posted on how Toyota tried to hide the matter. Here's one more.

Toyota secretly bought problem cars, lawsuit says - Yahoo! News


And it says the company's confirmation of at least one clear-cut case of sudden unintended acceleration was concealed rather than reported to federal auto safety regulators.

Statement from Toyota:

Toyota acknowledged in a statement on Thursday that it has repurchased vehicles from customers who complained of unintended acceleration but did so to conduct "further engineering analysis" on the cars.
However, the company said its technicians have never been able to replicate those "acceleration concerns nor found any related issues or conditions in these vehicles."


But internal communication says otherwise:


But in a series of field reports from 2006 to 2010 involving Toyota Camrys, technicians from Hong Kong confirmed unintended acceleration in cars they tested while ruling out faulty floor mats or gas pedals, the lawsuit said.
Moreover, the acceleration glitches were duplicated without the vehicle's diagnostic equipment detecting a malfunction. In a separate 2009 case, service manager described in a company memo as "trustworthy and reliable" experienced an unexplained burst of acceleration while test-driving a Toyota Tacoma. The vehicle raced from 70 miles per hour to 95 miles per hour in seconds with "no pedal contact" from the driver. Floor mats were properly secured, according to the lawsuit.

With all the evidence in place I would not use the words you did.

Last edited by airbender : 30th October 2010 at 02:13.
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Old 30th October 2010, 08:54   #227
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^^ Boy either you are totally against the Japs or Toyota has stolen production idea's from you without giving due credit.

almost six months since my previous post. The fact is Despite all the recalls and Toyota Bashing, The reliability(assurance/No niggles) they provide is something that the Germans/Italians/Indians can only dream off.

Last edited by vinaydas : 30th October 2010 at 08:56.
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Old 18th November 2010, 02:44   #228
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Originally Posted by vinaydas View Post
^^ Boy either you are totally against the Japs or Toyota has stolen production idea's from you without giving due credit.

almost six months since my previous post. The fact is Despite all the recalls and Toyota Bashing, The reliability(assurance/No niggles) they provide is something that the Germans/Italians/Indians can only dream off.
I have nothing against toyota. I admire honda and myself drive a nissan while looking to own a lexus.

Don't really understand what made you to add the word "courage" into that statement. And you repeated that in other threads too.

Last edited by airbender : 18th November 2010 at 02:46.
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Old 10th February 2011, 10:47   #229
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

Guys,
I was surprised to read in today's edition of The Washington Post that the panel appointed by the US Govt to study Toyota's problems relating to the major recall last year, has submitted its findings holding Toyota not responsible for the reported cases of sudden, unintended acceleration.

It has, on the other hand, attributed the accidents to driver error. Will post more after I get more information.

I believe this is already causing a storm in a teacup.
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Old 10th February 2011, 11:20   #230
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

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Originally Posted by vnabhi View Post
Guys,
I was surprised to read in today's edition of The Washington Post that the panel appointed by the US Govt to study Toyota's problems relating to the major recall last year, has submitted its findings holding Toyota not responsible for the reported cases of sudden, unintended acceleration.

It has, on the other hand, attributed the accidents to driver error. Will post more after I get more information.

I believe this is already causing a storm in a teacup.
Welcome to America. What do you think the 'S' stands for in USA?
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Old 11th February 2011, 03:10   #231
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

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Originally Posted by CPH View Post
Welcome to America. What do you think the 'S' stands for in USA?
I'll get a stinker if I post what I think it is
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Old 18th February 2011, 13:01   #232
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NASA Report

Surprised no one posted the ending to this long drawn crisis...

Source : Nasa Website

NASA - NASA's Toyota Study Released by Dept. of Transportation

Quote:
NASA's Toyota Study Released by Dept. of Transportation

02.08.11

WASHINGTON --

The results of a ten-month study by 30 NASA engineers of possible electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles was released today by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

"NASA found no evidence that a malfunction in electronics caused large unintended accelerations," said Michael Kirsch, principal engineer and team lead of the study from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

At the request of Congress, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began the study in March 2010 and asked NASA engineers with expertise in electronic and software systems to look into consumer claims that electronic systems may have played a role in reports of unintended acceleration.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and officials who led the study for NASA and NHTSA provided the results on Tuesday afternoon in Washington.

LaHood thanked NASA and other DOT engineers saying, "We enlisted the best and brightest engineers to study Toyota's electronics systems, and the verdict is in."

Two mechanical safety defects were identified by NHTSA more than a year ago: "sticking" accelerator pedals and a design flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats. These are the only known causes for the reported unintended acceleration incidents. Toyota recalled nearly 8 million vehicles in the United States for these two defects.

Kirsch went on to say that, "NASA and NHTSA engineers stood side by side in this study to try to find the root cause of the problem. We have a strong team including some of the best electronics and software experts in NASA."

The NESC team included NASA software experts in California to NASA hardware and systems engineers in Maryland who examined computer controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference and software to determine if these systems played a role in incidents of unintended acceleration.

The NESC was established in 2003 in response to the space shuttle Columbia accident with a goal to enable complex problem solving using experts from anywhere in the world. This approach allows the best engineers in their respective disciplines to apply their expertise to tough technical problems. To date, the NESC has engaged in approximately 400 independent technical assessments. Recently, the NESC provided support to the trapped miners in Chile by developing suggested design requirements for the rescue system.

Another Perspective I got from a email forward, a guru on Lean Methodology.

Toyota and Sudden Acceleration: Facts from the NASA Report | Lean Enterprise Institute

Quote:


NASA just released its highly anticipated report about the Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) charge in Toyota vehicles. (www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/features/nesc-toyota-study.html ) The verdict is in. And Toyota's electronic throttle control system is fully exonerated. The ten-month study by 30 NASA engineers found "no evidence that a malfunction in electronics caused large unintended accelerations," according to Michael Kirsch, principal engineer and team leader of the study. This means that that the reports of SUA were caused by "pedal misapplication," otherwise known as driver error.

So the events that led Toyota to recall 10 million vehicles may go down in industrial history as the biggest mountain of a crisis ever made out of the smallest molehill of a technical glitch. We now have verifiable facts, rather than conclusions drawn by politicians, media pundits, and lawyers based on assumptions, innuendo and fear.

Adding to the clarity provided by the NASA (commissioned by the U.S. NHSTA) report is a forthcoming book titled Toyota Under Fire by Jeff Liker and Tim Ogden (you can pre-order it from publisher McGraw Hill here which sheds even more light on the gulf between facts, and the way in which opportunists jumped to conclusions, throughout the entire crisis. I followed the story as it unfolded about as closely as anyone could ("Toyota the Bad Guy," "Toyota Trouble: Fighting the Demons of Complexity," "Robert Cole's Observations," "Dialogue with Jeff Liker," "It's Not the Crisis, It's How You Respond," "Detroit Auto Show Overshadowed" ) but still found reams of insightful new information in Toyota Under Fire.

These new resources clearly show how events spiraled out of control. The pivotal event that sparked the recall crisis was the tragic death of the Saylor family in a loaner Lexus in San Diego in 2009. The story of that accident quickly spread through the media, and was interpreted as SUA due to electronics. What actually happened is that a dealer placed a too-large all weather floor mat, one intended for an SUV, in the loaned passenger car without attaching it down. This entrapped the accelerator pedal, causing the accident. This event, and subsequent public attention, then snowballed into a global crisis for Toyota, with congressional hearings, public apologies in countries around the world, and 10 million (give or take a few million) recalls.

The technical charges leveled at Toyota took on a life of their own, quickly becoming "truth" in the public eye. Again, these reports show that there has never been a single confirmed case of electronically caused SUA, in any vehicle of any make - ever. More to the point of Toyota's specific issues: 1. there have been two documented cases of a serious accident due to "floor mat entrapment" (the one that resulted in the accident referenced above and a Camry accident in 2007 that killed one person) and 2. the "sticky pedal" problem in the U.S. is based on a handful of technical field reports from Toyota which include only twelve vehicles (others are surely out there but no more have been confirmed, and others are surely out there on vehicles of all makes and models). Sticky pedals do not cause SUA, they are simply slow to return to idle position (and tests showed the stopping distance with the sticky pedal was the same as with a normal pedal). For that, 10 million recalls.

So . . . case closed? Not so fast. On the technical side, NASA's findings may have exonerated Toyota of the most serious problems that the company has been accused of in recent years. And yet we cannot let the company off so easily. There is still plenty of evidence that the company has not been operating at the same levels of wall-to-wall excellence for which it became famous. And, I think it is okay for us to maintain high expectations of Toyota.

Toyota is a company with a special relationship with problems. The essence of the Toyota Way is commitment with respect: commitment to excellence and continuous improvement with respect for people and truth. Toyota's profound contribution to the pursuit of excellence is a wholesale commitment to exposing and dealing with problems. So, for many, Toyota's ongoing crisis has been a bit of a conundrum. If there was no technical problem, what has Toyota apologized for? Toyota's response has befuddled many from beginning.

This crisis has also called into question other aspects of the company's recent performance and decisions, including its rapid expansion over the past decade. The speed of the company's growth outpaced its ability to develop its organization and the people in it. That much is obvious, and many observers have named that fact as the "root cause" of the troubles and the company has admitted as much. But, why did the company DECIDE to grow so fast? And, having so decided, what was so hard about developing its people and organization to keep up? Hmm, now exploring those questions might lead to some interesting insights.

From the beginning of this crisis Toyota was seeking a technical answer to the problems and maelstrom that was emerging around it. As the NASA report shows, Toyota was essentially correct in its technical assessment of the problem. Toyota engineers were of course on the case from the beginning. Toyota engineers are trained to see problems EVERYWHERE. All the time, everywhere. So, to the engineers who were making the judgments, there seemed to be no need to rush. In fact, to rush would be precisely the wrong response. All evidence that they had in front of them pointed to the conclusion that there was no technical (the focus of their concern) problem. For further certainty or possibly a different conclusion, more facts were needed. Years of disciplined problem-solving and acculturation told them to never rush to a conclusion - examine the facts, determine causality and judge accordingly, then determine a course of
action.

But the nature of the problem quickly shifted from a technical issue to one of a very different kind: Human (customer and employee) behavior, customer expectation and feelings, nuance of communication and trust. As Toyota continued to focus on the technical side of the issue, it seemed uncertain of what to think of the growing concerns of its customers.
That's why I believe that Toyota is indeed to be held totally accountable - no excuses - for the mess it found itself in. With problems large or small, it's not the problem that matters; it's how you respond to it. And Toyota didn't respond well in the early days of its crisis. The company will pay a huge price for that for years to come. Robert Cole, who has spent a career studying quality, in a pre-publication draft of an article states: "It doesn't matter how much the media hyped the problem or the politicians politicized it. Customer perception is the final arbiter. Therefore, those customer perceptions translate into a serious quality problem for Toyota." (Cited with permission from the author)

So, essentially, that is where Toyota stumbled, where it all begins and ends - with the customer. Toyota's engineers were "right" - there was nothing seriously unsafe in their vehicles (virtually nothing from an engineering or manufacturing standpoint), but events evolved so that the problem swiftly became one not of engineering but of listening to and respecting the customer. Customer first. Parts of Toyota were doing their best to listen to the customer. But, those parts of the company weren't being listened to by the people making the decisions.

Customers were concerned and fearful. Toyota's actions weren't sufficient to allay those fears. "Customer perception is the final arbiter" - end of story.

So, what does all this discussion mean to each of us on a day-to-day basis, in the most practical terms? Let's go back to the beginning, to the runaway Lexus in San Diego, for a remarkable sequence of events. The vehicle in question was a loaner, that is a vehicle loaned to drivers' whose vehicles were in for service. As it turns out, the exact vehicle in question had experienced the exact same problem with a different driver just days before the Saylor's accident. In that previous case, with much effort and alarm, the driver was able to stop the vehicle. He removed the floor mat and went about his business with no further problems with the car. But, then, as reported by Liker and Ogden, an amazing and ultimately tragic set of events occurred.

"When he returned the car to the dealer, Bernard warned the after-hours receptionist that there was a problem with the vehicle's floor mat and that it had caused the car to accelerate out of control. He recalls telling the receptionist: "I think the mat caused it, you need to tell someone." His warning went unheeded. Apparently the receptionist thought that Bernard would tell his story to a service technician; Bernard thought that the receptionist would pass the story along. Three days later, Mark Saylor climbed into the car, still with the wrong floor mats, unsecured, and drove off."

So, what didn't occur is as remarkable as what did occur. The service technician who could have corrected the problem after the first incident never got the news because two people made assumptions about who would tell him. (For a lean look at this common problem, see my column of "A Technical Problem or a People Problem?") There is much more to the story, but you should read the full account in Liker and Ogden's book.
So, the receptionist is the butterfly whose wings didn't flap, resulting in a massive crisis. But, make no mistake - the lesson here has NOTHING to do with placing blame on her. If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught. If Toyota has defined itself by its special relationship with problems, that must extend to the relationship that each and every member of the organization has with problems.

Hence the deeper lessons to be drawn here about the Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System. Toyota's aspirational practices remain exemplary and serve brilliantly as a north star for any individual or organizations seeking similar levels of excellence. But, true excellence doesn't stop at the end of the assembly line or confine itself to the engineer's lab or the executive suite. Excellence extends everywhere. From engineers to receptionists. It is as strong as the weakest link the chain of providing customer satisfaction. Anything we can call the "Toyota Way" or "Your Way" is the actualization of how we do everything we do, everywhere we do it: designing, making, selling, servicing, HR policy-making, legal compliance-ensuring. Opening and closing our doors every day for our employees and customers. It all counts.

john

John Shook
Chairman and CEO
Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.
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Old 7th March 2011, 22:54   #233
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

Recalls have become a habit for Toyota. One more here

Toyota recalls 22,000 vehicles over tire monitors - Yahoo! News-
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Old 22nd April 2011, 16:32   #234
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Toyota announces recall of over 300000 SUVs in USA

Here comes the latest one!

Toyota to recall over 300,000 SUVs in US - The Times of India
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Old 26th April 2011, 11:38   #235
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

^^ It seems like the Toyota recalls have become a non news these days.
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Old 14th October 2013, 10:22   #236
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

A ray of hope for Toyota, the company has won a case filed against them for unintended accelaration that caused death of the driver.

Quote:
Toyota's lawyers said the sedan's design was not to blame and Ms Uno likely mistook the gas pedal for the brake. Jurors cleared the Japanese automaker
Full details here.
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Old 12th February 2014, 11:29   #237
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

Toyota is close to settle the case in relation to the US Justice Department’s 4-year criminal inquiry into whether the company misled federal investigators looking into driver complaints of sudden acceleration, by reaching a deal on a settlement in excess of US$1 billion. More details here:

http://editorial.autos.msn.com/blogs...-criminal-case

However, it seems that the company is not let off the hook, instead the deal would probably involve a deferred prosecution agreement, which means “Toyota would be on probation for a period of years”.

I only hope Indian federal agencies act as strong as thee US counterparts, by taking a leaf from the episode.
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Old 22nd February 2014, 10:07   #238
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

a very interesting and detailed breakdown of Toyota's ECM code
http://www.safetyresearch.net/Librar...L_SCRUBBED.pdf
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Old 9th April 2014, 18:39   #239
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

Another major recall involving RAV4, Corolla, Matrix/ Vibe, Trezia/Viz, Yaris, Highlander, Tacoma and Hilux pickups, Reiz, Fortuner, Innova, Land Cruiser Prado and Camry etc... read details on

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...calls/7497031/
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Old 29th June 2016, 13:52   #240
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re: Toyota announces major recall in the US (Sudden Unintended Acceleration)

Another recall from Toyota: extract from news

Quote:
Japan's Toyota Motor Corp has recalled 3.37 million cars worldwide over possible defects involving airbags and emissions control units.
The automaker on Wednesday said it was recalling 2.87 million cars over a possible fault in emissions control units. That followed an announcement late on Tuesday that 1.43 million cars needed repairs over a separate issue involving air bag inflators.
Some of the automaker's gasoline-electric hybrid Prius models contain both of the potential defects, taking the total number of vehicles affected by the recalls to 3.37 million.
Toyota on Wednesday said evaporative fuel emissions control units in models produced from 2006 to 2015 including the Prius, Auris compact hatchback and its popular Corolla models were prone to cracks, which could expand over time and lead to fuel leaks.
News source: Reuters
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