When you, as a consumer and voter remain silent, DEMOCRACY is sacrificed, TRUTH IS SILENCED along with the safety of us all. Government no longer works for its citizens.
Although TOYOTA has worked to DISCREDIT and SILENCE THE TRUTH, it's out there!
Betsy Benjaminson stepped forward out of a deep moral belief to present TOYOTA'S OWN DOCUMENTS that are damning!
TOYOTA is taking steps to SILENCE Ms. Benjaminson, as well as targeting those who speak ILL of TOYOTA.
Report about visit to US Congressional staffers
Brooklyn, NY
Here is an unpolished draft of some facts and
opinions after four days of meetings with Congressional staff on the Toyota UA
issue. I went to see them when they invited me to bring experts to try to
validate the evidence I’d provided.
Generally it was a failure, and I guess and wonder about
Toyota’s lobbying forces working in opposition behind the scenes. I am a rank
amateur without the benefit of perfect evidence, up against the most
professional and cunning lobbyists.
However, the game is not over, not by a long
shot. There will be plenty of opportunity during the trials and/or with others
coming forward, or in the aftermath of more crashes. Now this also amounts to
Senator Grassley joining the House and others who those who know of this problem
in detail but choose to do nothing to solve it. This group has already included
Toyota itself, individuals who know the inside story, the industry, the
watchdogs, NHTSA, and in some sense also NASA for going along with NHTSA’s
program and not making its scientists’ objections public. So any coverage of the
“bad guys” can include members of both the House and the Senate under whose
direction the staffers work.
I suspect that the background issue of the
pending litigation caused some concerns among the staffers, who cannot be seen
as supporting claims usually associated with Democrat notions of consumer
protection/more regulation/corporate expose, risking possible job loss at the
corporation. This is totally illogical, because the cost of car crashes to the
economy runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars every year, not to mention
the huge human toll, and the litigation is also a monstrous waste of national
resources.
The meetings were as follows:
Tuesday am – Hannemann with House Energy and
Commerce staffers. The staffers admitted they could do nothing unless some
dramatic insider testimony or some new evidence came their way. The Toyota
internal documents were not enough, even with expert backup. Theoretically they
could compare the internal docs from me with what Toyota produced to them, but
they are in the minority and a comparison would be very expensive. I heard a
rumor that Toyota has hired away a staffer who used to work on that
investigation, and she is keeping tabs on what goes on there now.
The
rest of the meetings on the Hill were with Sen. Judiciary Cmte staff
Tuesday
pm – Hannemann—he said to me that he saw in the documents evidence that T knew
of electronics related UA (and of course had not admitted that at any time.) To
the staffers he also explained this, and highlighted the document evidence of
Toyota's global problem—evidence that does not seem to have been available to
Neil when he worked as a consultant to the House in the past.
Wednesday pm
Dr. Gordon Davy and his tin whiskers whistleblower daughter Lisa. Gordon said
there is no question that NHTSA is “derelict” in not performing its duty to the
public, and that in one document he found evidence that Toyota was lax its
approach to handling tin whiskers risk—they did not bother to prevent the risk
by coating the item, but instead just conducted lab tests to see if the whisker
growth was less than some arbitrary amount that they set as the upper limit.
Separately he said to me that the company was definitely negligent because it
marketed a product that contained a known danger (pure tin) without taking
reasonable steps to prevent or mitigate the risk.
Gordon
proposed that the solution to the problem was to either privatize the auto
safety certification function or to expand the FAA to also include cars because
the FAA is a strong and effective regulator of aviation safety. Gordon is
brilliant. He offered some great solutions based on his deep experience in
industry. His many contacts in the engineering world may also band together to
write letters and take other steps to help advance awareness of the dangers of
tin whiskers and the crying need for better regulation of the auto industry in
general and regarding tin whiskers risk mitigation in particular.
Thursday pm
Bill Rosenbluth and his wife Jean
Bill
presented some compelling technical evidence that, as far as I understood it,
proved that there is a layer of EDR data behind the data that Toyota wants
anyone to see. Bill is able to collect and download that data from EDRs and
finds all kinds of things in it, and according to Jean, Toyota “hates” him
because all they want anyone to see is the small subset of the real data. He
also gave a detailed explanation and case study of how EDR data is fundamentally
unreliable and how Toyota has been uncooperative with families of victims by not
providing the tool to read out the EDR after a crash. The case presented, the
Eves fatal crash in the pacific northwest, involved a single-vehicle accident of
a truck hitting a tree in which the EDR recorded data was physically
impossible.
We
discussed the role of the MDL in correcting this failure of regulation. The
staffer said that the MDL plaintiffs will be able to fund a thorough technical
investigation after which Congress will sit up and take notice of large
settlements or judgments and will do something afterward to fix the regulation.
This really pissed me off because he is not taking into account all the untold
suffering of the victims and the enormous wasteful effort of all the plaintiffs
and the defense in the litigation. To me this sounded like a close echo of the
position of the automakers. When I heard this I thought we are really dealing
with a Republican mentality. So after this, which he said on Wednesday, when
Bill demonstrated Thursday his download of the EDR, I asked if he did this when
people died, or if he did this any other time. The answer was, when attorneys
asked. Attorneys only get involved if there is a death or severe injury. And it
cost $10,000, he said. So this puts plaintiffs in a position of having to pay
for experts along the way, during a case.
These
comments sounded just like Toyota. The playing field is just as tilted in
Toyota’s favor in court as it is on the Hill.
Friday
am Dr. Antony Anderson
Dr.
Anderson presented a compelling story of the history of electronics-based
failures, lack of safety standards for cars, horrifying videos and photos of
runaway cars from around the world, and videos of Ray LaHood saying there is
nothing wrong with Toyota’s vehicle electronics, in direct contradiction of the
actual study findings.
Dr.
Anderson brought sample CTS pedals that had manufacturing defects in several
places, including holes that might result in “sticky pedal” for reasons other
than those publicly claimed by Toyota, as well as evidence of shoddy
manufacturing of the APPS (Accelerator Pedal Position Sensor) assembly.
Dr.
Anderson also showed photographs of the Eves EDR box and circuit board that
contained evidence of electrical arcing that may have occurred when the truck
hit the tree, and which may likely have caused an erroneous data recording that
was physically impossible, as had been described by Bill Rosenbluth.
There
was also an extended discussion of wrongful imprisonment of drivers whose cars
were out of control and had killed people. The Lee case was mentioned. The Mary
Hill case was mentioned. Mary Hill remains imprisoned in Florida after having
been sentenced to 15 years when her car went out of control and killed two
girls. Perhaps she could be interviewed?
Dr.
Anderson pointed out a very weak and obsolete point in the law that he
understood from his perspective as an expert witness in many UA civil cases and
in one criminal UA case. That is, he said the law assumes the driver
is in control of the car, but in many cases of vehicle electronic glitches, the
car does not do what the driver wanted. In actual practice, this puts the driver
in the impossible legal position of being responsible for the behavior of a
vehicle that the driver cannot completely control. The staffers responded by
saying that in a criminal case, the defense could establish reasonable doubt
about the driver’s culpability. Dr. Anderson later commented that first, it is
expensive to do so, and there are few experts available who could credibly
testify about intermittent or one-time electronic cased vehicle behavior that
leaves behind no physical evidence. Courts rely too heavily on traditional rules
of evidence that require physical evidence of a defect, but electronic defects
often leave no evidence behind, and thus the driver tends to be blamed.
Dr.
Anderson also pointed out the difficulties of requiring repeatability in proving
UA events. The events need not be repeatable because the sheer number of
possible failure mechanisms makes it impossible to find the exact cause in a
majority of incidents. Toyota engineers have agreed with Dr. Anderson in their
recorded interviews with House staff and in internal memoranda.
Meanwhile on
Wednesday am, Gordon Davy, Lisa, and I went to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt MD and met Dr. Henning Leidecker and Dr. Norman Helmold who
indicated their concerns that the NASA study was not scientifically sound. Both
of them have worked as senior level failure analysts for many years. Henning’s
specialty is tin whiskers.
The
concerns with the study were with the small sample sizes, lack of samples of
failed pedals, vehicles, or other components, and no data to analyze. They seem
to have numerous other concerns that remain unexpressed. Dr. Leidecker was on
the study team that he asked to be put on, and the team leader agreed without
enthusiasm. He was sometimes excluded from meetings.
Dr.
Leidecker indicated that the path forward involved more thorough engineering
failure analysis and probability studies using a proper sample of many pedals. I
asked him if he would like a huge box of, say, 1,000 pedals and he responded
agreeably, with enthusiasm, and said that would enable him to predict the
probability of failure and to publish his findings. That would cost so little
money! I wonder what neutral funding source could be secured for such a
project.
Someone
who lobbies for a highway safety advocacy group explained to me that the reason
this is going to be stuck in the Senate is that NHTSA administrator David
Strickland used to work for Rockefeller, the chair of the Senate Commerce
Committee. Senator Rockefeller is from W. Virginia, where he got Toyota to build
an engine plant. So the Senator does not necessarily want to do anything to
embarrass his former employee or his patron. Separately I had heard that
information provided to that Committee is likely to be shared with Toyota.
All
this palace intrigue is emotionally exhausting to watch from an uninvolved
position, but far worse to observe as a participating unpaid volunteer when
lives are at stake. I have now seen directly, as far as the feedback I’ve gotten
from the staff, that an expert-verified universal safety issue affecting every
American driver is less important that those relationships…and I tentatively and
sadly conclude that members in Congress care more about their political fortunes
than they seem to care about the welfare of the people, and do not have the
capacity to proactively fix problems. Rather we must wait for them to react to
some scandal or disaster. I had hoped to make a scandal with Congress for this
reason but don’t seem to be able to, so much work with media to do it and press
Congress to do it.
When
people advocate tort reform they are also often advocating regulatory rollbacks.
Softer regulations lead to more torts. And tort reform leads to lower
compensation for victims. I think these people will continue this way until some
tort happens to them.
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