Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Wow, every step Toyota takes is a disaster for them, isn’t it?  They deserve every last bit of negative publicity, though.

Former regulators hired by Toyota Motor Corp. helped end at least four U.S. investigations of unintended acceleration by company vehicles in the last decade, warding off possible recalls, court and government records show.

Holy crap.

While all automakers have employees who handle NHTSA issues, Toyota may be alone among the major companies in employing former agency staffers to do so. Spokesmen for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Group LLC and Honda Motor Co. all say their companies have no ex-NHTSA people who deal with the agency on defects.

Possible links between Toyota and NHTSA may fuel mounting criticism of their handling of defects in Toyota and Lexus models tied to 19 deaths between 2004 and 2009.

May?  Uh, consider the mounting criticism fueled.

In one example of the Toyota aides’ role, [Christopher] Santucci [of Toyota's Washington office] testified in a Michigan lawsuit that the company and NHTSA discussed limiting an examination of unintended acceleration complaints to incidents lasting less than a second.

Well, that’s…wait…what?  You got it backwards!

We discussed the scope” of the investigation, Santucci testified. “NHTSA’s concerns about the scope ultimately led to a decision by the agency to reduce that scope. You say it worked out well for Toyota, I think it worked out well for both the agency and Toyota.”

Well I’m glad Santucci has the consumer where s/he belongs on the priority list: below Toyota and the NHTSA.

In Toyota’s case, “the company has built itself on pillars of safety, quality and reliability,” [some random market analyst] said. “A defect in their product is appalling to them, sort of unthinkable.”

Time to get past the cognitive dissonance, fellas.

Toyota spokeswoman Martha Voss declined to make Santucci and Tinto available for comment.

“Anything Mr. Tinto and Mr. Santucci did was in the interest of full disclosure, transparency and openness with regulators and safety experts,” Voss said in an e-mailed statement.

Kind of telling that those two paragraphs are next to each other, huh?

“Their actions have been consistent with our efforts to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards in all of our legal and regulatory practices. Their paramount concern was for the safety of every single owner of one of our vehicles.”

Right, because limiting the scope of an investigation into stuck accelerators to incidents lasting less than one second clearly indicates their paramount concern was for the vehicle owners.  I mean, one the one hand you’re concerned about using the NHTSA’s resources well, and on the other you’re concerned about consumers.  How do those go hand in hand? Ms. Voss, how do you live with yourself after blatant lies like this?  The only explanation is that you are evil.

[Christopher] Tinto [vice president of regulatory affairs in Toyota's Washington office], 46, came to Toyota after about four years at NHTSA. He hired Santucci from NHTSA in 2003, after the two met on opposite sides of the table in defect investigation cases, Santucci said in a deposition in the Michigan lawsuit.

Um, again…holy crap.  Jesus lord this article reads as a damning indictment from top to bottom.

And look, it worked:

NHSTA opted to limit the investigation to unintended acceleration events that lasted less than a second and those where the brake could be used to control the vehicle, or about 11 incidents with 5 crashes.

…

The agency decided to limit the cases to eliminate instances where a driver may have used the wrong pedal, the Transportation Department’s Alair said.

And go figure, but the cherry-picked data exonerated Toyota:

“In each of these vehicles, no evidence of a system or component failure was found and the vehicles were operating as designed,” Tinto wrote in a Nov. 15 letter to NHSTA. He also cited the findings that ended the Camry investigation in 2004.

NHTSA ended its probe of the 2002 Camry in January 2006, citing lack of evidence of a problem and the agency’s need to allocate “limited resources” to other investigations.

This story is slightly outdated now that Toyota has announced (with very few details) their plans to repair (not replace) their crappy accelerators causing deaths nationwide and now that the probe expands, deepens, and finally it seems like somebody is paying attention to the baby killing machines that Toyota produces.  This aspect of it is still relevant, though, and angers me to no end.

Toyota is sending new gas pedal systems to its factories rather than its dealership service departments, The Associated Press learned Friday. The move angered some dealers who say they should get the parts to take care of the millions of car owners whose accelerators may stick.

Dealers?  Good god, what about the customers?  The fact that Toyota sent this to their factories, so they could sell new cars, before fixing all the death traps they’ve got on the road is one of the most unforgivable things I can imagine.  They’ve got “precision cut steel reinforcement bars” on the way to dealers now, but I don’t find that phrase, nor its other name, “shim”, nor the fact that it will take a significant amount of time to train their servicepeople to do the repair, comforting at all.  This is almost certainly the last Toyota I’ll ever buy.

Can somebody please string these assholes up by their sphincters?  Are we really going to let them hide behind their lawyers as their dawdling costs lives, money, and lost productivity as many parents are now, quite reasonably, not putting their kids in these car-to-coffin transformers?