Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I know that the busy-ness in my life has contributed to this as well, but I think it says more about the evilness of Toyota that I haven’t been able to keep up with just how evil they are.  My Drafts folder is filled with links to articles and half-written synopses of their evil-doings; posts that I’ve had to abandon because by the time I get around to writing about them there’s some new article about how they’re even more evil than they were in the last article.

Anyway, here’s the latest from Sunday.

Toyota has routinely engaged in questionable, evasive and deceptive legal tactics when sued, frequently claiming it does not have information it is required to turn over and sometimes even ignoring court orders to produce key documents….

In a review of lawsuits…involving a wide range of complaints – not just the sudden acceleration problems…- the automaker has hidden the existence of tests that would be harmful to its legal position and claimed key material was difficult to get…. It has withheld potentially damaging documents and refused to release data stored electronically in its vehicles.

For example, in a Colorado product liability lawsuit filed by a man whose young daughter was killed in a 4Runner rollover crash, Toyota withheld documents about internal roof strength tests despite a federal judge’s order that such information be produced…. The attorneys…now say such documents might have changed the outcome of the case, which ended in a 2005 jury verdict for Toyota.

…

In another case involving a Texas woman killed when her Toyota Land Cruiser lurched backward and pinned her against a garage wall, the Japanese automaker told lawyers for the woman’s family it was unaware of any similar cases. Yet less than a year earlier, Toyota had settled a nearly identical lawsuit in the same state involving a Baptist minister who was severely injured after he said his Land Cruiser abruptly rolled backward over him. Under court discovery rules, Toyota had an obligation to inform the woman’s attorneys about the case when formally asked.

“Automobile manufacturers, in my practice, have been the toughest to deal with when it comes to sharing information, but Toyota has no peer,” said attorney Ernest Cannon, who represented the family of 35-year-old Lisa Evans, who died in 2002 in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.

…

Similar claims have been lodged by Dimitrios Biller, a former Toyota attorney who sued the company in August, contending it withheld evidence in considerably older rollover cases.

Of course Toyota wants to tell you that that piss you feel running down your back is rain and there’s nothing it can do about the weather, gee shucks.

“Toyota takes its legal obligations seriously and strives to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards, in connection with litigation and otherwise,” the company said. “We are confident we have acted appropriately with respect to product liability litigation.”

The evil doesn’t end there.  The article has many more evil details.

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?