Markets

Unintended Acceleration: Toyota May Be Off the Hook, but It's Not Exonerated

By Jim Henry

Updated on: February 9, 2011 / 4:16 PM EST / MoneyWatch

There are a few neglected aspects in some of the coverage of this week's report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which found that Toyota (TM) electronic systems weren't to blame for Toyota's unintended acceleration problems that prompted the recall of millions of its cars last year.

Before getting into all this, let's say that the report should definitely help Toyota put the whole unintended-acceleration nightmare behind it. The consequences are bad enough already:

Toyota's quality reputation got dinged but not destroyed.
Its U.S. sales fell slightly in 2010, while the market rose.
The company spent untold millions of dollars for recalls, to settle fines and penalties, and for incentives that kept its sales going, when faith in Toyota wavered.

However, the NHTSA report appears to nip Toyota's worst-case scenario in the bud. That would have been if there were some "ghost in the machine" after all, in the sense of some hard-to-identify problem in the computer chips that govern many automotive systems.

Having said all that, for those keeping score here are those neglected aspects:

The report didn't "exonerate" Toyota or blame "driver error," although you could get that impression from some of the coverage. The government research on Toyota simply failed to find conclusive evidence that electronics were to blame. You can just imagine all the engineers at NHTSA and NASA scowling like Dilbert in frustration, because non-engineers are taking their conclusions out of context. (Yes, NASA; NHTSA called them in on this, too.)
Let's not forget Toyota spent a lot of resources on replacing floor mats and potentially "sticky" accelerator pedals. The newest NHTSA report found nothing wrong with any of that.
Predictably, there is strong indication that the Toyota situation will result in new regulation that will affect other automakers as well. Consumer Reports astutely points this out in a recent blog post.

The government says regulators will "study" whether to make it a requirement for all cars to have an "override" feature so that when both the brake and the accelerator are pushed at the same time, the brake always wins. Toyota already added that feature to all its new cars.

Something similar happened following a giant recall involving the Ford Explorer and Firestone tires several years ago. U.S. regulators made all carmakers add a tire-pressure monitor and warning system to anticipate improperly inflated tires, as investigators found improperly inflated tires had contributed to a rollover problem.

Before Toyota's recent situation, Audi was Exhibit No. 1 in unintended acceleration cases. Following the Audi case back in the 1980s, automakers added a "lock-out" feature. That means you can't shift your automatic-transmission car out of "park" without stepping on the brake.

Some folks will never be satisfied
Finally, I also think it's easily predictable that some people are never going to be satisfied that we've gotten to the bottom of Toyota's problem. After all, there were tragedies that were blamed on unintended acceleration.

Fueling this will be the fact that the government reports are blacked-out here and there, sometimes pretty heavily, evidently to protect competitive data. The situation may never completely go away, but the NHTSA report is a step in that direction.

Related: