UPDATE March 19, 2014
The U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday that Toyota Motor Corporation will pay $1.2 billion to settle a criminal probe into whether the automaker handled reports of safety issues in its vehicles properly.
The agreement ends a four-year investigation into sudden unintended acceleration complaints dating back to the late 2000s. The issue first gained national attention after an off-duty California highway patrol officer and members of his family were killed in a crash.
“The $1.2 billion payment represents the largest criminal penalty imposed on a car company in U.S. history,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “This is appropriate given the extent of the deception carried out by Toyota in this case. Put simply, Toyota’s conduct was shameful. It showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers.”
Rather than immediately disclosing and correcting identified safety issues, says Holder, Toyota “made misleading public statements to consumers and gave inaccurate facts to Members of Congress.” In addition, “they concealed from federal regulators the extent of problems that some consumers encountered with sticking gas pedals and unsecured or incompatible floor mats that could cause these unintended acceleration episodes.”
And, “while Toyota conducted a limited recall of some vehicles with floor mat issues in September 2009, the company delayed a broader recall until early 2010 – despite internal tests warning of the dangers posed by other, unrecalled vehicle models.”
The Justice Department will defer prosecution of Toyota for three years, says Holder, as long as the company complies with the agreement and continues to cooperate with federal authorities.
“But let me be clear,” he said, “the department has not, and will not, consent to foreclose criminal prosecution if the terms of this agreement are not rigorously honored.”
Toyota still reportedly faces a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation as well as a number of civil lawsuits.
UPDATE February 7, 2014
Israeli economic news provider MarkerWeek has published an article on Toyota whistleblower Betsy Benjaminson, who now lives in Sderot, a western Negev city in the southern district of Israel. The story highlights Benjaminson’s moral struggle and reasoning behind her decision to reveal Toyota’s alleged cover-up of the unintended acceleration issues affecting thousands of its vehicles.
During her career as a translator, Benjaminson translated documents from almost every major company in Japan including Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, Nissan and Toyota.
“But this was different,” Benjaminson said in an interview with MarkerWeek, adding that as the most experienced of a team of translators, she was given the job of editing the translated documents.
“I got to see thousands of documents. And slowly, I began to see the pattern: thousands of who say ‘my car suddenly accelerated, and many Toyota public relations documents, they say something completely different,’” she said. “Dots started to connect, and I could not go back.”
Benjaminson delved further into the scandal surrounding Toyota, translating more documents and consulting with leading safety experts to put together a complete picture, reports MarkerWeek. Eventually, she became convinced that Toyota knew about flaws in its system and hid it for fear of damaging its image. Finally, ignoring the advice of her attorneys, she began leaking incriminating documents to journalists and contacting the victims, a decision she was eventually dismissed for.
When asked why she jeopardized her career and her family’s financial situation to start a war against a huge corporation, she was not sure how to answer.
“This is a complicated question,” she said. “A lonely man whose life was destroyed and his family killed—as he tries to give justice to such a large corporation, it is almost impossible. I feel endless empathy for the victims. When you encounter such cases, and you have information that can help people, you are at a crossroads: You can leave your emotions out and stay a screw in the legal machine. Or you can do what I did, [that is,] to cheat the machine. I cheated the machine. Cheated a bit because I realized that the machine is broken, and if I do nothing, more people will die and it will be on my conscience.”
Her decision to leak the Toyota documents came at huge personal cost, says Benjaminson, but she would not change it if given the chance.
“I make half today of what I earned before I started to leak the documents. I lost two large customers, one when I started to leak [the information] and another when I revealed my identity,” she said.
“It’s the price I pay, but that’s okay. If I [didn’t do] that, what would happen? [I would have] worked another 10-20 years and died. This way at least there is something I did in my life that might positively affect other people.”
A translation of the original MarkerWeek story was provided to Interference Technology by Betsy Benjaminson.
UPDATE March 19, 2013
EMC expert Keith Armstrong, who consulted on the documents, has given Interference Technology a statement on the problem:
“Hopefully this article will help the world to realize that electronics are not reliable enough for safety-critical applications – such as controlling the throttle of an automobile – without:
a) Special skills and techniques being employed in their design (IEC 61508 is the source document for these, first published 2000)
b) Compliance with appropriate Functional Safety standards (ISO 26262 is the auto industry’s attempt at such a standard, first published in 2011)
c) Added costs
d) Finally, approval by an Independent Functional Safety Assessor, without which no sales or operation or vehicles can occur (as has already been happening in the rail and aviation industries since 2003 or so.)
UL, TUV, Intertek, etc. have had departments dedicated to providing this type of assessment service for well over a decade now, and the auto industry should use them.
But even when the auto industry eventually manages to deliver complete vehicles for which they say all of the safety-critical electronics have been designed from scratch to comply with ISO 26262 (perhaps in 2018?) – as far as I know they have no plans to get their vehicles approved by Independent Functional Safety Assessors.
At least two major automakers have now proved that we can’t trust them to tell the truth when they claim that their auto control electronics are safe enough. So why should we trust them when they eventually (at least 15 years behind rail and aviation) claim compliance with a Functional Safety standard?
Without the approval of each new model of vehicle by an Independent Functional Safety Assessor, we can have no confidence whatsoever that the auto industry has designed and manufactured their electronics, and hence their cars, to be safe enough.”
For more information, visit Corporate Counsel at law.com.
March 13, 2013
Officials announced a few weeks ago that Toyota Motor Corp. has agreed to pay a $29 million settlement to end lawsuits accusing the Japanese car manufacturer of misleading people by issuing false statements in regards to safety issues related to unintended acceleration.
“We are confident that no problems exist in our electronic throttle systems in our vehicles,” Jim Lentz, the CEO of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc., testified in February 2012. He also reported Toyota did not find “any malfunction that caused unintended acceleration.”
However, Toyota documents recently analyzed by Keith Armstrong, Antony Anderson and Brian Kirk of the UK and automotive engineer Neil Hannemann of California reportedly directly contradict Toyota’s assertion that the vehicles have no electronic problems. The documents were translated from Japanese to English by translator Betsy Benjaminson, who also initially discovered the discrepancies in Toyota’s claims. The documents were made public Wednesday, March 13.
‘Is Toyota Telling the Truth About Sudden Acceleration?’, asks law.com in a breaking article chronicling the alleged cover-up. “The experts don’t believe that [driver error or floor mat slippage] explain the surge in complaints. Instead, they believe precisely what Toyota has for many years steadfastly denied: that the problem is rooted in electronics,” the article says.
According to the article, an undated spreadsheet showed “test results of an engine’s electronic throttle control system, including numerous faults that the document said cause sudden acceleration.”
Other translated documents reportedly illustrate Toyota’s willingness to “define problems as they wish them to be, regardless of the facts.”
“Previously, when I was in charge of Hilux [a Toyota truck model] in the Japan domestic service division, I experienced an engine stall malfunction due to radio wave interference from a nearby U.S. naval base in Yokohama. At that time, I was told that it could absolutely never occur,” one document, an undated email from an unnamed engineer, stated.
However, the article says, despite numerous consumer complaints, incidents and testimonials from engineers, plaintiffs have made slow progress convincing the courts that electronic malfunctions are real because expert findings cannot always be replicated in tests.
“We have the burden of proof, and we should,” Molly O’Neill said. O’Neill works with the dean of sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) trial lawyers, Thomas Murray of Sandusky, Ohio. “But you cannot open up the car and show what went wrong. That’s the nature of electronics.”
– Belinda Stasiukiewicz and Aliza Becker
Nizar Dassouki says
All electronics based control systems especially the safety related ones must comply with EN12016 and EN12015 before the vehicle or any other products such as elevators can be grated code approvals, the question now is, can Toyota prove that they complied with that code and had code certifications from code authorities?
Keith Armstrong says
Hi Nizar! The two standards you mention are specifically for lifts and elevators,and are not safety standards. They are intended to be used to gain compliance in Europe to the EMC Directive which does not cover safety,and to gain compliance with various code authorities in other countries. From the BSI catalogue:BSEN12015:2004,EMC. Product family standard for lifts,escalators and moving walks. Emission.BSEN12016:2004 A1:2008,EMC. Product family standard for lifts,escalator sand moving walks.Immunity.Obviously,complying with an EMC immunity test standard is better for safety than failing to comply with it, but the safety of persons requires levels of risk that are much lower than any practical or affordable EMC test plan can achieve. Such levels of risks require the approach taken by IECTS61000-1-2,the basic publication on EMC for Functional Safety. Automobiles in Europe have to comply with the Auto EMC Directive, which contains EMC tests that are less stringent than the Big 5 automakers own in-house tests. In any case, neither EN12016 nor the Auto EMC Directive, nor the automakers own in-house EMC immunity standards are based on IECTS61000-1-2,which is listed as a normative requirement in the basic standard on Functional Safety:IEC61508,from which the auto industry have Dec 2011 created their own functional safety standard ISO26262.
C Gollnick says
As engineers familiar with electromagnetics and EM susceptibility of electronics, we all know that if you subject most any microelectronic device to sufficient EM energy, that device can be caused to malfuction. We also know that the design and manufacturing precautions that can harden electronics against such malfunctions rise exponentially in cost with effectively and that they have limitations too.
As engineers, we know that anything can happen once. We know the danger of extrapolating from a single dataum. The fact that an engine was once observed to have stalled attributed to EM phenomena is interesting, but hardly conclusive.
As engineers, we also know the desire and practice of pushing tests to failure. So, it should not surprise us that amidst all of Toyota’s records, documents can be found of tests in which malfunctions were caused by EM agression. The question is whether or not those tests represent conditions likely to be encountered in the field.
Even more important is whether the actual incidents of unintended acceleration experienced in the field were caused by EM waves. I have serious doubts, myself, because some of the incidents reported in the popular media transpired over many miles. It’s unlikely that any single EM source could continue to act on the vehicle’s systems over such a distance.
Basically, the article here is very sketchy and very incomplete. I’m not going to make any conclusions from this article.
admin says
Thank you for your comment. We do not claim to confirm or deny Toyota’s alleged cover-up as fact, only that documents have been publicly released at this point that may suggest the possibility. As more information regarding the alleged cover-up is released, this story will be updated. Please stay tuned!
Regards,
Interference Technology
Keith Armstrong says
EMI is a possible cause of UA, because it can interfere with the throttle electronics because they use identical channels in a dual redundant system and so are very susceptible to common-cause effects. But no-one is claiming that EMI is the cause of the majority of UAs, there are several other possibilities, for example tin whiskers, and (my current favourite) conductive salt deposits on the gas pedal or throttle valve PCB connectors.
Prof Todd Hubing has recently written about conductive salt deposits in connectors, in the IEEE EMC Society Newsletter, 2012, Vol 1, Q4, available from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6397057
D.Dwyer says
I have worked in the automotive industry for years, the last fifteen involving the development of sensors for vehicle engine management and braking. Much of my work in the last ten years has involved EMC/EMI evaluation of such sensors. Reporting an EMC issue with the Hilux and extrapolating it to the problems of unintended acceleration is misleading. As a previous poster has noted, all electronics are susceptible to interference by external energy sources. However, the specific nature of the energy, i.e. its intensity and frequency content and its coupling mode i.e. radiowaves through the air, coupling from close running wires are critically important. Unless it can be shown that Toyota witheld data that suggests a specific EMC issue with the speed control of vehicles in question, there is no smoking gun.
admin says
Thank you for your comment. Please refer to the original article for more information and details here. We are only reporting on the recent release of the translated documents that may suggest a alleged cover-up.
Regards,
Interference Technology
Keith Armstrong says
As I replied above, no-one is claiming that EMI is the main cause of Toyota UAs.
We just don’t know what the cause is yet.
Howard Berman says
I’ve seen information indicating that the Toyota acceleration problems were caused by tin whiskers. You can read about it here;
http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2011-NASA-GSFC-whisker-failure-app-sensor.pdf
Rob Kado says
Post the document that shows Toyota covered anything up please.
admin says
Hi Rob,
Thank you for your comment. The full documents have been released but only certain portions have made available to the general public thus far. Please stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.
Regards,
Interference Technology
Keith Armstrong says
The author of the article in Legal Counsel asked me (and others) to review the Toyota documents that were revealed by the whistleblower.
I can assure everyone that all the quotes in that article are taken from real documents, because I have been shown them.
The author restricted himself to non-technical documents showing cover-ups, but there were also many documents of a technical nature that he did not use.
But placing whistleblower documents in the public domain is associated with very serious legal issues that I know very little about and so cannot comment on.
Varuzhan Kocharyan says
Regardless of this discussion around TOYOTA, one of the obvious problems is the fact that there is an enormous number of the standards concerning the automotive electronics. In this discussion already were mentioned IEC61508, ISO26262, EN12016 and EN12015. Are well known the standards ISO11452, ISO7637, SAEJ1113, 2004/104/EC, 2009/19/EC, 2009/19/EC, E/ECE/324/Add.9/Rev.4E/ECE/TRANS/505/Add.9/Rev.4, etc. Also, every auto manufacturer has the company standards. The test levels and methods of all those standards are very different. This multitude of the standards does not work in the favor of the automotive electronics reliability.
Richard Lu says
as automation became more and more, functional safety and his third party certification is becoming applicable.
two or more-dimension safety margin is minimum for critical function.
Ron Belt says
Please read my papers at http://www.autosafety.org/dr-ronald-belt%E2%80%99s-sudden-acceleration-papers for a slightly different twist to explaining the cause of sudden acceleration besides EMI/EMC.
Betsy Benjaminson says
Here I am, the whistleblower herself. I have started posting some of the actual documents showing confirmed or suspected electronics causes of SUA in both development vehicles and in on-the-road vehicles, as per Toyota\\’s own engineers. See them on my blog at betsybenjaminson.blogspot.co.ilThe \\”smoking gun\\” is actually the giant gap between what these docs say and what emerged from the mouths of Toyota executives all these ten years.I am eager to hear more feedback about the signficance of these docs from engineers, especially with regard to whether they are evidence that standards are being disregarded. The entire document collection is also available online, and is not hard to find if you know my name, but these are a few hundred electronics-related docs are mixed into many hundreds of docs about mats and pedals, that were given to the DOJ. So I don\\’t recommend spending weeks going through them unless you are obsessed.EMI is only one of the many causes of SUA, as far as I have learned from the docs and experts. In fact, I think each SUA event has a unique set of causes. But I have heard an unconfirmed rumor that there are clusters in the statistics that point to certain kinds of causes, for example, tin whiskers. Stay tuned for whenever that rumor may be verified and published as fact.
Betsy Benjaminson says
@D.DwyerThe Toyota engineer Mr. Ikura wrote that he was driving a Hilux that hesitated when subjected to radio waves from a U.S. military base. It was Mr. Ikura himself who brought that up when discussing possible causes of speed control issues/SUA with his colleagues. I would not call that misleading. He was an engineer looking for answers. Also, the smoking gun here is that the public statements of Toyota executives continually cite compliance with standard EMC testing protocols, but do not mention the real-world and test chamber instances of EMI causing vehicle speed misbehavior, instances that were known to the company and that are described in documents that are stored here on this computer at which I write.