Ray LaHood, The Media & Congress Owe Toyota an Apology

You may have seen it on TV or maybe even a newspaper that Toyota was exonerated from safety concerns about their electronic throttle controls. I say “may” have seen it because the media downplayed this just as badly as they hyped the lies about Toyota having unsafe cars.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) commissioned NASA to study whether or not any sudden acceleration problems could be caused by the electronic throttle control systems in Toyotas. This is the same system that most other manufacturers now use. Our nation’s top scientists studied this possibility for 10 months and concluded this month that there are no defects and Toyotas are perfectly safe to drive.

The conclusion is that most of those cases of “sudden acceleration” were the fault of the drivers, not Toyota, and the rest of them were lawyers and car owners trying to make a fast buck by suing Toyota. In the vast majority of the accidents, the driver mistakenly stepped on the accelerator thinking it was the brake. This sort of thing happens every day, especially in south Florida where a lot of elderly people who shouldn’t drive do. Other “sudden acceleration” accidents were caused by customer or dealers accidentally using the wrong floor mats in cars or stacking more than one set of floor mats on top of the other. The terrible case of the highway patrolman’s family killed driving a Lexus in Texas was the fault of the wrong floor mats. The media jumped all over this one even though it was proven that the dealer incorrectly installed truck all-weather floor mats “upside down” in this Lexus. These were the only deaths caused by any alleged sudden acceleration event.

Toyota, Toyota dealers and their employees, and Toyota customers have suffered financially and emotionally from the irresponsible acts and suspect motivations of Ray LaHood, the chairman of NHTSA, the Congress, and the media. Ray LaHood, on national TV, actually told all Toyota owners to pull their Toyotas over to the side of the road, get out of the car, and don’t drive it again. I can still remember the panic of my customers in my dealership on that day. The phones were ringing off the hooks and some of my customers were literally in tears.

Toyota had to recall millions of Toyotas at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Millions of Toyota owners were fearful of their “lives”, even being afraid to drive their cars to the dealerships to have them “fixed”. For my customers who were terrified to drive their cars, I sent my technicians to their homes or brought them a free loaner car and took their car back to my dealership. Even after the cars were “fixed”, owners were fearful of driving them because of the pure speculation that there might be something wrong with the electronic throttle control too.

Every time someone claimed their Toyota had accelerated out of control, the media headlined and featured the accusation but when the allegation was proven fraudulent or mistaken, they failed to mention this at all or buried it on the back pages.

Congress dragged the president of Toyota USA , Jim Lentz, and the chairman of the board of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, in front of the TV cameras and utterly humiliated them. The worst of these political hacks were the Congressmen from the Detroit, Michigan districts, Bart Stupak, and John Dingell. There hidden agenda was clearly to build up GM, Chrysler, and Ford by tearing down Toyota.

Toyota had no choice but to apologize and confess to a crime they didn’t commit. It would have been suicidal for Toyota to blame their customers for the problems of sudden acceleration. This would have whipped Ray LaHood, Congress, and the media into an even greater feeding frenzy and may have even brought down Toyota as big and powerful as they are.

Toyota’s false confession is analogous to the large number of false confessions by accused criminals. Many innocent men and women confess every day to crimes they didn’t commit. The police interrogators make it sound as if they have no alternative. They tell the accused that they have more than sufficient evidence to convict. They go on to say that they can get the judge to go easy on them if they confess and save the taxpayers the cost of a trial. Sometime they promise no jail time and probation, but a very severe sentence of they don’t sign a false confession. This occurrence is so common, that courts have held that a confession by itself is not sufficient to convict. There must be enough evidence to substantiate the confession. The famous novelist, John Gresham, just wrote a book on this very topic, Confession, which is on the NY Times best seller list.

I’m not deluding myself to expect that Ray LaHood, Congress, or the media would ever do the right thing and publically apologize to Toyota. Admitting you’re wrong and sincerely apologizing takes class…and as the old Frank Sinatra song, “Style”, goes…”You either got or you haven’t got class”.

Did Congress “Beat” a Confession out of Toyota with a Rubber Hose?

You may have read that in 25% of those cases involving innocent people imprisoned and later exonerated by DNA testing, those falsely imprisoned had “confessed” to a crime they did not commit. Since the discovery and implementation of DNA testing, hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women have been freed from our prisons, some on the verge of being executed. Unfortunately we will never know how many innocent people we have executed or how many are still in prison because there was no DNA evidence.

DNA testing of accused criminals is the result of applying the surging scientific knowledge we didn’t have only a few years ago. Analogous to DNA is the “black box” which used to be only in airplanes but now is being used increasingly in automobiles. This box contains scientific instruments that record the seconds and minutes before and after accidents. This black box can tell if the brake was applied and, if so, how long and how hard. It can tell us the same about the accelerator. Of course it can tell the speed, acceleration or deceleration and the direction the car is traveling.

Scientific tests like DNA have shown that, what we relied on most before for evidence, confessions and eye-witness accounts are extremely unreliable. How many innocent people were imprisoned or executed over the years by eye-witnesses or false confessions? We will never know.

If you’re a regular reader, you know where I’m going with this. The media has recently, but reluctantly, released the finding of the NHTSA that all of the black box tests on Toyotas so far have shown the crashes to be driver error. There is no evidence of any kind showing the electronic throttle controls or sticky accelerators to have caused one single crash or injury. In fact, the tests prove that the many drivers who swore their accelerators stuck and they could not brake to slow down or stop, never once applied the brake, clearly proving that they thought they were but instead were holding down the accelerator to the floor. I’m not suggesting that all of these drivers are lying so that they can sue Toyota, although there certainly some of that going on. I believe that these people firmly believe their foot was on the brake and not the accelerator the whole time. One woman was quoted as saying, I don’t care what the scientific evidence says, I know where my foot was. Similar statements have been made by eye-witnesses to crimes who were proven wrong by DNA tests.

All of this begs the question, why would Toyota or any innocent person or company confess to something they did not do. Back in the old days, that was an easy question to answer. Before we had the Miranda Act and before we videotaped confessions, all the cops had to do was “beat it out” of the accused. The cops can’t use rubber hoses anymore, but they can use psychological rubber hoses. They can make deals for shorter sentences or probation suggesting that if they are found guilty by a jury the sentence will be much, much worse. They can tell the accused that, if they don’t confess to this crime, the police will make a major effort to investigate them on a multitude of other possible crimes until they find something. The police can exert a large amount of duress without violating the rules. They can pretend that they have evidence they don’t, they can question an accused for long periods and repeatedly, they can suggest that they will let it be known on the street that the accused “ratted out” his friends, and they can shout and scream as much as they like. A big cop with a big gun can be pretty terrifying.

Scientific studies on false confessions have all come to the same conclusion. They all have one thing in common and that is a decision at some point during the interrogation process that confessing will be more beneficial to them than continuing to maintain their innocence. So there we have it. Jim Lentz, the President of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Yoshi Inabla the President of Toyota of North America, and Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota all felt they had far more to lose by telling the truth than by falsely confessing.

With the U.S. Congress and the National Highway Transportation Safety Association (NHTSA) fueled by a biased media on the attack, it would have been corporate PR hari kari for Toyota to blame their customers for the reported crashes. They had no choice but to apologize to Congress and the public and confess to a crime they didn’t commit because “confessing will be more beneficial to them than continuing to maintain their innocence”.

Now that Toyota’s innocence has been proven by scientific tests, you would think that somebody would apologize. Like Ray LaHood, chairman of NHTSA, who advised everybody driving a Toyota to “pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car”? How about Bart Stupak and John Dingell, the Congressmen from Michigan who are “in the tank” for the UAW who shouted at Jim Lentz to apologize to those families of those who his defective Toyotas had killed. The media will never apologize. In fact, they won’t even give the exoneration anywhere near the coverage they gave the erroneous allegations.