What was Toyota doing about unintended acceleration five years ago? Congress
subpoenaed tens of thousands of pages of documents for its hearing on
runaway Toyotas and has begun to sift through them. New York Congressman Towns
has come across some memos he finds alarming. Towns has sent a letter
to the president of Toyota asking him to explain the memos which seem
to suggest that in 2005, about five years ago, Toyota settled some lawsuits
to avoid having to provide information about unintended acceleration in
discovery (the process where parties in lawsuits get to see each other’s papers).
There’s also some suggestion in the memos that at least some people
in the U.S. Toyota operations were hoping that the class action lawsuits
would encourage Toyota to fix the problem. Towns quotes one Toyota memo
as saying: “the possibility of a class action lawsuit was used as
one way to try to get TMC [Toyota Motor Company] to work on a series of
proposed countermeasures.” That was five years ago, before the so
many deaths and injuries attributed to unintended acceleration took place.
Toyota has apparently requested that these memos and others like them
be kept confidential.
Toyota has been talking a great deal about openness on this issue. Time
will tell if they are now truly interested in answers, rather than cover-up.
-Stuart Ollanik
Toyota Acceleration Defects Now Allegedly Linked to 34 Car Accident Deaths,
Product Liability Blog Feb. 15, 2010
Toyota Recalls Another 1.1 Million Autos Over Floor Mat – Gas Pedal
Defect, Product Liability Blog Jan. 29, 2010
