Toyotathud Returns

As readers of the Wonderblog undoubtedly know, this blog has had more than its share of ‘oops’ moments. (Not that I am keeping score, but I seem to be in no danger of ever achieving perfection.) On those occasions when we have been proven incorrect, the Wonderblog chows down on crow fast food style and promptly admits it. We even have a nifty logo, just for such occasions.

On a recent occasion the Wonderblog waved the ‘I was Wrong’ flag in the direction of the Toyota Motor Corporation of Japan. Toyota had been making the claim that a spate of deaths behind the wheels of their products were essentially caused by IDIOT AMERICANS not being able to operate their fine products. Many EXCLUSIVELY AMERICANS had been killed or injured when their Toyotas suddenly bolted and went careening out of control. Toyota’s claim was that this was caused primarily by IDIOT AMERICANS mistaking the accelerator for the brake—or being messy drivers and having their floor mats in a bunch.

Both the Wonderblog and Steve Jobs called ‘B.S.’ on this. Jobs went so far as to offer to help to fix the problem. The Wonderblog’s Lax and Apple’s Jobs postulated that the problem probably was in the Toyota’s electrical ‘drive by wire’ system.

(Pictured above, a pair of visionaries: Jobs and Lax) *1

To make a long story short, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration hired NASA to look into these accidents. Their conclusion: the accidents were 100% the fault of STUPID AMERICANS. Could some of it be fly by wire problems? Nope. Problems with cell phone bleed over into unshielded sensors? Absolutely not. Per NASA the problem is operator error, AKA STUPID AMERICAN DRIVERS.

I didn’t blink twice. If NASA says it, I believe it. I immediately issued my apology to Toyota and the Empire of Japan. (*2) Steve Jobs died. We all went on our merry way.

I should have known better. With any other department or agency, I would have waited for the report itself to be released. Whenever an agency wants to bury a detail, they issue the conclusions first, with proclamation on television and coverage in the news headlines. Then they sneak in the actual report, released several weeks later, on a Friday night when no one is in town. That the initial headline and the actual information should contradict each other is more the norm than an exception. It’s like when a rock star dies suddenly and his agent and everyone in his family fall over each other to say that it is not an overdose or suicide. Then you find out three weeks later the guy was snorting Draino. Sadly, a lot of things work this way. But not NASA. Certainly not NASA…

Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration both seized on that conclusion as proof that Toyota's electronic systems were beyond reproach -- a contention amplified widely in media accounts. But buried within that same report are details that safety experts construe as disturbing evidence of problems potentially afflicting the electronic systems governing the gas pedal -- problems that Toyota and the highway safety agency have so far dismissed.

WTF! How does this happen? This is the United States, not some third world dictatorship wherein well placed bribes make all problems disappear. Surely there must be a reason for any oversight…

Investigators found so-called tin whiskers -- which grow on tin when it is electrified and can conduct electricity to unintended places -- inside the electronic systems in Toyota Camry gas pedals, according to the report. These wiry fibers of metal are thinner than a human hair and can sprout unpredictably. They have been implicated in crippling defects besetting a range of equipment, including communications satellites, pacemakers, missiles and nuclear power plants.

"It's not potentially dangerous; it's absolutely dangerous," said Sean Kane, founder and president of Safety Research & Strategies, a Massachusetts-based auto safety consulting firm. "If you talk to anyone in the field, they'll tell you it's dangerous. NHTSA is trying to minimize what it means."

("Toyota" is Japanese for "Death-Mobile")

But outside safety experts have long speculated that a fourth cause could be at play in cases of unintended acceleration: faulty electronics.

The problem can cause engine revving, surging and hesitation. But all those issues are eliminated as soon as a driver take the foot off the gas, NHTSA asserted on the basis of an analysis of NASA's data, consumer complaints and Toyota's warranty data. The agency concluded that it was effectively impossible for tin whiskers to have caused Toyota vehicles to have accelerated out of control.

But the details of the report reveal that NASA and NHTSA based their conclusions on a tiny sample of evidence. The analysis looked at just three gas pedals. Two of the pedals came from drivers who complained their cars lunged forward when they pressed on the gas pedal. The third came from a car in a junkyard. Despite the fact that all three pedals were passed around -- one was shipped via FedEx across country, and no one knows how the car in the junkyard was handled -- the fragile, thin tin whiskers stayed intact. NASA found tin whiskers in all three pedals.

("See, it is the American that is defective.")

But researchers at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering published a paper last fall saying they found evidence of more tin whiskers in Toyota gas pedals. They examined pedals from two Toyotas -- a 2005 Toyota Camry and a 2002 Camry -- probing them with X-ray fluoroscopes and scanning electron microscopes to look at the inner workings. They found six tin whiskers growing inside one of the pedals and two inside the other. Based on how many tin whiskers they discovered and how many NASA found, they estimated that the whiskers could cause shorting failures in 140 out of 1 million vehicles, which could result in more sudden acceleration cases.

Last fall, Henning Leidecker, an expert for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, gave a presentation that lent credence to the idea that tin whiskers could render any car with this problem effectively inoperable.

Leidecker used X-rays and microscopes to examine a gas pedal from Albuquerque that was malfunctioning. He found two tin whiskers inside. One whisker was long enough to bridge the internal electronics and was causing a short. Leidecker discovered that the specific gas pedal would work fine if depressed quickly. But when pushed slowly, the accelerator jumped and sped up suddenly. If pressed even harder, the throttle sometimes opened entirely, as if the driver were pressing intending to speed up rapidly.

All of this has led me to three somewhat independent conclusions:

#1. Holy Crap, I WAS RIGHT. (As was Jobs.) It wasn’t a total flying guess on my part. (And I wasn’t just following Jobs’ lead.) There was a lot of evidence simply ‘out there’ which indicated the accidents were caused by something much more systematic than human error, American or otherwise. It was obvious there was either a signal problem (fly by wire) or a software problem. It turns out I was dead right and it was a signal problem.

#2. NASA was bought off. Or at least pressured. That an agency without an income should branch into the area once occupied by Ralph Nader and Consumers Reports was curious, but it didn’t raise any red flags at the time. Now it does. I am now quite prepared to not trust a word NASA has to say about anything.

(Before I go into this next conclusion, may I emphatically state that no nation, race or group of people deserve to have earthquakes, nuclear accidents nor twenty plus years of economic depression. Not even people who have such a dastardly and dishonest of an entity as Toyota upon their shores.)

#3. Toyota LIED. Moreover, Toyota (the family name is actually Toyoda) and its sycophants in the Japanese government pulled strings and used clout to sell their lies. The dishonesty and corruption of NASA and NHTSA notwithstanding, it is Toyota and the Government of Japan who are the operative bad actors here. And the worst part of it is that they did it for DIRTY STINKING MONEY.

SHIP YOUR DAMN RICE BURNERS HOME AND ROT IN HELL!
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In the end, rigging the system is going to be the end of us all. In Japan, the government, the big industrial complex and the banks are all a part of one entity. They appoint national champions to bend the odds in their favor. It works in the short run, but in the long run, you wind up with entities whose first obligation is to their own survival, not the creation of competitive advantage against countries. It becomes survival of country's elite verses its own internal creative forces. And the Japanese aren't the only folks who suffer from this...

It is not due to complicated technical difficulties that many of the world's economic problems persist and deepen. In most cases, today's malaise is a reflection of political dysfunction and ineffective leadership, both of which pre-empt any meaningful effort to take the difficult yet necessary decisions. Witness how the U.S. Congress has torpedoed President Barack Obama's job initiative. As a result, the credibility of the system itself suffers. Fortunately, several key countries, including the United States, are holding elections this year, giving citizens an opportunity to send a message to their elected representatives. The greater the clarity and urgency of that message, the higher the probability that bickering politicians can overcome real and perceived legacies to unite in doing the right thing for current and future generations of citizens.

Or as another internet wag put it:

These guys are the invisible chess players in American democracy.. Their politicians are the Kings and Queens, their police are the Knights and Rooks and the rest of us are the expendable pawns...

I use the term 'wag' in the traditional English sense, meaning a person who writes without sanction of authority. In most places, this means a reporter, in the United States sense of the word. There is also a 1970s era sense of the word 'wag', which is as an acronym for Wild Ass Guess. A common permutation was SWAG for a Super Intuitive Wild Ass Guess. I would rate my prognostication about Toyota's problems as a SWAG. Somehow the word 'wag' just works better for writers plying the internet. It seems to encompass all senses of the word.

Note: Though I do not labor tirelessly to edit my own prose here, the majority of the awkward sentences you see above come off of professional wire service copy. This of course in no way excuses me, but it does showcase the somewhat low standards of this medium. When searching for blog fodder, I often find the comments sections much more illuminating than work being commented on. It was in such a place that I found this rather on topic riff...

The financial system is not a naturally occurring equilibrium. It is a game made up of rules made by man. So is monopoly, and like monopoly when all of the capital ends up in too few hands for the game to continue the game will stop. When the other players can no longer pay rent in Monopoly it is a win for the guy with all of the money. In the more real, but not totally real, game of high finance, it will be a loss.

Not that this is really the Wonderblog's gig, but all of this touches on the topic of the current American election. As framed, the choice is between "fairness" and "preserving the free market."

The year 2012 is Europe's moment of truth. If their dithering continues, European politicians will soon lose control of the continent's economic and financial future. After all the excitement of 2011, it is also a make-or-break year for some Middle Eastern countries in the midst of tricky political transitions. Even the United States is being shaken out of its social slumber as concerns mount about income inequality and, more generally, the fairness of the "system."

As if to amplify, another source SWAGs:

This rage against the very rich may explain why Gingrich scored so well among less affluent voters in the Palmetto State. He nabbed 40 percent of those who make less than $100,000 a year, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research and published by the New York Times. The higher the income, the better Romney scored. Taken as a whole, the numbers suggest the 99 percent overwhelmingly supported Gingrich over Romney.

The result is especially telling in South Carolina, where many Republican voters are evangelical Christians, who might be appalled by Gingrich’s marital history. But Romney’s financial issues seemed to matter more than even the accusation, days ahead of the vote, by the second of his three wives that Gingrich had sought an “open” marriage. Gingrich nabbed 44 percent of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again – twice Romney’s take.

That the Christian Right is beginning to realize that they have been the victim of the rapacity of their better-off Republican brethern is, simply put, huge.

To wander back to Wonderblog territory, it seems that politics is not the only place our Christian brethren (I spelled it right) are being taken. (For reasons that escape me, the English refer to confidence games as affinity rackets):

But religious fraud is particularly common, because people find it hard to imagine that the pastor is a perp. Joseph Borg, Alabama’s securities commissioner, reckons half of all affinity frauds in the American South are faith-based. The problem stretches across all types of belief, and ranges far beyond the Bible Belt.

That cons and church should go hand in hand should surprise no one. That cons are connected mostly to cults and that cults are much more widespread than conventionally thought will be a topic of another Wonderblog post. While we stay away from the houses of God, we can have faith in the coming of the Wonderblog's panacea, the Electricar...

Electric and Hybrid Cars Hit an Inflection Point

The controversy over unintended acceleration and a huge recall hurt Toyota in 2010 and 2011, but now the Prius is very much back. Meanwhile, Tesla is finally launching its long awaited high end electric sedan. The electric car story has been anticipated for so many decades we hardly notice that the era's now really here.

They had better hurry up and materialize. Even my pom poms are starting to sag on this. And no one wants a wag with saggy pom pom swag.

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The Wonderblog will return with its promised entry on Character Management soon. Toyota just ticked me off. Not that I can make Toyota more "Internet Famous" than it already is, but I can contribute a much deserved kick to its corporate nads. Toyota's are DEATHTRAPS. Pass it on.

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*!. To our knowledge, Steve Jobs and Mark Lax have never been in the same area code together, much less worked together on anything. Moreover, this is not a real photograph, nor is the picture of Mark Lax at all accurate. Per his sister, Lax looks like Tooter the Turtle. As a young man Lax resembled Beaker the Muppet.

*2. The Wonderblog is not retracting its apology to Toyota or the Empire of Japan. It is they who have lost face, not us. You lying sacks of dung.