Speaker 1: Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in
Speaker 1: Juleivis to California, just south of San Diego. Sailor was
Speaker 1: forty five years old, a California HIWI Patrol officer. Ordinarily,
Speaker 1: he drove a two thousand and six Lexus I S,
Speaker 1: but his car had a problem with his CD player,
Speaker 1: so that morning he took it to the dealership and
Speaker 1: got a loaner a brand new Lexus E. Sailor finished
Speaker 1: his shift at the HIGWI Patrol and went back home,
Speaker 1: picked up his wife, daughter, and brother in law Chris Lostrella,
Speaker 1: and they all set out for the daughter's soccer practice.
Speaker 1: They were heading up Highway one twenty five and just
Speaker 1: as they approached a town called Santi, Lostrella, who sitting
Speaker 1: in the backseat, calls nine one one. What you're about
Speaker 1: to hear? A morning you is harrowing and see what
Speaker 1: are you reporting? Yeah, we're Alexis. I'm sorry your cell
Speaker 1: phone cutting out. We're going one twenty five TV. I'm
Speaker 1: sorry for alexceritor stuck well one twenty five great, okay,
Speaker 1: northbound one twenty five. Where are you passing. We are
Speaker 1: passing up? Where are we passing? Words? We're going on
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty mission. Gorge, We're in trouble. We
Speaker 1: can't We're there's no break, okay, Gorge and three way
Speaker 1: half mile okay. And you don't have the ability to
Speaker 1: like turn the vehicle off or anything. Approaching an intersection.
Speaker 1: We're approaching an intersection. Okay, We're pushing interfect hold on, pray, pray, Hello,
Speaker 1: oh hello, the o o oh you here is this
Speaker 1: Jella's horrified response to the Lexus spinning out of control,
Speaker 1: hitting another vehicle, and plunging down a ravine. Everyone inside
Speaker 1: the car was killed. The Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story.
Speaker 1: I hesitated before playing it, but in the end I
Speaker 1: concluded that you have to hear it to make sense
Speaker 1: of what happened Next, the tape went viral. It was
Speaker 1: played on the nightly news, written up in horrified news articles,
Speaker 1: to the point where a wave of fear swept the country.
Speaker 1: Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales due to
Speaker 1: a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives in day runaway.
Speaker 1: Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to one
Speaker 1: hundred miles an hour. One died she crashed her camera
Speaker 1: into a tree and a pole. A car had sped
Speaker 1: up to more than one hundred miles per hour. Hundreds
Speaker 1: of people came forward with horror stories about the Alexis
Speaker 1: accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is a
Speaker 1: brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings exposs whistleblowers. NASA
Speaker 1: got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine and March two thousand and ten, totaling
Speaker 1: millions of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated
Speaker 1: to have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended
Speaker 1: up paying a one point two billion dollars fine to
Speaker 1: the US government. They spent another one point one billion
Speaker 1: to settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've
Speaker 1: settled something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest
Speaker 1: automobile company was accused of a cover up, of putting
Speaker 1: profits ahead of people, of having a culture of denial.
Speaker 1: Toyota's conduct was shameful. He showed a blatant disregard for
Speaker 1: systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers.
Speaker 1: That's Eric Holder in March two and fourteen. He was
Speaker 1: the Attorney General of the United States at the time.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement
Speaker 1: officer of the land calls out one of the largest
Speaker 1: companies in the world. My name is Malcolm Glaube. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, where every week we go back
Speaker 1: and examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted
Speaker 1: to the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard
Speaker 1: at least some part of that nine one one tape before.
Speaker 1: Maybe you had a Toyota at the time and had
Speaker 1: a sudden pang of worry. What I want to do
Speaker 1: is go back to two thousand and nine and convince
Speaker 1: you that something went very wrong in the way the
Speaker 1: controversy played out very well. Let's go back for a
Speaker 1: moment to the person we started with, Mark Sailor, California
Speaker 1: Highway patrol officer. He's driving down the highway and he
Speaker 1: can't stop his car. The accelerator is stuck. His brother
Speaker 1: in law says. After the crash, another person comes forward
Speaker 1: to the police and says he had driven the same
Speaker 1: loner Lexus a few days before and had a similar incident.
Speaker 1: It accelerated to get past a truck, and when he
Speaker 1: pushed the throttle towards the floor, that's what car guys
Speaker 1: called the accelerator pedal, the throttle stuck. What he realized
Speaker 1: is that someone had put one of those big, thick
Speaker 1: all weather rubber floor mats in the car, on top
Speaker 1: of the floor mat that was already there. That second
Speaker 1: big thick floor mat wasn't attached to those little hooks
Speaker 1: that hold floor mats down. It slid around, and so
Speaker 1: somehow the thick mat got wedged under the throttle. That
Speaker 1: everyone decides is what happened to Sailor maybe he tried
Speaker 1: to turn the car off, but the Lexus has one
Speaker 1: of those push button ignitions, and what he may not
Speaker 1: have realized is that you have to hold that button
Speaker 1: down for three seconds if you're trying to stop the
Speaker 1: car while it's in motion. Maybe he tried to put
Speaker 1: the car in neutral, but it's not always obvious how
Speaker 1: to do that, particularly if you're panicking. They crash. The
Speaker 1: nine one one car goes viral and Toyota launches a
Speaker 1: massive recall of floor mats across its model line. Problem solved, right. Well, No,
Speaker 1: here's the problem. Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration
Speaker 1: crisis thinks that floor mats are any more than a
Speaker 1: small part of the story. It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: So that's an all weather matt. That's my producer, Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith talking to Sean Kane. This is the killer format. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is the format that brought Toyota to fame. Kane
Speaker 1: runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research and Strategies.
Speaker 1: Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean Kane's name
Speaker 1: comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked closely with
Speaker 1: many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's not buying
Speaker 1: the floor matt theory. When the pedal was depressed fully
Speaker 1: to the floor inkade the way this road here, the
Speaker 1: pedal extended down to the point where the bottom edge
Speaker 1: of it would catch here on this rubber piece. Okay,
Speaker 1: and it would catch on the bottom edge and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't return. But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell
Speaker 1: the whole story. Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals.
Speaker 1: So the way this would have to happen is you'd
Speaker 1: have to depress your accelerator pedal nearly to the floor
Speaker 1: all wide overthrooor to wide open throttle, you'd have to
Speaker 1: mash that accelerator to the floor and to have that
Speaker 1: catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Speaker 1: Kane is saying that for the floor mat to trap
Speaker 1: the accelerator, the driver has to floor it. But why
Speaker 1: on earth is a guy driving his family to soccer
Speaker 1: practice flooring it? Not to mention all the hundreds of
Speaker 1: other people who complained about Toyota's with stuck accelerators, some
Speaker 1: of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically,
Speaker 1: since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her
Speaker 1: camera down the street? Mark Sailor, he was driving with
Speaker 1: what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while,
Speaker 1: Why didn't he just reach down on a yank the
Speaker 1: floormat away from the pedal? Right, I still have a
Speaker 1: hard time believing, giving a long distance and the travel
Speaker 1: of his car, that the floormat was the culprit. Kane
Speaker 1: thinks that something else must have happened in that car.
Speaker 1: And by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis ended
Speaker 1: up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming number
Speaker 1: of those cases, the car didn't even have an oversized,
Speaker 1: thick plastic floormat. The cars had normal floormats. Something else
Speaker 1: must have been happening, and a number of people believe
Speaker 1: that something has to do with software. That there is
Speaker 1: and was something wrong with the software that governs the
Speaker 1: throttle in Toyotas in today's cars. Now we're looking at
Speaker 1: code code that can be up to one hundred million
Speaker 1: lines of code. The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter
Speaker 1: is running about seven million lines of code. A luxury
Speaker 1: car today can run a hundred million lines of code.
Speaker 1: You what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got
Speaker 1: a fifty thousand dollars car. In The complexity level of
Speaker 1: the fifty thousand ar car is exponentially greater. Do you
Speaker 1: think that that car is now going to be defect
Speaker 1: free and software clear not likely? This is the argument
Speaker 1: that Kane has made in lawsuits against Toyota. The cars
Speaker 1: contain a bug in the lines of computer code that
Speaker 1: control how the car starts and stops. Speeds up and
Speaker 1: slows down. The La Times also pursued this question, resulting
Speaker 1: in one of the most prestigious investigative reporting awards in
Speaker 1: a country, the Lobe, for its work. If the La
Speaker 1: Times and Sean Kane are right, then that's terrifying because
Speaker 1: what it means is that what happened to Mark Sailor
Speaker 1: could happen to you. I wanted to put this fear
Speaker 1: to a test, that what happened to Mark Sailor could
Speaker 1: easily happen to you or me. It's a terrible story,
Speaker 1: after all, but how much should we be afraid that
Speaker 1: our cars might do the same thing. To test this out,
Speaker 1: my producer Jacob and I got ourselves a two thousand
Speaker 1: and three camera two hundred and twenty five thousand miles
Speaker 1: on it, the best selling Toyota, in fact, the best
Speaker 1: selling car in America for eleven of the last twelve years.
Speaker 1: A lot of the unintended acceleration cases happened in cameras.
Speaker 1: After getting the car, we called up Car and Driver,
Speaker 1: the premier automotive magazine in the United States. We wanted
Speaker 1: them to help us figure out what was behind this
Speaker 1: epidemic of unintended acceleration to try and replicate one of
Speaker 1: those runaway car situations. So one chilly winter morning, Jacob
Speaker 1: and I met up with three guys from Car and
Speaker 1: Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds just west of Detroit. It's
Speaker 1: a vast racetrack that Chrysler uses to do all of
Speaker 1: its testing. I'm guessing a thousand acres big guardhouse at
Speaker 1: the front. The whole time we were there, Christ had
Speaker 1: someone in a jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on us,
Speaker 1: making sure we didn't take photos of any of the
Speaker 1: new cars they were testing. Oh look, there's the Q seven.
Speaker 1: What the car Driver guys right there. Our guys are
Speaker 1: Don Sherman, he's the technical director of Car and Driver,
Speaker 1: and Casey Colwell, young guy Brooks with Don. Eddie Altiman
Speaker 1: also came. He's the editor of Car and Driver, Cami, Don, Casey, Eddie.
Speaker 1: They all car guys, which matters because one of the
Speaker 1: notable facts about sudden acceleration is how the car guys
Speaker 1: see things differently from the non car guys. Incidentally, Jacob
Speaker 1: and I would also describe ourselves as car guys, although
Speaker 1: not quite at the level of the Car and Driver folks.
Speaker 1: True story, when I was thirteen, I rode away for
Speaker 1: promotional brochures on every car sold in the world, except
Speaker 1: for the Soviet zeal which was really hard to get.
Speaker 1: I still have every one of those brochures. Anyway, back
Speaker 1: to the racetrack in Detroit, Silver camera entering VDF, staying
Speaker 1: out of your way like we were before. The plan
Speaker 1: is to take the camera up to some serious speeds,
Speaker 1: keep the throttle wide open, as if the accelerator pedal
Speaker 1: is somehow stuck, and then see if we can stop
Speaker 1: the car. What happens if you have your foot full
Speaker 1: on the accelerator pedal and then you also slam on
Speaker 1: the brakes at the same time, because intuitively you'd think
Speaker 1: that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your car surges uncontrollably,
Speaker 1: you slam on the brakes. We want to figure out
Speaker 1: what that looks like. You're gonna make it go wide
Speaker 1: open throttle, then quickly you apply the brakes, not really
Speaker 1: a panic, but just stop at the best you can.
Speaker 1: So Jacob goes out first with Casey behind the wheel.
Speaker 1: He accelerates so bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two,
Speaker 1: sixty three five, sixty seven, eight nine, seventy and about
Speaker 1: to do it. All right, We're gonna put the throttle down,
Speaker 1: so the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
Speaker 1: the break with the gas pedal still down and we
Speaker 1: locked up a little bit. But what I mean that's
Speaker 1: what the car stops? Oh? Yeah, car stops. But no
Speaker 1: loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back. Jacob asks
Speaker 1: Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape are they in?
Speaker 1: Is it a little cooked or no, it's not. I
Speaker 1: don't think the brakes are cooked. They smell like we'll
Speaker 1: know in a second. Don't even sell. Okay, if you
Speaker 1: have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine, the brakes win.
Speaker 1: Then it's my turn. I get into Camray with Eddie Aultraman.
Speaker 1: He's driving. We take the car down straight away? Can
Speaker 1: we go a little fast? Let me favor? At seventy,
Speaker 1: Ultiman hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to
Speaker 1: a halt, throttles open. We've got a really old, not
Speaker 1: a terribly good shape car, filled with three people and
Speaker 1: a bunch of equipment and it's still stopping. So what's
Speaker 1: the What is the difference between breaking with your foot
Speaker 1: completely off the accelerator and breaking like this. What I
Speaker 1: mean is how much longer does it take to stop
Speaker 1: a car with a throttle wide open? About ten feet
Speaker 1: if you want to quantify it, it can be a
Speaker 1: little bit more, but not so much that you'd notice.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
Speaker 1: Driver do a version of this very same test. We
Speaker 1: basically did this with a variety of cars, and we
Speaker 1: found actually that with the throttle stuck open or going
Speaker 1: in seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty close
Speaker 1: to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that had
Speaker 1: his thrill closed. A camera with the accelerator stuck wide
Speaker 1: open stops basically as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
Speaker 1: It's not a big deal. Yeah, but of course we're
Speaker 1: not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
Speaker 1: carsons as my demons and we're in a closed kind
Speaker 1: of situation. But you can see, I'll get it up
Speaker 1: to seventy Not a big deal. Yeah, it's the most
Speaker 1: undramatic you try. I would love to truck. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: were out on the testing ground for two hours. We
Speaker 1: tried every trick in the book. The car stopped, We
Speaker 1: loaded up the camera with three adults and a ton
Speaker 1: of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine while
Speaker 1: the car was in motion. It stopped once. We took
Speaker 1: the camera up to one hundred miles an hour. What
Speaker 1: do we at getting there? It took forever, but it stopped. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: Don Sherman and I talked about the strangely normal experience
Speaker 1: of bringing a camera to a full stop with the
Speaker 1: accelerator to the floor. The brakes are powerful. You got
Speaker 1: four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them. Think
Speaker 1: of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline to
Speaker 1: power and move all that breaking is relatively easy to do,
Speaker 1: it much more powerful. That's why people don't acknowledge that
Speaker 1: all the capability built into their car. When Car and
Speaker 1: Driver did their version of this experiment right after the
Speaker 1: Sailor crash, they went so far as to do a
Speaker 1: full throttle braking to on a Ruche Stage three Mustang.
Speaker 1: If you aren't a car guy, I should explain. Ruche
Speaker 1: is an independent company that takes sports cars and basically
Speaker 1: puts them on steroids. The engine of the Stage three
Speaker 1: Ruche has five hundred and forty horsepower. That's two to
Speaker 1: three times more powerful than the typical car on the road.
Speaker 1: A monster a rouche would take a camera and chop
Speaker 1: it into little, tiny pieces. So car and driver take
Speaker 1: the ruche Mustang up to one hundred pounds an hour,
Speaker 1: keep their foot on the accelerator at the same time
Speaker 1: they slam on the brakes, and what happens. The car stops.
Speaker 1: Now it takes a good nine hundred feet to come
Speaker 1: to a full stop. There's all kinds of huffing and puffing,
Speaker 1: but it stops. Breaks go up against one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful engines on the road, and the brakes win.
Speaker 1: I think you can now understand how crucial this pointed
Speaker 1: Toyota gets embroiled in a massive controversy. They pay billions
Speaker 1: of dollars in fines, They face allegations of a cover up,
Speaker 1: all because their cars are supposed to be suddenly and
Speaker 1: mysteriously accelerating. But if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating,
Speaker 1: all you have to do is step on the brakes,
Speaker 1: because brakes beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailor stop
Speaker 1: his Lexus that day as he sped down Higway one
Speaker 1: twenty five. I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but
Speaker 1: it's the only logical explanation because he never put his
Speaker 1: foot on the brake. Maybe the most important person in
Speaker 1: this whole story is a man named Dick Schmidt. Sadly,
Speaker 1: Schmidt died last fall, which is a real loss, because
Speaker 1: Schmidt was a really remarkable man. As a kid, he
Speaker 1: was a champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub
Speaker 1: three hour marathoner. He owned five porsches, He raced cars,
Speaker 1: a car guy. He was also a professor at UCLA
Speaker 1: who becomes an important figure in what's called human performance research.
Speaker 1: Human performance research asks how do people move and act
Speaker 1: and interact with the physical world. Schmidt starts the Journal
Speaker 1: of Motor Behavior, and along the way he becomes maybe
Speaker 1: the world's leading expert on the way your feet behave
Speaker 1: when you drive a car. I talked to Schmidt about
Speaker 1: a year before he died. He was in a wheelchair.
Speaker 1: By that point, he had a neurological disease and you'll
Speaker 1: hear a little bit of his illness in his speech.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to repeat what he says because
Speaker 1: it's really important and I want to make sure you
Speaker 1: understand it. Schmidt got involved in the sudden acceleration issue
Speaker 1: years ago when he got a call from an attorney
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. It was a case involving a
Speaker 1: taxi driver who picked up some people outside a hotel.
Speaker 1: Nathan knows he's run full rattled on Parkway. What Schmidt's
Speaker 1: saying is, next thing you know, he's running full throttle
Speaker 1: down the street and he makes a left turn and realizes,
Speaker 1: oh god, I'm coming to a big traffic circle, and
Speaker 1: he ends up putting the car into a wall. That
Speaker 1: was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal, but
Speaker 1: it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously,
Speaker 1: the driver can't stop. It. Was there ever a moment
Speaker 1: when you suspected it might be a mechanical cause to
Speaker 1: these incidents? No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever
Speaker 1: suspected that the problem might be with the car, a malfunction,
Speaker 1: a faulty bit of software, an engineering failure. And Schmidt,
Speaker 1: one of the world's leading experts in human factors, is
Speaker 1: saying that never once crossed his mind. Why Because everything
Speaker 1: about sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver
Speaker 1: the car. He starts to look at other cases and
Speaker 1: discovers that there are some pretty clear patterns. But those
Speaker 1: patterns don't involve a particular make or model of car.
Speaker 1: Nothing that could make you say, oh, there's something wrong
Speaker 1: with that kind of car. Every carmaker gets hit with
Speaker 1: complaints of sudden acceleration. When it is a high profile
Speaker 1: case like the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand,
Speaker 1: like Toyota, but that's just the effect of publicity. It
Speaker 1: happens to everyone. The patterns involve the kinds of people
Speaker 1: who have sudden acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances
Speaker 1: that lead to sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to
Speaker 1: be older, they tend to be shorter, They tend to
Speaker 1: be people, and this is really important, they tend to
Speaker 1: be people who are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance,
Speaker 1: parking lot attendance, and the majority of these incidents happen
Speaker 1: right after someone gets into a car for the first time,
Speaker 1: or when they're parking or driving at very low speeds.
Speaker 1: Now you have to make sense of these patterns. You
Speaker 1: could argue, i mean, against all reason, but you could
Speaker 1: argue that cars just get really upset and misbehave when
Speaker 1: they're being driven by parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: The patterns Schmidt found mean it's not the car. What
Speaker 1: Schmidt concludes is that people are getting into strange cars,
Speaker 1: and maybe because those people are too short and didn't
Speaker 1: adjust the seat properly, they were a little further away
Speaker 1: from the pedal than usual. Or maybe they're trying to
Speaker 1: park and because they're doing the stopping and starting and
Speaker 1: getting in and out of a parking space, they get
Speaker 1: thrown just a little out of their comfort zone. They
Speaker 1: start making stabbing motions with their right foot, like someone
Speaker 1: groping in the dark. The term Dick Schmidt uses to
Speaker 1: describe this is impulse ability. Your brain requests a very
Speaker 1: specific action, but your body fails to deliver exactly what
Speaker 1: it's told to do. You mean to say that even
Speaker 1: when producing a very familiar physical movement, Yeah, there is
Speaker 1: variability in how I move my limbs in the force
Speaker 1: with which I so. Baseball players swinging a bat at
Speaker 1: a fastball may feel that he's reproducing his swing every time,
Speaker 1: but he's not. That's why even the greatest golfers in
Speaker 1: the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough, or
Speaker 1: the best basketball players in the world miss a free throw.
Speaker 1: I don't think the far is confused if which is
Speaker 1: a very pedal, which is excelera pally knows, but he
Speaker 1: is a guess. Schmidt says, I don't think the driver
Speaker 1: is confused. If you ask him which is the brake
Speaker 1: pedal and which is the accelerator pedal, he knows, but
Speaker 1: he gets in this state where he feels like he's
Speaker 1: acting normally and he's not. In other words, somewhere between
Speaker 1: intention and action, there's a garble, a glitch on what happens.
Speaker 1: The driver puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's
Speaker 1: the break. He wants to stop the car, but in
Speaker 1: fact he's speeding it up. So back to floor mats.
Speaker 1: Why do they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because
Speaker 1: they throw off the expected geometry of the car. A
Speaker 1: big thick winter mat stacked on top of an existing
Speaker 1: mat raises the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator
Speaker 1: and break seem much closer to your right foot, And
Speaker 1: if you're in a strange car, that just increases the
Speaker 1: odds of impulse variability. It's one of those little things
Speaker 1: that leads to a garble between intention and action. Once
Speaker 1: you understand Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds
Speaker 1: of scenarios that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor.
Speaker 1: Let me give you one. He's driving down the highway
Speaker 1: with the cruise control on. Both of his feet are
Speaker 1: on the floor mat. He comes up behind a car
Speaker 1: going slower than he is, so he puts his right
Speaker 1: foot back on the accelerator hard but as he does that,
Speaker 1: the floor mat slides under the throttle, locking it open.
Speaker 1: Now comes the crucial part. He takes his foot off
Speaker 1: the accelerator to return to his cruise control speed, but
Speaker 1: the car doesn't slow down. It surges forward. The throttle
Speaker 1: is locked open by the floor mat. He's alarmed. He
Speaker 1: picks his foot up to hit the brake, but it's
Speaker 1: a car he's not familiar with. It's a loaner, and
Speaker 1: he puts his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake,
Speaker 1: and he presses it down, expecting the car to slow,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't. That's why Listrella says. The brakes don't work,
Speaker 1: and Sailor freaks out, so he presses down harder and
Speaker 1: the car goes even faster, and he freaks out even more.
Speaker 1: I think it's important to note here that sailor isn't negligent.
Speaker 1: He's not a fault. He's not speeding or running a
Speaker 1: red light, or drunk. He's making the mistake that almost
Speaker 1: any of us could make under the circumstances. What happened
Speaker 1: to him in that moment is confusion. So they're going
Speaker 1: into a kind of panic state where instead of asking
Speaker 1: the question is my foot on the red pedal? They
Speaker 1: think the problem is not pushing the brake hard enough.
Speaker 1: Yea perception that the brakes have failed as pedal goes
Speaker 1: to the floor and the card of the stop. Schmidt says,
Speaker 1: the perception is that the brakes have failed because the
Speaker 1: pedal goes to the floor and the car doesn't stop.
Speaker 1: Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some kind of far fetched theory here.
Speaker 1: In February twenty eleven, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Speaker 1: released its report on the whole Toyota business that's the
Speaker 1: one NASA got involved in, and they basically agreed with Schmidt.
Speaker 1: They concluded that the overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases
Speaker 1: were clearly pedal air. The agency knows this because every
Speaker 1: car has a black box that records when the break
Speaker 1: and when the accelerator are used time and again. In
Speaker 1: these cases, the black boxes showed that the brakes hadn't
Speaker 1: even been touched. So here's my question, why is it
Speaker 1: so hard for people to accept the fact that there
Speaker 1: is a really simple, straightforward explanation for what happened in
Speaker 1: the sudden acceleration cases? Because it was hard. Right after
Speaker 1: the Sailor case, the Secretary of Transportation Rail Hood went
Speaker 1: before Congress and said, my advice is, if anybody owns
Speaker 1: one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to
Speaker 1: Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it.
Speaker 1: Do you realize how insane that is. This is the
Speaker 1: guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is
Speaker 1: completely deluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
Speaker 1: to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1: They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
Speaker 1: cars again and again what we've established with this type
Speaker 1: of In February of twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC
Speaker 1: News does a story on a runaway avalon. It's about
Speaker 1: how the software in Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Ooh,
Speaker 1: it's like that. But of course, all you have to
Speaker 1: do if a Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is used the brakes,
Speaker 1: So ABC rigs up an avalon and essentially stages an
Speaker 1: episode of unintended acceleration. Grace don't work, Grace give out Gee.
Speaker 1: The fakery was later uncovered by the website Jelopnik. Here's
Speaker 1: the editor of Jelopnick, Patrick George. They got a university
Speaker 1: professor to cut three wires within the electronic throttle control system,
Speaker 1: then connected two of the wires to each other in
Speaker 1: a specific pattern and with a specific resistor to create
Speaker 1: a link between two final wires with a switch in between,
Speaker 1: so that he can control it. In other words, this
Speaker 1: car was rigged. It was rigged in away that you
Speaker 1: would never produce these results in real life. At the
Speaker 1: same time, they fake a video, or if you ask ABC,
Speaker 1: they make an editing error that makes it look like
Speaker 1: the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact, the cars
Speaker 1: in park in the video you can actually see that
Speaker 1: the brake light is on the whole time. They go
Speaker 1: to all of this trouble of splicing wires and revving engines.
Speaker 1: All that because they're trying to avoid the simplest and
Speaker 1: most plausible explanation, which is people are hitting the wrong
Speaker 1: pedal crazy. It gets worse at the height of the
Speaker 1: Toyota controversy. Consumer Reports releases a video telling driver is
Speaker 1: what to do in the case of unintended acceleration. So
Speaker 1: this is one of the most trusted and irreputable brands
Speaker 1: in the United States. Millions of people look to Consumer
Speaker 1: Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of automotive testing,
Speaker 1: Jake Fisher, has to say. A car accelerating out of
Speaker 1: control is a very serious and scary situation for anyone.
Speaker 1: A gas pedal could get stuck because of a malfunction,
Speaker 1: because a broken throttle return spring, or even a jam floormat. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: to remain calm and follow a few steps, you can
Speaker 1: easily avoid tragedy. Wait, stop right there. He lists a
Speaker 1: series of reasons why a car might accelerate out of control,
Speaker 1: and he neglects to mention the number one cause, which
Speaker 1: is that a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay,
Speaker 1: on to the next problem. Here at our track, We're
Speaker 1: going to demonstrate to you what you should do, and
Speaker 1: more importantly, what you shouldn't do. If you're ever in
Speaker 1: this unfortunate situation, if you find that your car is
Speaker 1: chlorating hard, even after you're taking your foot off the
Speaker 1: gas pedal, your first and stink's probably the right one.
Speaker 1: Step one, put your foot on the brake firmly and
Speaker 1: don't lift off. It's extremely important not to lift your
Speaker 1: foot off the brake. Wait wait, wait, this is even
Speaker 1: crazier than an ABC reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon
Speaker 1: Fisher says it's extremely important not to lift your foot
Speaker 1: off the brake. No, no, no. The whole problem of
Speaker 1: unintended acceleration is caused by the fact that people mistakenly
Speaker 1: think they have their foot firmly on the brake when
Speaker 1: they don't. He needs to say the exact opposite. He
Speaker 1: needs to say, it is extremely important to lift your
Speaker 1: foot off whatever pedal it is on, because chances are
Speaker 1: you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now place it back
Speaker 1: on the brake firmly. This is an advice, This is maultpractice.
Speaker 1: In the spring of two thousand and ten, the people
Speaker 1: who run the autowebsite edmonds dot com got really frustrated
Speaker 1: with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration have become,
Speaker 1: so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
Speaker 1: the car was the culprit and sudden acceleration that is
Speaker 1: an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
Speaker 1: a floor mat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them
Speaker 1: a million dollars. A million dollars they put together a
Speaker 1: panel of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who
Speaker 1: came forward to win? I asked Dan Edmonds, who heads
Speaker 1: up the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a
Speaker 1: grand total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even
Speaker 1: met the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five,
Speaker 1: one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again,
Speaker 1: and the rest, he says, are just nonsense, so they
Speaker 1: can't award the prize. The million dollars is still sitting
Speaker 1: there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits
Speaker 1: filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the
Speaker 1: software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any
Speaker 1: of those plain to Flayers. No, we didn't hear from
Speaker 1: any anybody of that sort. I think because of the
Speaker 1: nature of litigation. I mean, this is me speculating. They
Speaker 1: probably wanted to focus on that. Maybe a million dollars
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to attract their attention. Remember Sean Kaine, mister
Speaker 1: sudden acceleration, the guy with the software coding gone awry theory.
Speaker 1: Not even he wants the million dollars. It was nothing
Speaker 1: more than than, you know, media circus, and it was.
Speaker 1: It was ridiculous, a media circus. Kane doesn't want to
Speaker 1: try and win a million dollars because it's a media circus.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what a media circus was the entire
Speaker 1: Toyota sudden acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kane insisted
Speaker 1: that some elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, because
Speaker 1: people like Sean Kane couldn't admit that this was just
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly a matter of human air. I've used the phrase
Speaker 1: car guys in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt
Speaker 1: was a car guy. The three people from Car and
Speaker 1: Driver or car guys. And what's interesting about the car
Speaker 1: guys is that none of them doubted ever that This
Speaker 1: is a problem caused by drivers because they understand what
Speaker 1: a car is. It's a complicated mechanical object that requires
Speaker 1: attention and skill to be operated safely, and non car
Speaker 1: people have lost sight of that fact. Here is Eddie
Speaker 1: Altiman of Car and Driver All more time. I think
Speaker 1: there is that really really depressing sense of exasperation about
Speaker 1: how customers expect the car to take care of them,
Speaker 1: and how the average driver just expects the car to
Speaker 1: be completely flawless and to save their lives under any circumstances.
Speaker 1: What the car guys want the rest of us to
Speaker 1: acknowledge is that driving is a complicated and dangerous act.
Speaker 1: It is not just the negligent or the reckless who
Speaker 1: make fatal mistakes. Ordinary people do under seemingly ordinary circumstances.
Speaker 1: Mark Sailor did nothing wrong. Nothing. What happened to him
Speaker 1: could have happened to any of us and will happen
Speaker 1: again unless we can finally have an honest conversation about
Speaker 1: what a car is and what it is, and what
Speaker 1: the responsibility of a driver is when things go awrve.
Speaker 1: Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
Speaker 1: just does what the driver tells it to do all right,
Speaker 1: So here we are, we're in our what is this?
Speaker 1: What is two thousands three camper? Is a two thousand
Speaker 1: and three or two thousand and four twenty two thousand miles? Okay,
Speaker 1: get ready? That was I was completely surprised that that
Speaker 1: was the most un unremarkable, not remarkable thing. And let's
Speaker 1: right again, Sigernel hold at sixty. You've been listening to
Speaker 1: Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do
Speaker 1: us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can
Speaker 1: get more information about this and other episodes at revisionist
Speaker 1: history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
Speaker 1: show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky, and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Speaker 1: Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Our
Speaker 1: fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks to Eddie Altman,
Speaker 1: Don Sherman, and Casey Colwell a car and driver for
Speaker 1: helping us to find and buy a two thousand and
Speaker 1: three camera and taking a day off to hostess. Also
Speaker 1: thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for braving the break tests.
Speaker 1: The Penemptly management team is Laura Mayor Andy Bowers in
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.