The report, ordered by the Legislature last year, went live Wednesday and shows, as expected, that roads with the biggest traffic messes are clustered in the state’s biggest cities. Of the top 10, four are in Dallas or Tarrant counties, one is in Austin, and Houston drivers are stuck with the other four, including the two worst.

Of the 15 most congested roads in Texas, five are in Dallas. Of those, four either touch Central Expressway or are segments of it. And fixes for U.S. 75 are probably a decade or more away.

And as for traffic near downtown, that’s not likely to get much better until either the Trinity Parkway is built or the state finds a way to rebuild the Mixmaster and Canyon without the new toll road, a prospect that appears years away at best.

Bloomberg News reports that NHTSA has said that the defect “could cause stalling ‘at any speed without warning.’” The recall covers model years 2005 to 2008, and follows “at least three reported accidents linked to the defect. The action adds to record recalls in the past year by Toyota City, Japan-based Toyota, including more than 8 million vehicles worldwide for flaws related to unintended acceleration.” Bloomberg notes that NHTSA “upgraded its investigation of the defect to an engineering analysis,” last week, “a step that can lead the agency to demand a recall. The regulator said cracks in engine control units could occur if improperly cured coating was applied to circuit boards.”

The New York Times notes that this is Toyota’s 15th recall this year, adding that NHTSA opened its investigation into the issue in December. “On Thursday, Toyota attributed the problem to improper manufacturing of the vehicles’ engine control modules, which allowed cracks to develop at certain solder points or in a protective coating on the circuit board. Dealers will replace the control modules, which were made by the Delphi Corporation, a process expected to take about 40 minutes for each vehicle, Toyota said.”

From the American Association for Justice news release.

(In an unrelated note, I read that in Afghanistan, 90% of all automobiles are Toyota Corollas! There is a long explanation having to do with a reluctance to be seen in U.S. or European vehicles, and with the endurance of Corollas. Whatever the reason, that’s an astonishingly high percentage for one model from one manufacturer.)

This is an excellent idea, and I look forward to using it. It’s really still in beta test stage at this point, so it’s a little unfair to make fun of a “flaw” in the system. However, apparently no one seemed to consider the fact that a few of us around here speak with slight accents. And the automated system is not yet fine-tuned to handle Texas dialect yet, and is looking for testers with different regional accents. Here’s a quote from Steve Simmons, TxDot Deputy Executive Director:

“John Steinbeck wrote that Texas is ‘a nation in every sense of the word,’ and at times, we even seem to have our own language with accents from every corner of the state. Now we need callers with an East Texas twang and a Panhandle drawl. We want South Texans to help the system learn to understand ‘Refugio’ and Central Texans to teach the computer the number of times the letter ’s’ is in ‘New Braunfels’ or how to pronounce ‘Mexia’ or ‘Bexar.’”

“Two consumer safety groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to order Enterprise Rent-A-Car to start fixing every vehicle with a safety recall before renting them to consumers. The groups say the request highlights the lack of a requirement that rental companies must fix recalled vehicles before renting them.

The request comes about three months after Enterprise admitted in a California court that its failure to fix a Chrysler PT Cruiser was responsible for the deaths of two California women when it caught fire and crashed.”

There is no reason rental companies should be treated differently than car dealers, which are not allowed to sell recalled vehicles without first repairing them. Be careful next time you rent a vehicle, check to see if there’s been a recall on it. You can get that information from SaferCar.gov.

ABC World News (8/10, story 8, 0:20, Stephanopoulos) reported, “Some rare good news for Toyota tonight. Safety experts at the Transportation Department say that so far they have not found any new defects with the electronic systems and no problems beyond the floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals.” The CBS Evening News (8/10, story 8, :30, Couric) reported, “A preliminary Federal report out today suggests that in many cases drivers, not the cars, are to blame. The drivers may have hit the accelerator instead of the brake.”

USA Today (8/11, Woodyard, O’Donnell) reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said “the only causes of ‘unintended acceleration’ continue to be those already identified – sticky gas pedals or floor mats that can become trapped under accelerators.” This is “significant because Toyota critics have alleged that electronics might be at fault in cases of unexplained acceleration,” and “Toyota seized on the report as further proof of what it has contended all along – that engine electronics are not to blame for runaway cars.” In fact, of the 58 data recorders investigators examined, in 35 cases drivers had not braked at all .

The Washington Post /AP (8/11, Thomas) reports, “Olivia Alair, a Transportation Department spokeswoman, said the review of the black boxes was ‘one small part’ of the investigation, which is expected to be completed later in the fall.” She added “that experts with NASA and NHTSA were ‘conducting research at labs across the United States to determine whether there are potential electronic or software defects in Toyotas that can cause unintended acceleration.’” Meanwhile, “Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and NHTSA Administrator David L. Strickland briefed members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the findings of the government review.”

The Los Angeles Times (8/11, Bensinger) reports that LaHood and Strickland “told three members of Congress in the briefing that the agencies had drawn ‘no conclusion’ on the causes of sudden acceleration and noted that investigations by NHTSA, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences were ongoing, with final results a year or more away.” Additionally, “the reliability of black box data has been questioned by automotive experts and even Toyota itself, and the officials were careful to point out that it is only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to analyzing sudden acceleration.”

In a front-page article, the New York Times (8/11, A1, Bunkley) reports that investigators studied data recorders from just 58 vehicles. Also, Sean Kane, a Massachusetts safety consultant working on behalf of plaintiffs in lawsuits against the carmaker, “said many of the reported crashes happened at low speeds, often in parking lots, and would not activate the data recorders.”

From the American Association for Justice press release.

This recall by Honda is troubling, because most auto makers use a similar system for ignition interlocks, and the concern is that other manufacturers might have similar problems.

The United States has done a fairly good job so far of policing the safety of cars and trucks. The number of deaths in traffic accidents dropped to an estimated 34,000 last year — the least since the 1950s. But that is still too many deaths.

The recall of millions of Toyota cars and trucks because of persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration has exposed unacceptable weaknesses in the regulatory system. These weaknesses are allowing potentially fatal flaws to remain undetected. Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation to improve regulation and oversight of auto safety. It should be passed into law without delay.

The Motor Vehicle Safety Act requires all vehicles to have a brake override system to ensure that a vehicle can be stopped even if the throttle is open. Pedals must exceed a minimum clearance from the floor to avoid snagging car mats. Electronic control systems must meet minimum performance standards, to be set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And all vehicles must come fitted with recorders that log operational data and help determine the causes of accidents.

But perhaps more important, the bill would broadly change the system of overseeing and enforcing safety rules. That should help the N.H.T.S.A. identify serious problems faster and provide tools to ensure automakers’ compliance with its standards of safety and disclosure.

Automakers support some of the provisions in the bill — like the call for event data recorders and brake override systems, which are already installed in many vehicles. But they oppose the bigger fines and the new safety fees. They argue that disclosure of defect information could reveal confidential information to competitors.

But legislators should not back down on these provisions. N.H.T.S.A. needs vastly more resources to monitor potentially lethal flaws in the nation’s increasingly high-tech fleet. And it needs more compelling fines if it is to persuade carmakers to comply with its rules. N.H.T.S.A. could fine Toyota only $16.4 million for delays in revealing problems with defective accelerator pedals that left the throttle open after being released. That’s pocket change for a company of its size.

Washington Post (7/30, Cha) reports that Toyota announced yesterday the recall of “412,000 Avalons and Lexuses for steering problems, bringing the number of cars recalled around the world since October to nearly 9 million. The 373,000 recalled Avalons, dating from between 2000 and 2004, have improperly cast steering lock bars that appear to have been a factor in three accidents reported to the company. This problem can cause what Toyota described as a ‘minute’ crack to develop on the surface. The crack, in turn, can break the bar and lock the steering wheel, increasing the risk of a crash.” A smaller number of Lexus models “have a different steering shaft problem and no injuries have been reported related to this issue, Toyota said.”

Bloomberg News (7/30, Ohnsman, Kitamura) adds, “Toyota also said it will recall 80,000 Land Cruisers for another problem involving steering shafts. The world’s largest automaker is working to improve quality following global recalls of more than 8 million cars and light trucks for defects linked to unintended acceleration,” noting that the crisis resulted in a $16.4 million fine and pending auto safety legislation.

The Los Angeles Times (7/30, Hirsch, Times) adds that the “latest recalls bring the number of vehicles Toyota has recalled in the last year to about 9 million worldwide. That’s almost as many vehicles as were sold by all manufacturers in the US last year. … Toyota faces hundreds of lawsuits arising from its problems with sudden acceleration and sticking gas pedals and has been the target of intense scrutiny by federal safety regulators and Congress.”

From the American Association for Justice news release.

]]> http://www.pissd.com/2010/08/toyota-recalling-400000-vehicles-to-fix-steering-problems/feed/ 1 http://www.pissd.com/2010/07/toyota-does-an-about-face-on-reliability-of-black-boxes-in-its-vehicles/ http://www.pissd.com/2010/07/toyota-does-an-about-face-on-reliability-of-black-boxes-in-its-vehicles/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:53:42 +0000 Bob Kraft http://www.pissd.com/?p=5753 The Los Angeles Times reports that Toyota has often dismissed the data collected by its event data recorders as “unreliable” and collected by “unproven technology. … Now, facing continued claims that its vehicles are defective, Toyota appears to have done an about-face” and “has been citing data from black boxes in Toyota and Lexus vehicles to suggest that driver error, rather than mechanical or electronic defects, is causing sudden acceleration. In court cases, regulatory filings and dealings with customers, Toyota has for years branded the devices -called event data recorders, or EDRs – as unreliable. It has also said the tools used to read the reports are prototypes. ‘It sounds duplicitous when all along Toyota has been saying this is unreliable, and now they are using it as their defense and they are not releasing the data to the public,’ said Henry Jasney, senior counsel at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.”

From the American Association for Justice news release.