Speaker 1: Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in Julivista, California,
Speaker 1: just south of San Diego. Sailor was forty five years old,
Speaker 1: a California Higway Patrol officer. Ordinarily, he drove a two
Speaker 1: thousand and six Lexus ISS, but his car had a
Speaker 1: problem with his CD player, so that morning he took
Speaker 1: it to the dealership and got a loaner a brand
Speaker 1: new Lexus ES. Sailor finished his shift at the highway
Speaker 1: patrol and went back home, picked up his wife, daughter,
Speaker 1: and brother in law, Chris Lostrella, and they all set
Speaker 1: out for the daughter's soccer practice. They were heading up
Speaker 1: Highway one twenty five and just as they approached a
Speaker 1: town called Santi Lostrella, who's sitting in the backseat, calls
Speaker 1: nine one one. What you're about to hear? A mourning
Speaker 1: you is harrowing.
Speaker 2: Nine Montier and see what are you're reporting? Yeah, we're
Speaker 2: the lection start. I'm sorry your cell phone cutting out.
Speaker 1: We're going north one twenty five.
Speaker 2: Hit our suck, I'm sorry for.
Speaker 3: Our accelerator stuck well one twenty five blake.
Speaker 2: Okay, north found one twenty five. Where are you passing?
Speaker 4: We are passing out?
Speaker 3: Where are we passing? We're we're we're going one hundred
Speaker 3: twenty mission.
Speaker 2: Gorge, We're we're in trouble.
Speaker 5: We can't We're there's no.
Speaker 2: Break, okay, Gorge and three or a half mile okay,
Speaker 2: And you don't have the ability to like turn the
Speaker 2: vehicle off or anything.
Speaker 6: Approaching an intersection.
Speaker 2: We're approaching the intersection. Okay, we're approaching intersection. Hold on, pray, pray,
Speaker 2: shot Oh oh hello.
Speaker 1: The ooo you hear is Listrella's horrified response to the
Speaker 1: Lexus spinning out of control, hitting another vehicle, and plunging
Speaker 1: down a ravine. Everyone inside the car was killed. The
Speaker 1: Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story. I hesitated before playing it,
Speaker 1: but in the end I concluded that you have to
Speaker 1: hear it to make sense of what happened Next. The
Speaker 1: tape went viral, was played on the nightly news, written
Speaker 1: up in horrified news articles, to the point where a
Speaker 1: wave of fear swept the country.
Speaker 7: Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales.
Speaker 8: Due to a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives
Speaker 8: in days.
Speaker 9: Runaway Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to
Speaker 9: one hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 10: A woman died she crashed her camera into a tree
Speaker 10: and a pole.
Speaker 11: A car had sped up to more than one hundred
Speaker 11: miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of people came forward with horror stories about their
Speaker 1: Lexus accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is
Speaker 1: a brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings Expose's whistleblowers.
Speaker 1: NASA got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine and March twenty ten, totaling millions
Speaker 1: of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated to
Speaker 1: have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended up
Speaker 1: paying a one point two billion dollar fine to the
Speaker 1: US government. They spent another one point one billion to
Speaker 1: settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've settled
Speaker 1: something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest automobile
Speaker 1: company was accused of a cover up, of putting profits
Speaker 1: ahead of people, of having a culture of denial.
Speaker 6: Toyota's conduct was shameful.
Speaker 9: He showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed
Speaker 9: to look after the safety of consumers.
Speaker 1: That's Eric Holder in March twenty fourteen. He was the
Speaker 1: Attorney General of the United States at the time. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement officer
Speaker 1: of the land calls out one of the largest companies
Speaker 1: in the world. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, or every week we go back and
Speaker 1: examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted to
Speaker 1: the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard at
Speaker 1: least some part of that nine to one before. Maybe
Speaker 1: you had a Toyota at the time and had a
Speaker 1: sudden pang of worry. What I want to do is
Speaker 1: go back to two thousand and nine and convince you
Speaker 1: that something went very wrong in the way the controversy
Speaker 1: played out very well. Let's go back for a moment
Speaker 1: to person. We started with Mark Sailor, California Highway patrol officer.
Speaker 1: He's driving down the highway and he can't stop his car.
Speaker 1: The accelerator is stuck. His brother in law says after
Speaker 1: the crash. Another person comes forward to the police and
Speaker 1: says he had driven the same loner Lexus a few
Speaker 1: days before and had a similar incident. He'd accelerated to
Speaker 1: get past a truck, and when he pushed the throttle
Speaker 1: towards the floor, that's what car guys called the accelerator pedal,
Speaker 1: the throttle stuck. What he realized is that someone had
Speaker 1: put one of those big, thick all weather rubber floor
Speaker 1: mats in the car, on top of the floor mat
Speaker 1: that was already there. That second big thick floor mat
Speaker 1: wasn't attached to those little hooks that hold floor mats down.
Speaker 1: It slid around, and so somehow the thick mat got
Speaker 1: wedged under the throttle. That everyone decides is what happened
Speaker 1: to Sailor Maybe he tried to turn the car off,
Speaker 1: but the Lexus has one of those push button ignitions,
Speaker 1: and what he may not have realized is that you
Speaker 1: have to hold that button down for three seconds if
Speaker 1: you're trying to stop the car while it's in motion.
Speaker 1: Maybe he tried to put the car in neutral, but
Speaker 1: it's not always obvious how to do that, particularly if
Speaker 1: you're panicking. They crash. The nine one one call goes
Speaker 1: viral and Toyota launches a massive recall of floormats across
Speaker 1: its model line. Problem solved, right, Well, No, here's the problem.
Speaker 1: Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration crisis thinks that
Speaker 1: floormats are any more than a small part of the story.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 6: So that's an all weather matt.
Speaker 1: That's my producer, Jacob Smith talking to Sean kin.
Speaker 6: This is the killer format. Okay, this is the format
Speaker 6: that brought Toyota to fame.
Speaker 1: Cain runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research
Speaker 1: and Strategies. Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean
Speaker 1: Kain's name comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked
Speaker 1: closely with many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's
Speaker 1: not buying the floor mat theory.
Speaker 6: When the pedal was depressed fully to the floor, okay,
Speaker 6: the way this road here, the pedal extended down to
Speaker 6: the point where the bottom edge of it would catch
Speaker 6: here on this rubber piece, Okay. And it would catch
Speaker 6: on the bottom edge and it wouldn't return.
Speaker 1: But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell the whole story.
Speaker 6: Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals. So the
Speaker 6: way this was have to happen is you'd have to
Speaker 6: depress your accelerator pedal newly to the floor all the
Speaker 6: wide through to wide open throttle. You'd have to mash
Speaker 6: that accelerator to the floor and to have that.
Speaker 1: Catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it.
Speaker 1: Cain 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 streets? 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 and yank the format
Speaker 1: away from the pedal? Right?
Speaker 6: I still have a hard time believing, giving a long
Speaker 6: distance in the Travelers car, that the format was the culprit.
Speaker 1: Caine thinks that something else must have happened in that
Speaker 1: car and by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis
Speaker 1: ended up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming
Speaker 1: number 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.
Speaker 6: In today's cars. Now we're looking at code, code that
Speaker 6: can can be up to one hundred million lines of code.
Speaker 6: The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter is running about
Speaker 6: seven million lines of code. A luxury car today can
Speaker 6: run one hundred million lines of code. You got a
Speaker 6: what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got a
Speaker 6: fifty one thousand dollars car. In the complexity level of
Speaker 6: the fifty thousand dollars car is exponentially greater. Do you
Speaker 6: think that that car is now going to be defect
Speaker 6: free and software clear not likely.
Speaker 1: This is the argument that Kane has made in lawsuits
Speaker 1: against Toyota. The cars contain a bug in the lines
Speaker 1: of computer code that control how the car starts and stops,
Speaker 1: speeds up and slows down. The La Times also pursued
Speaker 1: this question, resulting in one of the most prestigious investigative
Speaker 1: reporting awards in the country, the Lobe, for its work.
Speaker 1: If the La Times and Sean Kin are right, then
Speaker 1: that's terrifying, because what it means is that what happened
Speaker 1: to Mark Sailor could happen to you. I wanted to
Speaker 1: put this fear to a test, that what happened to
Speaker 1: Mark Sailor could easily happen to you or me. It's
Speaker 1: a terrible story, after all, but how much should we
Speaker 1: be afraid that our cars might do the same thing.
Speaker 1: To test this out, my producer Jacob and I got
Speaker 1: ourselves a two thousand and three camera two hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand miles on it, the best selling Toyota,
Speaker 1: in fact, the best selling car in America for eleven
Speaker 1: of the last twelve years. A lot of the unintended
Speaker 1: acceleration cases happened in cameras. After getting the car, we
Speaker 1: called up Car and Driver, the premier automotive magazine in
Speaker 1: the United States. We wanted them to help us figure
Speaker 1: out what was behind this epidemic of unintended acceleration to
Speaker 1: try and replicate one of those runaway car situations. So
Speaker 1: one Chili winter morning, Jacob and I met up with
Speaker 1: three guys from Car and Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds
Speaker 1: just west of Detroit. It's a vast racetrack that Chrysler
Speaker 1: uses to do all of its testing. I'm guessing a
Speaker 1: thousand acres big guardhouse at the front. The whole time
Speaker 1: we were there, I had someone in a jeep Cherokee
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on us, making sure we didn't take
Speaker 1: photos of any of the new cars they were testing.
Speaker 1: Oh look, there's the Q seven. Those are the Car
Speaker 1: Driver guys right there. Our guys are Don Sherman, he's
Speaker 1: the technical director of Car and Driver, and Casey Colwell,
Speaker 1: young guy works with Don. Eddie Altman also came. He's
Speaker 1: the editor of Car and Driver. Oh that's that Camra
Speaker 1: side Don, Casey Eddie. They're all car guys, which matters
Speaker 1: because one of the notable facts about sudden acceleration is
Speaker 1: how the car guys see things differently from the non
Speaker 1: car guys. Incidentally, Jacob and I would also describe ourselves
Speaker 1: as car guys, although not quite at the level of
Speaker 1: the car and driver. Folks lift up on that.
Speaker 3: We were all had come on last.
Speaker 1: It was over a second true story. When I was thirteen,
Speaker 1: I wrote away for promotional brochures on every car sold
Speaker 1: in the world, except for the Soviet Zeal which was
Speaker 1: really hard to get. I still have every one of
Speaker 1: those brochures. Anyway, back to the racetrack in.
Speaker 11: Detroit, Silver Camera Entering VDF, staying out of your way
Speaker 11: like we were before, happy.
Speaker 1: The plan is to take the camera up to some
Speaker 1: serious speeds, keep the throttle wide open, as if the
Speaker 1: accelerator pedal is somehow stuck, and then see if we
Speaker 1: can stop the car. What happens if you have your
Speaker 1: foot full on the accelerator pedal and then you also
Speaker 1: slam on the brakes at the same time, because intuitively
Speaker 1: you'd think that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your
Speaker 1: car surges uncontrollably, you slam on the brakes. We want
Speaker 1: to figure out what that looks like.
Speaker 3: You're going to make a go wide open throttle, then
Speaker 3: quickly you apply the brakes, not really a panic, but
Speaker 3: just stop at the best you can.
Speaker 1: So Jacob goes out first, with Casey behind the wheel,
Speaker 1: he accelerates.
Speaker 12: So bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two, sixty three,
Speaker 12: sixty five, sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy and
Speaker 12: about to do it all right, We're gonna put the
Speaker 12: throttle down.
Speaker 1: So the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits
Speaker 1: the brake with the gas pedal still.
Speaker 7: Down, and we locked up a little bit. But but
Speaker 7: I mean that's the car stops. Oh yeah, car stops.
Speaker 1: But no loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back.
Speaker 1: Jacob asks Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape
Speaker 1: are they in?
Speaker 7: Is it a little cooked or no, it's it's not.
Speaker 2: I don't think the brakes are cooked.
Speaker 9: Why do they smell leg We'll know in a second.
Speaker 7: Don't even smell about.
Speaker 12: Okay, if you have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine,
Speaker 12: the breaks win.
Speaker 1: Then it's my turn. I get into camera with Eddie Altraman.
Speaker 1: He's driving. We take the car down straight.
Speaker 7: Away, Can we go a little faster? Let me get
Speaker 7: the pass of the favorite.
Speaker 1: Seventy Ultimate hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come
Speaker 1: to a halt.
Speaker 7: Throttles open. We've got.
Speaker 1: A really old not a terribly good shaped car filled
Speaker 1: with three people and a bunch of equipment, and.
Speaker 7: It's still stopping. So what's that?
Speaker 1: What is the difference between breaking with your foot completely
Speaker 1: off the accelerator and breaking like this? What I mean
Speaker 1: is how much longer does it take to stop a
Speaker 1: car with a throttle wide open?
Speaker 7: About ten feet if you want to quantify it.
Speaker 4: It can be a little bit more, but not so
Speaker 4: much that you notice.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and
Speaker 1: Driver do a version of this very same test.
Speaker 5: We basically did this with a variety of cars, and
Speaker 5: we found actually that with the throttle stuck open, or
Speaker 5: going at seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty
Speaker 5: close to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that
Speaker 5: had his throng closed.
Speaker 1: A camera with the accelerator stuck wide open stops basically
Speaker 1: as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally.
Speaker 13: It's not a big deal. Yeah, But of course we're
Speaker 13: not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the
Speaker 13: cars goss as my demons and we're in a closed
Speaker 13: kind of situation. But you can see, I'll get it
Speaker 13: up to seventy.
Speaker 1: Okay, not a big deal, Yeah, Yeah, it's the most undramatic.
Speaker 7: You want to try it?
Speaker 1: I would love to truck it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We were out on the testing ground for two hours.
Speaker 1: We tried every trick in the book. The car stopped.
Speaker 1: We loaded up the camera with three adults and a
Speaker 1: ton of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine
Speaker 1: while the car was in motion. It stopped once. We
Speaker 1: took the camera up to one hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 1: What are we at ninety to getting there? It took forever,
Speaker 1: but it stopped. Afterwards, Don Sherman and I talked about
Speaker 1: the strangely normal experience of bringing a camera to a
Speaker 1: full stop with the accelerator to the floor.
Speaker 7: The brakes are powerful.
Speaker 3: You've got four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them.
Speaker 3: Think of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline
Speaker 3: to power and move all that braking is relatively easy
Speaker 3: to do, it much more powerful.
Speaker 7: That's what people.
Speaker 3: Don't acknowledge, that all the capability built into their car.
Speaker 1: When Car and Driver did their version of this experiment
Speaker 1: right after the Sailor crash, they went so far as
Speaker 1: to do a full throttle breaking town on a Rushe
Speaker 1: Stage three Mustang. If you aren't a car guy, I
Speaker 1: should explain. Rush is an independent company that takes sports
Speaker 1: cars and basically puts them on steroids. The engine of
Speaker 1: the Stage three Rouche has five hundred and forty horse power.
Speaker 1: That's two to three times more powerful than the typical
Speaker 1: car on the road. A monster. A roush would take
Speaker 1: a camera and chop it into little, tiny pieces. So
Speaker 1: car and driver take the Rush Mustang up to one
Speaker 1: hundred miles an hour, keep their foot on the accelerator
Speaker 1: at the same time they slam on the brakes, and
Speaker 1: what happens. The car stops. Now it takes a good
Speaker 1: nine hundred feet to come to a full stop. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds of huffing and puffing, but it stops. Breaks
Speaker 1: go up against one of the most powerful engines on
Speaker 1: the road, and the breaks win. I think you can
Speaker 1: now understand how crucial this point is. Toyota gets embroiled
Speaker 1: in a massive controversy. They pay billions of dollars in fines,
Speaker 1: They face allegations of a cover up, all because their
Speaker 1: cars are supposed to be suddenly and mysteriously accelerating. But
Speaker 1: if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating, all you
Speaker 1: have to do is step on the brakes because breaks
Speaker 1: beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailors stop his lexus
Speaker 1: that day as he sped down Highway one twenty five.
Speaker 1: I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but it's the
Speaker 1: only logical explanation because he never put his foot on
Speaker 1: the brake. Maybe the most important person in this whole
Speaker 1: story is a man named Dick Schmid. Sadly, Schmidt died
Speaker 1: last fall, which is a real loss because Schmidt was
Speaker 1: a really remarkable man. As a kid, he was a
Speaker 1: champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub three hour marathoner.
Speaker 1: He owned five porsches, He raced cars, a car guy.
Speaker 1: He was also a professor at UCLA who becomes an
Speaker 1: important figure in what's called human performance research. Human performance
Speaker 1: research asks how do people move and act and interact
Speaker 1: with the physical world. Schmid starts the Journal of Motor Behavior,
Speaker 1: and along the way he becomes maybe the world's leading
Speaker 1: expert on the way your feet behave when you drive
Speaker 1: a car. I talked to Schmid about a year before
Speaker 1: he died. He was in a wheelchair. By that point,
Speaker 1: he had a neurological disease, and you'll hear a little
Speaker 1: bit of his illness in his speech. I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to repeat what he says because it's really important
Speaker 1: and I want to make sure you understand it. Schmid
Speaker 1: got involved in the sudden acceleration issue years ago when
Speaker 1: he got a call from an attorney in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: It was a case involving a taxi driver who picked
Speaker 1: up some people outside a hotel. Nathan knows he's running
Speaker 1: of parkway. What Schmid's saying is next thing you know,
Speaker 1: he's running full throttle down the street and he makes
Speaker 1: a left turn and realizes, oh god, I'm coming to
Speaker 1: a big traffic circle, and he ends up putting the
Speaker 1: car into a wall.
Speaker 14: He splits a car at a wall.
Speaker 1: That was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal,
Speaker 1: but it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously,
Speaker 1: the driver can't stop.
Speaker 7: It.
Speaker 14: Was there ever a moment when you suspected there might
Speaker 14: be a mechanical cause to these incidents?
Speaker 1: No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever suspected that
Speaker 1: the problem might be with the car, a malfunction, a
Speaker 1: faulty bit of software, an engineering failure, and Schmidt, one
Speaker 1: of the world's leading experts in human factors, is saying
Speaker 1: that never once crossed his mind why because everything about
Speaker 1: sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver the car.
Speaker 1: He starts to look at other cases and discovers that
Speaker 1: there are some pretty clear patterns. But those patterns don't
Speaker 1: involve a particular make or model of car. Nothing that
Speaker 1: could make you say, oh, there's something wrong with that
Speaker 1: kind of car. Every car maker gets hit with complaints
Speaker 1: of sudden acceleration. When it's a high profile case like
Speaker 1: the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand, like Toyota,
Speaker 1: but that's just the effect of publicity. It happens to everyone.
Speaker 1: The patterns involve the kinds of people who have sudden
Speaker 1: acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances that lead to
Speaker 1: sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to be older, they
Speaker 1: tend to be shorter, They tend to be people, and
Speaker 1: this is really important, they tend to be people who
Speaker 1: are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance, parking lot attendants.
Speaker 1: This majority of these incidents happen right after someone gets
Speaker 1: into a car for the first time, or when they're
Speaker 1: parking or driving at very low speeds. Now you have
Speaker 1: to make sense of these patterns. You could argue, I mean,
Speaker 1: against all reason, but you could argue that cars just
Speaker 1: get really upset and misbehave when they're being driven by
Speaker 1: parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous. The patterns Schmidt found
Speaker 1: mean it's not the car. What Schmidt concludes is that
Speaker 1: people are getting into strange cars, and maybe because those
Speaker 1: people are too short and didn't adjust the seat properly,
Speaker 1: they were a little further away from the pedal than usual.
Speaker 1: Or maybe they're trying to park and because they're doing
Speaker 1: the stoping and starting of getting in and out of
Speaker 1: a parking space, they get thrown just a little out
Speaker 1: of their comfort zone. They start making stabbing motions with
Speaker 1: their right foot, like someone groping in the dark. The
Speaker 1: term Dick Schmidt uses to describe this is impulse very ability.
Speaker 1: Your brain requests a very specific action, but your body
Speaker 1: fails to deliver exactly what it's told to do.
Speaker 14: I mean to say that even when producing a very
Speaker 14: familiar physical movement, there is variability in how I move
Speaker 14: my limbs and the force with which I use. So
Speaker 14: baseball players swinging a bat at a fastball may feel
Speaker 14: like he's reproducing his swing.
Speaker 1: Every time, but he's not. That's why even the greatest
Speaker 1: golfers in the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough,
Speaker 1: or the best basketball players in the world miss a
Speaker 1: free throw.
Speaker 14: I don't think the is confused.
Speaker 3: Which the brake pedal, which is accelerator pedally knows.
Speaker 1: But Schmid says, I don't think the driver's confused. If
Speaker 1: you ask him which is the brake pedal and which
Speaker 1: is the accelerator pedal, he knows, But he gets in
Speaker 1: this state where he feels like he's acting normally and
Speaker 1: he's not. In other words, somewhere between intention and action,
Speaker 1: there's a garble, a glitch, And what happens. The driver
Speaker 1: puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's the break.
Speaker 1: He wants to stop the car, but in fact he's
Speaker 1: speeding it up. So back to floor mats. Why do
Speaker 1: they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because they throw
Speaker 1: off the expected geometry of the car. A big thick
Speaker 1: winter mat stacked on top of an existing mat raises
Speaker 1: the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator and break
Speaker 1: seem much closer to your right foot, and if you're
Speaker 1: in a strange car, that just increases the odds of
Speaker 1: impulse variability. It's one of those little things that leads
Speaker 1: to a garble between intention and action. Once you understand
Speaker 1: Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds of scenarios
Speaker 1: that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor. Let me
Speaker 1: give you one. He's driving down the highway with the
Speaker 1: cruise control on. Both of his feet are on the floormat.
Speaker 1: He comes up behind a car going slower than he is,
Speaker 1: so he puts his right foot back on the accelerator hard,
Speaker 1: but as he does that, the floor mat slides under
Speaker 1: the throttle, locking it open. Now comes the crucial part.
Speaker 1: He takes his foot off the accelerator to return to
Speaker 1: his cruise control speed, but the car doesn't slow down.
Speaker 1: It surges forward. The throttle is locked open by the
Speaker 1: floor mat. He's alarmed. He picks his foot up to
Speaker 1: hit the brake, but it's a car he's not familiar with.
Speaker 1: It's a loaner, and he puts his foot on the
Speaker 1: accelerator instead of the brake, and he presses it down
Speaker 1: expecting the car to slow, but it doesn't. That's why
Speaker 1: Listrella says, the breaks don't work, and Sailor freaks out,
Speaker 1: so he presses down harder and the car goes even
Speaker 1: faster and he freaks out even more. I think it's
Speaker 1: important to note here that Sailor isn't negligent. He's not
Speaker 1: a fault. He's not speeding or running a red light
Speaker 1: or drunk. He's making a mistake that almost any of
Speaker 1: us could make under the circumstances. What happened to him
Speaker 1: in that moment is confusion.
Speaker 14: So they're going into a kind of panic state where
Speaker 14: instead of asking the question is my foot of the
Speaker 14: right pedal? They think the problem is are not pushing
Speaker 14: the break hard enough, so the perception that the brakes
Speaker 14: have failed has pedal goes to the floor and.
Speaker 1: The car stop. Schmid says, the perception is that the
Speaker 1: brakes have failed because the pedal goes to the floor
Speaker 1: and the car doesn't stop. Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some
Speaker 1: kind of far fetched theory here. In February twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its report on the
Speaker 1: whole Toyota business. That's the one NASA got involved in,
Speaker 1: and they basically agreed with Schmidt. They concluded that the
Speaker 1: overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases were clearly pedal error.
Speaker 1: The agency knows this because every car has a black
Speaker 1: box that records when the brake and when the accelerator
Speaker 1: are used. Time and again. In these cases, the black
Speaker 1: boxes showed that the brakes hadn't even been touched. So
Speaker 1: here's my question, why is it so hard for people
Speaker 1: to accept the fact that there is a really simple,
Speaker 1: straightforward explanation for what happened in the sudden acceleration cases.
Speaker 1: Because it was hard. Right after the Sailor case, the
Speaker 1: Secretary of Transportation Railer Hood went before Congress and said, my.
Speaker 14: Advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop
Speaker 14: driving it, take it to Toyota dealer, because they believe
Speaker 14: 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 diluded about the cause of the problem. He wants
Speaker 1: to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing.
Speaker 6: They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these
Speaker 6: cars again and again.
Speaker 1: What we've established with this type of In February of
Speaker 1: twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC News does a story
Speaker 1: on a runaway Avalon. It's about how the software in
Speaker 1: Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Wow, it's like that. Uh,
Speaker 1: But of course all you have to do if a
Speaker 1: Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is use the brakes. So ABC rigs
Speaker 1: up an Avalon and essentially stages an episode of unintended
Speaker 1: acceleration brace don't work Frank's get out Gee. The fakery
Speaker 1: was later uncovered by the website Jeelopnik. Here's the editor
Speaker 1: of Jeelopnik, Patrick George.
Speaker 11: They got a university professor to cut three wires within
Speaker 11: the electronic throttle control system, then connected two of the
Speaker 11: wires to each other in a specific pattern and with
Speaker 11: a specific resistor to create a link between two final
Speaker 11: wires with a switch in between, so that he can
Speaker 11: control it. In other words, this car was rigged. It
Speaker 11: was rigged in a way that you would would never
Speaker 11: produce these results in real life.
Speaker 1: At the same time, they fake a video, or if
Speaker 1: you ask ABC, they make an editing error that makes
Speaker 1: it look like the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact,
Speaker 1: the cars in park in the video you can actually
Speaker 1: see that the brake light is on the whole time.
Speaker 1: They go to all of this trouble of splicing wires
Speaker 1: and revving engines, all that because they're trying to avoid
Speaker 1: the simplest and most plausible explanation, which is people are
Speaker 1: hitting the wrong pedal crazy. It gets worse at the
Speaker 1: height of the Toyota controversy, Consumer Reports releases a video
Speaker 1: telling driver what to do in the case of unintended acceleration.
Speaker 1: So this is one of the most trusted and irreputable
Speaker 1: brands in the United States. Millions of people look to
Speaker 1: Consumer Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of
Speaker 1: automotive testing, Jake Fisher, has to say.
Speaker 9: A car accelerating out of control is a very serious
Speaker 9: and scary situation for anyone. A gas pedal could get
Speaker 9: stuck because of a malfunction, because a broken throttle return spring,
Speaker 9: or even a jammed floormat. Fortunately, if remain calm and
Speaker 9: follow a few steps, you can easily avoid tragedy.
Speaker 1: Wait, stop right there. He lists a series of reasons
Speaker 1: why a car might accelerate out of control, and he
Speaker 1: neglects to mention the number one cause, which is that
Speaker 1: a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay,
Speaker 1: on to the next problem.
Speaker 9: Here at our track, we're going to demonstrate to you
Speaker 9: what you should do, and more importantly, what you shouldn't
Speaker 9: do if you're ever in this unfortunate situation. If you
Speaker 9: find that your car is explorating hard, even after you
Speaker 9: take your foot off the gas pedal, your first instinct
Speaker 9: is probably the right one. Step one, put your foot
Speaker 9: on the brake firmly and don't lift off. It's extremely
Speaker 9: important not to lift your foot off the brake.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, this is even crazier than an ABC
Speaker 1: reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon Fisher says it's extremely
Speaker 1: important not to lift your foot off the brake. No, no, no.
Speaker 1: The whole problem of unintended acceleration is caused by the
Speaker 1: fact that people mistakenly think they have their foot firmly
Speaker 1: on the brake when they don't. He needs to say
Speaker 1: the exact opposite. He needs to say it is extremely
Speaker 1: important to lift your foot off whatever pedal it is on,
Speaker 1: because chances are you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now
Speaker 1: place it back on the brake firmly. This is an advice,
Speaker 1: This is malpractice. In the spring of twenty ten, the
Speaker 1: people who run the autowebsite Edmunds dot com got really
Speaker 1: frustrated with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration had become,
Speaker 1: so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that
Speaker 1: the car was the culprit in sudden acceleration that is
Speaker 1: an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or
Speaker 1: a floormat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them a
Speaker 1: million dollars. A million dollars they put together a panel
Speaker 1: of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who came
Speaker 1: forward to win? I asked Dan Edmons, who heads up
Speaker 1: the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a grand
Speaker 1: total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even met
Speaker 1: 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 avoid 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 plan defloyers.
Speaker 10: No, we didn't hear from anybody of that sort. I
Speaker 10: think because of the nature of litigation. I mean, this
Speaker 10: is me speculating. They probably wanted to focus on that.
Speaker 10: Maybe a million dollars wasn't enough to attract their attention.
Speaker 1: Remember Sean Kin, Mister sudden acceleration, the guy with the
Speaker 1: software coding gone awry theory, Not even he wants the
Speaker 1: million dollars.
Speaker 6: It was nothing more than a media circus, and it
Speaker 6: was ridiculous.
Speaker 1: A media circus. Kin doesn't want to try and win
Speaker 1: a million dollars because it's a media circus. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what a media circus was the entire Toyota sudden
Speaker 1: acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kain insisted that some
Speaker 1: elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, Because people like
Speaker 1: Sean Kin couldn't admit that this was just overwhelmingly a
Speaker 1: matter of human error. I've used the phrase car guys
Speaker 1: in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt was a
Speaker 1: car guy. The three people from Car and Driver are
Speaker 1: car guys. And what's interesting about the car guys is
Speaker 1: that none of them doubted ever that this is a
Speaker 1: problem caused by drivers, because they understand what a car is.
Speaker 1: It's a complicated mechanical object that requires attention and skill
Speaker 1: to be operated safely, and non car people have lost
Speaker 1: sight of that fact. Here is Eddie Altaman of Car
Speaker 1: and Driver one more time.
Speaker 8: I think there is that really really depressing sense of
Speaker 8: exasperation about how customers expect the car to take care
Speaker 8: of them, and how the average driver just expects the
Speaker 8: car to be completely flawless and to save their lives
Speaker 8: 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 awry.
Speaker 1: Cars do not have minds of their own. A car
Speaker 1: just does what the driver tells it to do.
Speaker 7: All right.
Speaker 1: So here we are, we're in our what is this?
Speaker 1: What is this? Two thousand and three camera?
Speaker 4: This is it two thousand and three or two thousand
Speaker 4: and four? Twenty two thousand miles?
Speaker 7: Is okay? I'll love to fifty five miles of four?
Speaker 7: Get ready?
Speaker 1: That was I was completely surprised to that. That was
Speaker 1: the most un unremarkable, that remarkable thing.
Speaker 7: And let's try it again. Say your nail hold it
Speaker 7: a sixty.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
Speaker 1: you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
Speaker 1: on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
Speaker 1: other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Laonon Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Eddie Altman, Don Sherman, and Casey Cowell. A car
Speaker 1: and driver for helping us to find and buy a
Speaker 1: two thousand and three camera and taking a day off
Speaker 1: to hostess. Also thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for
Speaker 1: braving the break tests. The Penalty management team is Laura Mayor,
Speaker 1: Andy Bauers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.