Bob Lutz is one of those larger-than-life personalities you hate to see retire. In an auto industry increasingly buttoned up, intimidated by govt. owners, and run by vanilla corporate types, car guy Lutz was a breath of fresh air, often speaking his mind. GM may be behind him, but I’m sure we’ll hear from him again soon.
Detroit — Overwrought, tort-fed accusations of automakers designing “killing machines” have historically been based on half-baked, even fraudulent, manipulations of data. When Audi was accused of making runaway cars in the 1980s, 60 Minutes doctored accelerator pedals. In 1993 NBC used hidden rockets strapped to the bottom of GM trucks to make them explode to “prove” GM’s side-saddle gas tank design was unsafe.
Now the other shoe is dropping in the Toyota “sudden acceleration” case.
Turns out that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D., NY) falsely represented “smoking gun” legal documents alleging Toyota deliberately withheld documents that proved it was guilty. . . .
Want to talk about scary acceleration? Check out our national debt figures. With Greece looming as an example, the devil-may-care attitude of Washington these days towards spending doesn’t instill confidence. The trickiest part of this toon was determining the composition of stuff flying through the air.
A little different use (single panel) of my normal Payne & Ink space. This was a fun visual to do – though, given how deep the space is, I had to scan the drawing in in two parts, then stitch them together in the computer.
NASCAR, horse racing, the tortoise and the hare . . . there are plenty of metaphors for campaign races. Andy Dillon will be dogged (another racing metaphor?) by his nemesis unions this year. Sure to be an ongoing theme.
Detroit — Clarence Ditlow, “safety expert” with the Center for Auto Safety, told the Senate Transportation Committee Tuesday that “the Toyota unintended acceleration crisis” has been caused by “electronic controls” used in cars for the last decade. His solution? “First and foremost, Toyota needs to install electronic brake override systems in all vehicles with electronic throttle control.”
That is, the solution to faulty electronic computer code is to . . . install more electronic computer code!
So went another day of farcical Washington auto-safety hearings. As in the House a week ago, the Senate Transportation Committee eschewed expert engineering witnesses for tort lawyer mouthpiece Ditlow while browbeating federal safety officials into issuing more regulations. . . .
Jim Bunning holds the line on spending (even as DC’s press corps mocks him. Fiscal conservatives can only be Democrats, by DC press rules). Bunning’s baseball past makes for good visual opportunities. Bunning ends his filibuster the day after this cartoon goes out – but his stand will resonate for a while, I think.
Obama decides on the reconciliation trick to win passage of his unpopular health bill. Meanwhile, we learn that Obama is still smoking from his doc’s report. The latter reinforces the problems of the former: A president who insists on telling us how insurance cos. and cigarette cos are making us less healthy, nevertheless can’t give up the smoking vice.
Detroit — An Edmunds.com study has found that Toyota has received more complaints of unintended acceleration than any other automaker, contradicting company claims that it’s been unfairly singled out by federal investigators. But the study also puts in doubt the claims of tort lawyers and their Congressional parrots that electronics — standard in vehicles over the last decade — pose a new threat to vehicle safety.
On a complaints-per-sale basis, Toyota had four times the number of complaints (4.81 per 100,000 U.S. vehicles sold) of Chrysler, Honda, Nissan, and GM (which averaged 1.22 per 100,000). But significantly, another manufacturer — Ford — also had an unusually high number of complaints: 3.12 per 100,000 or nearly double the industry average.
Tort lawyers salivate at the thought that electronics — which have displaced hydraulics and cables in operating accelerator pedals — are vulnerable to random electrical interference and faulty computer code. Some in Congress now routinely make wild claims about “possessed” vehicles. . .
So much for Chinese Hummers. In past toons, I associated Hummer’s size with China’s Great Wall. But how to illustrate Chinese rejection? Personally, I’m a great fan of Chinese food and those little fortune cookies.
Detroit – No auto-safety scare is complete without journalistic malpractice.
News reports on Toyota vehicles’ alleged sudden acceleration have routinely publicized tort-lawyer fantasies of “possessed” cars without investigating the underlying data. But ABC News – in the tradition of 60 Minutes (Audi) and Dateline NBC (GM) rigging cars to fail – tasked a tort stooge with sabotaging a Toyota in order to get the intended, shocking result.
ABC reporter Brian Ross brought on “automotive expert” David Gilbert from Southern Illinois University to demonstrate an electronic glitch in a Toyota Avalon. What ABC did not explain is that Gilbert is a paid shill for trial lawyers. Specifically, he was paid for his investigation by notorious tort-lobby consultant Sean Kane’s Safety Research & Strategies, which is under contract with at least five law firms currently involved in Toyota litigation.
By shorting together two normally independent throttle pedal sensors, Gilbert demonstrated that a Toyota Avalon throttle would go wide open regardless of the driver’s input. But, as the technically reliable Autoblog.com explains, this only proved “that Gilbert was able to create a fault condition that could never happen without human intervention. To imply otherwise is unethical on the part of both ABC and Mr. Gilbert.”
As with global warming, the MSM has abandoned objective reporting on auto-safety issues. And as with global warming, a growing alternative media in talk radio, blogs, and opinion pages have assumed the role of hard reporting.
To me the message of the health care summit was how differently Democrats and GOPers view economics. I tried to capture that in these cartoons – even as most satirists concentrated on the conflict moments between, say, Obama and McCain (“John, the campaign is over”.
I’ve been working over the last couple of years with my college roommate, Bill Dwight – and fellow classmate, Chris Beaufort – on illustrating their web startup, FamZoo. The site – a family finances organizer – launched this week and is a superb tool for families as they teach their children financial responsibility. As Princeton grads, we naturally picked the tiger as the lead character among the many animas that populate the website with teachable moments and avatars. Sign up your family at Famzoo.com here.
On Day Two in the Toyota show trials, the tort industry’s representatives – er, people’s representatives – wasted no time in trying to bloody the Japanese car company for making what Rep. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.) Tuesday called “killing machines.”
The day’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing was headlined by Akio Toyoda, Toyota chairman and grandson of the company’s founder. Sticking to script, Toyoda drily repeated what has become the company line throughout this crisis: “I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick. We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization.” But he did not concede that buggy electronics caused alleged vehicle “sudden acceleration. . . .”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) said that this week’s Congressional hearings into alleged “sudden acceleration” of Toyota vehicles were called to take “a serious look at the possibility that electronic defects could be causing the problem.”
But nothing serious was ever intended to come out of these hearings. That much is evident from the witness lists. This was a show trial rigged for tort lawyers.
Toyota claims no pattern of unintended acceleration, but instead says random instances of floor mat failure or pedal sticking have caused problems. Waxman and his tort allies say the last decade’s “increased reliance on electronics can bring new risks, and these need to be carefully examined.”
So bring on the engineers and let’s talk data. But there were no independent engineers within shouting distance of Tuesday’s Energy and Commerce Committee hearing or Wednesday’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee circus.
The only “automotive experts” on Waxman’s Tuesday panel were Sean Kane of Safety Research and Strategies, Inc. and David Gilbert, Assistant Professor of Automotive Technology at Southern Illinois University. In a testy exchange, Rep. Steve Buyer (R., Indiana) quickly unmasked Kane as a paid impostor hired by tort lawyers — not the disinterested expert advertised by committee leadership. And Gilbert? He was paid by Kane.
Wednesday’s “experts” were worse. Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook and Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety are not just tort stooges — they have themselves endorsed either fraudulent or dangerous auto practices.
If America’s Toyota owners turned on their television looking for answers to questions about vehicle safety and technology, they were misled. This week was a trial run of sensationalistic tort lawsuits to come.
Henry Payne RSS
