TOYOTA: CHAIN REACTION

What do you think?

“WE’RE APPROACHING THE INTERSECTION – HOLD ON. HOLD ON AND PRAY … PRAY!”

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There are some muffled screams after that – the most horrifying of which is the teenage girl in the back seat, the higher pitch of her voice audibly piercing the final audio from the end of the line. But the car that in 2009 flew straight off the bridge and plummeted into a ball of flames two hundred feet down into the bottom of a San Diego valley and sparked a public hearing wasn't the only incident of a Toyota that went beyond the control of its driver. There have been plenty of other similar incidents since then, too. Each time, Toyota's reaction has been exactly the same: to blame the driver. Worse, regulators silently consent and support the automaker in a game of quid pro quo. But why do these accidents keep happening, and why doesn't Toyota fix the problem with its cars? The answer is that to do so would mean spending more money on manufacturing. Last year, the company made a record $17.9 billion in profit. Every year, profit keeps rising, only Toyota's managing of its costs in Asia and LatAm looks like a leading cause of deaths of many of its customers elsewhere. Story by Daniel M. Harrison. Cover Artwork by Jonathan Vico.

 

The case in which highway patrol officer Mark Saylor, his wife, daughter and his brother in law – who put in the 911 call at the last minute – died was well-publicized because of the unavoidable evidence of Toyota’s culpability provided in the form of a 911 emergency services call moments before the car flew off the side of road and burst into flames.

On that particular occasion, there was only so much spin doctoring that could be done. A car that accelerates off a bridge on a balmy South California Sunday, occupied by a man who tells emergency services that “we’re in a Lexus [and] there’s no brakes,” is about as clear as it gets to proof of vehicle manufacturing error. (Another driver had reported a similar problem to the dealership with the vehicle earlier on in the week, too, compounding evidence.)

Toyota – and in turn the founder’s third generation progeny himself, Akio Toyoda – came under attack immediately. Evidence was coming to light that cars had been crashing everywhere. All around the world, something was clearly going wrong, and even the engineers had no clue what that was. It was freaking everyone out. Toyota car prices were plummeting.

But that was far from being all that was wrong, for there were a string of other mishaps and tragedies associated with Toyota’s malfunctioning vehicle performance that the company was doing its utmost to cover up. (It has maintained the same position ever since, too.)

At the very moment the Saylor family lost their lives in the Lexus E350, there was another hapless victim of Toyota’s callous profit-driven ruthlessness still alive. But that didn’t mean Toyota wasn’t taking away his life. It was. The Japanese automaker was costing an innocent man his freedom.




In 2006, 29-year old Laos national Koua Fong Lee was sentenced to 8 years in jail by a Minnesota court after the Toyota he was driving mowed down three people while he was ferrying his family home – them being his pregnant wife and two primary school-age kids – after Church on a Sunday morning in a 1996 Toyota Camry.

One of those injured in the car in front was an 8 year-old girl who was left paraplegic and later died of her injuries. Lee constantly maintained his innocence all along. There is something detectably clear about the way Lee explains the culmination of events leading up to the crash. Almost instantly, you begin to recognize a truthful story emerging.

 “When I exited from [the] I-94 [turning] to Snelling and [sic] I saw many cars in front of me and I saw the red light. Then I took my foot off the gas and put my foot on the brake. But you know, when I pushed nothing happened. Then I pushed again. Then I yelled to my family “the brakes aren’t working!” Then the police came and he [sic] asked me: “What happened?” and I told him “the brakes aren’t working, that’s why we had an accident. So I tried everything I could to stop the car but the brake was just not working.”

Even as Lee was convicted of manslaughter, the family of the deceased doubted the true motivation and mechanism of the random slaying of their next of kin and child. Something, they maintained all along, didn’t add up for a very long time.

“I was told the guy was speeding, doing 90-something miles an hour coming off the freeway ramp. I couldn’t understand how you could come off that ramp going so fast,” a family member of the victims maintained in an ABC documentary focused on the subject of Lee’s imprisonment and potential injustice done during the period in which he was still behind bars. “It still works on me on a daily basis. What happened? What was actually going on in that car or with that car? I need to know what happened! Why? I don’t have my brother, my nephew or my daughter any more,” she said, breaking into tears.

Watching that documentary was a Texas lawyer who began to analyze the way in which the crash correlated with similar accidents that had taken place in or involving Toyota vehicles. Robert Hilliard considered the facts and immediately went to defend Lee pro-bono, gambling his entire career on the outcome of the verdict. Four days after Hilliard’s evidence was put in front of a different judge for the first time in 2 years, the verdict was overturned and no retrial was mandated necessary at all by the same afternoon. After paying with his time for a crime he never committed, Lee was allowed to walk free.

To hear Hilliard tell it, Lee was the victim not just of a malfunctioning vehicle but potentially of something a lot more nefarious, that thing being a dirty legal system in which his defense was improperly prepped and a verdict which was clearly ill-considered by a jury unlikely to find him innocent anyway.

This may be down to the typically racist slant that it is possible to find in Minnesota and Mid-West more generally, or it may be the result of something worse still: Toyota’s influence, directly or indirectly. Hilliard doesn’t comment on this. The rapidity of the judge’s response to the motion to overturn the previous conviction (the same day that Hilliard presented his case at the hearing) certainly implies that something was amiss at the initial trial though.

The conviction of Koua Fong Lee is not the only example in which Toyota is potentially implicated in bribing political or legal figures of influence, as we shall see.

In 2015, Lee was awarded $14 million by a jury who found Toyota 60% culpable of the accident. This case was settled only in the past month in entirety, too. Toyota knowingly caused an innocent man to go to jail and to spend two years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and was itself eventually found guilty of murdering an elementary school child it first made a cripple for 18 months of her life. Still, it got off with a $10 million slap-on-the-wrist ten years later in 2015, a year in which the company boasted of earning $18 billion in profit in trailing earnings.

The National Highway Transport Safety Administration (NHTSA) [pronounced Nit-za] meanwhile implicitly supported Toyota’sdefense! Announcing the same month (June) that it found no link between sudden acceleration and the throttle and other vehicular functions it helped the automaker fight back against other similar cases by casting doubt on the matter. This was despite the fact that NHTSA chiefs had been presented with hundreds of pages of evidence to the contrary repeatedly over the past half-decade at least. NHTSA had no comment when asked about this.

It is hardly surprising that when he discovered another 150 cases of sudden acceleration related to Toyota vehicles in September 2014, the 2010 Corolla owner Robert Ruginis went round the NHTSA deeming the public officials ineffective. But, if this is really the case, the question remains:

What then is the point of the NHTSA?

The document laid out in front of the Chinese, “Details of Korea Measures Final Version”, stated that “there is no possibility of similar problems occurring in the floor mats introduced in China.”

The longtime Beijing policymaker, Jinson Zheng* knew that he had to make it look like he was giving Toyota a hard time over this. There were others looking over his shoulder, after all, that cold April day in 2010.

“Regarding the Korea measures, it is recognized that BOS [break override system] is very important – if Toyota wants to provide it to the customers voluntarily, then we have recognized that the present problem has already exceeded the problem of only the mat,” Zheng told Toyota. “However, regarding the present problem, while I think Toyota ought to know best the cause of the problem, I have come to think that it is difficult to accept that the problem is only in the floor mat.”

Zheng went on to mention that even if the problem was the floormats in the cars, then China was likely to be affected badly as a result of the habit of its consumers installing their own customized versions of floormats in their cars. (Chinese people, ever eager to generate as much prosperity and long life their way as possible, frequently customize their doors, floors and even ceilings with Feng Shui items.)

“To give one example, some Chinese user may replace the original floor mat with a non-original one. Because of this, if we imagine a situation in which the incident of a pedal getting stuck occurs because of that, while safety is preserved if that is a vehicle in which a BOS has been introduced, but the result will be that safety is not preserved if that is a car in which a BOS has not been introduced. Therefore, it is not logical to say that BOS will not be introduced because the problematic original floor mat is not being used,” Zheng told the Toyota team.

“Actually, using non-original floor mats is very common in China. When viewed from this point of view, it is possible to consider that this is a design problem.

In other words, the users in China will be exposed to the same risks as the users in the US and Korea. If this becomes a difference in the countermeasures taken, I do not want to imagine what would happen if there is a large scale protest.”

This is the first ever public report of Toyota’s dealings with Beijing policymakers, who preside over Toyota’s second largest global market. When taken in context with the cosy relationship the company enjoys with US regulators, the implication from Zheng’s warnings is clear: government officials everywhere at the most senior levels were fully aware of the fact that Toyota’s vehicles were responsible for more deaths of their citizens than any other automaker’s cars were.

Zheng’s concerns over the reaction of Chinese citizens to news that a Japanese car manufacture deliberately let them ride around in unsafe cars, even as they spent the extra cash fixing up the same model vehicles that belonged to the Koreans, is not insignificant either. It confirms racial prejudice that could lead to massive social unrest if left unchecked for any period of time. He continued hestitantly:

“In addition, what do you think the reaction of Chinese consumers [will be like]  when they come to know the details disclosed publicly in Korea?

“Although I think Toyota has foreseen this as an aspect of crisis management, in such a situation, of course not only Toyota but even our Administration will be the target of great pressure and we both will be in a very disadvantageous situation.”

Toyota executive Yoshiki Suno* seemed quite candid that afternoon about the ways in which his employer had – almost by random – selected vehicles which is was recalling. “Even in Korea, the non-original floor mats were initially considered problematic, but … I have heard that eventually only the cars corresponding to the problematic original floor mats were taken as the targets for taking measures,” he told the Chinese, admonishing that “break override systems … are not omnipotent.”

Once again, Zheng cautioned Suno and his team of the risks involved in letting this situation go unmarked: “If the Korea information is announced publicly, it will be difficult for Chinese consumers to accept the details of that announcement.”

But Zheng, just like his counterparts in the United States, was charitable to the Japanese automobile maker, ultimately:

“However,” he told the Toyota executives, “it is sufficient to show the stance of Toyota about taking the countermeasures, that is, the meaning is that Toyota should announce its stance. When we view this from the point of view of equality, it is not good if the ES350 of Korea is a target but the ES350 of China is not a target. However, never write anything about fairness in your formal documents.”

In fact, by advising Toyota not to compare the Korean recall of E350 vehicles with the Chinese non-recall situation or mention an incident of fairness in their final report, Zheng was effectively stating the limits of his powers as alone policymaker. In other words: file the most detail-oriented, technical and unremarkable explanation for your decision as you possibly can, containing thousands of pages of unremarkable graphs, charts and assembly line observations, and I can get it past the People’s Republic without a fuss, but mention fairness, and it’s another story.

Finally, Zheng added: “My purpose is to spend the rest of my days in peace.” It is for the reason that this statement is on the record now that Zheng’s identity has been changed here: in Chinese, this phrase is a classic example of one used where a bribe or cash payment is being made to the party concerned. It means: don’t let this be found out. In mainland China, especially in the current political climate, the penalty for being party to such activities as those recorded here for government officials is the harshest imaginable: execution.

Toyota said this crash was the result of “driver error” | Source: http://middlebororeview.blogspot.com/

At this point it is logical to pause and consider what may turn out to be a defining naivite that characterizes the nature of pre-Millennial society.

Why do people trust the same individuals or groups who profit from selling them their vehicles to tell them they are safe to drive? Why do they trust their government regulator to do the same, when the same organization openly lets the firms it oversees get away with paying for their criminal offenses in dollar bills and then backs them up after they have done wrong?

What is wrong with people? Why do members of society allow the same bastards who maim and kill children and wreck lives to get away with saying the following sorts of things in the aftermath of being found guilty?:

“We sympathize with anyone in an accident involving one of our vehicles [but] we believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that [we were] not the cause of this unfortunate accident. We will study the record and carefully consider our legal options going forward.”

Those are Toyota’s words.

What is wrong with you? What is my problem that I allow this to go on unchecked? These are the questions we must ask ourselves.

For why are any of us driving Toyotas? Is the answer: because Toyotas are affordable? Or is it: well, they might malfunction once in a while, but generally, they are very reliable?

Is this really the point, considering the facts of the Fong Lee case alone?

For if one of the above reasons does apply to you, then by that same logic, would you marry a murderer whose only words to the parents of the child he viciously mutilated and killed were that it was an “unfortunate accident” for which he was “not responsible” and after the finding of being such was the case commented only that he would “consider [his] legal options going forward”?

Imagine the sole reason that your daughter wished to wed such a member of society was that he was an easily obtainable member of the opposite sex who had readily agreed to an engagement? What would be your response then?

Today, Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. Which means that at some point in our lives, most of us walk down the aisle with that man, and what is more, later suggest to our own children they do the same thing, too.

Toyoda made the march into the majestic Pennsylvania Avenue courtroom with his head bowed deeply in the characteristic Japanese fashion of offering up an apology for sins committed. When it was his turn to speak, after swearing an oath to tell the truth, the chief executive paused and looked briefly into the eyeball of the camera.

At first, Toyoda outlined the four categories of problems the company had identified as being related to unexpected acceleration. The first, he said, was some sort of problem with the electronic throttle control system (ETCS). The second potential problematic cause of UA was driver error, the third was a problem with the design aspect of the vehicle, and the fourth was a problem related to the structural aspect of the vehicle.

“I am absolutely confident that there is no problem with the design of the ECT system,” Toyoda told policymakers. This was a lie.

Internally, the company was well aware at the time that ECT systems were malfunctioning. A presentation handed around by senior managers at Toyota dated October 20, 2008 is titled “Electronic Throttle Abnormality Measures” and lists various problems with the ECTS such as: “After throttle sensor abnormality occurs, engine output abnormality [is the consequence].”

In an other example, on an e-mail sent by Yoshitaka Ugawa from Engine Management Systems Innovation Section Group 2 (EMAG2G) on 28th May 2009 at 00.20 to a colleage, the engineer lists a variety of problems with Toyota’s cars in an e-mail titled “Monitor car electronic throttle”:

Problem: [Sticking at full open during freeway driving]

It was hypothesized from the freeze data that the throttle sensor characteristics became abnormal during driving because the throttle sensor ground floated.

Because the ECU severely misjudges the throttle opening angle by approximately 9 degrees, the fully closed stopper interfered when the accelerator was OFF.   The throttle was unable to completely close and was detected as being stuck open.

Problem: [Engine Stall]

It is hypothesized that it is the same phenomena as the above incident.   As the car was being driven at a low speed while parking, it is conjectured that the engine stalled due to insufficient air volume. Because the failure location was the throttle’s ground (E2), the ECU, the harness, or the electronic throttle could be considered to be the cause. Since the frequency of occurrence is low, a harness connector connection failure may have been the cause.

Despite evidence to the contrary, when sued, Toyota consistently maintains time and again up to the present day that it is in fact problem number 2 that is the cause of most of the accidents its vehicles are involved in: driver misuse of the vehicle.

Given the evidence provided in the form of the e-mail above, as well as other similar e-mails, it is implausible to believe Akio Toyoda’s statement that he had only been made aware of the problems in his vehicles that very year, in late 2009.

It means that despite having been Vice-President of the company for over a decade, and further, that despite owning the largest shareholding of any individual on earth, he is not privy to information that is readily available in any quality inspection unit in the company’s headquarters and which is openly discussed internally among engineers on a regular basis on company e-mails.

While it is true that chief executives are commonly detached from the day-to-day minutae of the goings-on inside the organizations they lead, it is not true that such authorities are commonly blind to major incidences of common knowledge regarding product weakness or ineffectiveness.

The executives on the Board of the National Highway & Transportation Safety Association (NHTSA) knew it, too. In the previous half-year at a minimum, they had received the exact same reports contesting that ECT system malfunctions and other more basic problems were the cause of unintended acceleration and non-braking vehicles among Toyota’s product line-up.

In fact, TMC had been aware of the possible floormat-related risks to its vehicles’ braking and acceleration functionalities since the middle of 2005 when a driver in West Hollywood reported to both the company and the NHTSA that her 2005 Prius had lost the ability to brake or accelerate properly on a highway after the floormat had become stuck to the pedals.

Since then, Toyota, unbeknownst to the NHTSA, had privately received a flurry of more worrying reports about its vehicles’ tendencies towards unintended acceleration of units among its Prius line, in what internally had become known simply as “UA”.

“Vehicle surged to 90 mph even though [my wife] applied both regular and emergency brake during acceleration. She checked both feet on brakes not obstructed. She exited interstate and careened through small town eventually ditching vehicle through forest, ending up in a river after somersaulting end over end 3 times, clipping off trees 10 feet above the ground,” read the contents of one such report from a Colorado driver, filed in March of 2007. The exasperated victim’s husband cited “numerous” unrequited attempts to contact Toyota about the problem. It was a similar story elsewhere in the country. Another Pensylvannia-based driver had reported in July of 2006 that “the vehicle had continued to accelerate up to 90 mph even when pressure was taken off the accelerator pedal.”

Even as the reports piled up in number and spread geographically in scope – the same unintended acceleration problems reported by drivers of the Aygo and Yaris vehicle models that were sold in the United Kingdom and Ireland under precisely the same circumstances – it was only reports of possible floormat defects that were discussed officially with government watchdogs. This information asymmetry gave Toyota’s public relations executives a crucial advantage over many policymakers who were still clueless as to what was going on.

The real problem, TMC’s engineers knew, was nothing to do with a floormat that got jammed over the acceleration pedal.

But given that they were still unsure how to correct the flaw cost-effectively yet, and that anyway, there were insufficient numbers of pedals to reinstall in so many potentially affected vehicles within any reasonable amount of time, replacing floormats seemed like a convenient alternative. The decision to lie to government officials and customers about the real cause behind the death of the Saylor family had in fact been taken by senior Toyota executives barely a week after the crash. Not all the company’s engineers agreed with the strategy to conceal the truth however.

“I hate to break this to you but WE HAVE A tendency for MECHANICAL failure in accelerator pedals of a certain manufacturer on certain models. We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean and I believe that Jim Lentz [Head of North America] and Yoshi are on the way to DC for meetings with NHTSA to discuss options. We better just hope that they can get NHTSA to work with us in coming with a workable solution that does not put us out of business,” wrote Irv Miller, group vice-president for Toyota Motor Sales (TMS) in an e mail to Katsuhiko Koganei, a colleague in Japan, on 16th January, 2010.

Koganei, a senior executive at parent TMC, replied curtly an hour later: “Irv san, thank you for your message, and I understand our status”. His position was clear: “Now I talked with you on the phone, we should not mention about the mechanical failures of acc. pedal, because we have not clarified the real cause of the sticking acc [sic] pedal formally, and the remedy for the matter has not been confirmed.” And that was how the doubters were silenced.

Crucially, this approach of covering up the real causes of the accidents meant that the company could plausibly concentrate the problem on a limited number of vehicles on the American continent, and could thus push under the rug the much more expensive alternative possibility of having to address the vehicles’ true engineering faults which would have been all over the world instead.

“TMC is going to explain that the floor mats were improperly attached, but TMC is not going to raise the topic of the accelerator pedeal [sic] design … Therefore, if appropriate floor mats are properly attached in countries other than the US and Canada, we think there is no problem. No investigation has been made in other regions and countries,” wrote Shigemi Yaeo one of Toyota’s customer quality engineers, to the company’s Beijing-based Chinese marketing department in an e-mail sent on October 5, 2009.

The focus on keeping costs lower at the expense of the customer and pretty much everyone but itself was classic Toyota, as was the amount of public relations prominence given to the problem in contrast to the amount of engineering attention it was showed. This perception-before-product focus was designed to aid Toyota’s sales-first philosophy. An incorrectly installed floormat – which the driver himself could correct – sounded, and indeed was, a much less alarming issue for the company’s customers to stomach than a vehicle which spontaneously began to move at high speeds on the way back from school carpool runs, or on the way to Sunday afternoon picnics.



The lead investigator into the causes of the unintended acceleration cases was someone from the Senate, a Democrat named Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia. Rockefeller had appealed to Toyoda for the right to build a factory in his state as recently as 2006. Given that Rockefeller had been friendly with Toyoda’s own grandfather back in the 1960s, the request had been promptly forthcoming. With this in mind, it should have been obvious that a meaningful hearing was somewhat unlikely, however much grandstanding Rockefeller and his cohorts engaged in to give sceptics the opposite impression.

Actually, the relationship between Toyoda and Rockefeller had influenced White House decision-making, and was a critical reason NHTSA had started to cool off Toyota’s case somewhat after that same January, despite its facing continued attacks in the U.S. media for appearing soft.

David Strickland, the newly-appointed NHTSA chief in January of 2010, worked for eight years prior on Rockefeller’s committee as a lawyer and senior staffer. Strickland owed his career to Rockefeller: in fact, by Strickland’s own admission “[Rockefeller]’s the one who signs the paychecks … and I have no problem with that.”

David Strickland would be prevented from testifying on Toyota’s behalf at a case involving a civil lawsuit in California in 2015 surrounding the failure of Toyota’s vehicles. The fact that he was willing – and enthusiastic – to do so indicates the level of intimacy he had developed with the manufacturer by the later stages of his appointment (he retired from the position as head of NHTSA in 2014).

Could this intimacy have interfered with NHTSA’s impartiality as a regulator? Quite possibly. The signs are there that this is the case. Apart from agreeing – subject to approval by NHTSA chiefs which was not granted – to testify on Toyota’s behalf in a California civil suit in 2015, Strickland muddles his words when asked to identify the root cause of the unintended acceleration problems which his team was tasked with investigating.

For example, Strickland, usually a straight-talking lawyer in presentation, seemed flustered while recalling the early days with Toyota:

“[In] my personal experience dealing with the Unintended Acceleration issues with Toyota, it really felt like “when is this going to stop?” I mean, you know – it was on the front pages of the major newspapers for weeks and there was major exposes, and then, you know, I had to go out and hire NASA to do an evaluation of the vehicles, Secretary Ray La Hood was deeply involved in it and then once we had Toyota kinda, you know, we sorta found the answers, that, you know, were the answers, things kinda fell into, fell into, rhythm, you know.”

Actually, we have no idea what the answers Strickland found to the problems surrounding unintended acceleration were. at all For the same year this interview was conducted – in 2015 – NHTSA issued the following statement:

“NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrtion) has not identified any defects with the vehicles that can explain simultaneous failures of the throttle and brake systems,” the organization’s PR representative Catherine Howden said in a June 2 statement.

This seemingly contradictory role of NHTSA as shepherd of the country’s biggest automakers that it is meant to make sure acts in compliance with the law, combined with Toyota’s political savvy leads to the assumption that perhaps the organization is not as impartial as it maintains.

Is this why it allowed Toyota to get away with paying a pittance fine for admitting to criminal negligence? I asked NHTSA’s PR representative Kathryn Henry this question and received the following response:

“NHTSA’s enforcement authority is limited to civil matters.

In the Toyota unintended acceleration matter, NHTSA assessed Toyota a then-record $66 million civil penalty. Keep in mind that by law, NHTSA’s civil penalty authority is capped at $35 million for a related series of violations, and that the Department of Transportation has urged Congress to raise that cap in order to increase the deterrent capability of the agency’s civil penalties.

The $1.2 billion figure you cite is a criminal penalty assessed by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a deferred prosecution agreement it reached with Toyota. I would note the $1.2 billion figure is by far the largest penalty of its kind ever assessed to an auto company.

For any additional information on the criminal penalty, I suggest you contact the Department of Justice.”

But that made the explanation of NHTSA’s role doubly-confusing, I countered. For if it wasn’t making arrangements for or informing on Toyota’s guilty pledge, what was NHTSA doing?:

The only thing that bothers me here I guess is that it’s hard for me to believe that this deal didn’t happen without you guys somehow brokering or being party to or agreeing the terms of this deal.

I received no further response from anyone in government on this issue. Like so many others, I was stonewalled, despite asking fair and reasonable questions which still remain unanswered by the only people capable of addressing them meaningfully.




It wasn’t as if Strickland had been President Obama’s first choice to lead the NHTSA. At first, Obama had preferred Charles Hurley, the former chief executive from Mother’s Against Drink Driving.

But after a series of passionate exchanges inside the Democrat Party orchestrated by Rockefeller and others cosy with the Detroit lobbyists, Strickland, a legal buff with a breadth of intricate domestic policy experience, had been the natural compromise for an Administration which had conceded a number of key posts to Republicans and which was keen on keeping its unelected officials among the blue rank and file henceforth.

NHTSA chiefs were keen to cosy up to the automakers now the organization was turning blue again after what had been in effect a 25-year long cold war that had thawed relations between the agency and the automanufacturers, in particular foreign ones, chief of all Toyota.

Given Strickland’s proximity to Rockefeller, Toyoda in fact had nothing to worry about at all: this investigation, like so many conducted by the NHTSA after this turning point in US political history, would end up concluding exactly what Toyota told it to.

Still, Toyota executives seemed to expect a significantly warmer welcome when they braved the winter weather in Washington DC in 2010. Hamilton Loeb, the firm’s chief council at the hearings, openly expressed disappointment. He had hoped that granting Rockefeller a factory in his backyard would have more of an impact, it seemed:

“It is surprising that Senator Rockefeller’s closing comments [in today’s hearing] were long and in such a harsh tone,” he told Toyota executives in a summary. “We had expected his comments to be shorter, and to involve gratitude to the Toyota officials who had come from Japan in order to give their statements. Two of my own colleagues who witnessed this hearing (of which one was involved in the hearing at the venue) had the same reaction.”

The need to cosy up to Democrat policymakers after having been left outside in the cold of the Republican administration’s more protectionist stance was something Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the center for automotive research, drove home to the Toyota executives he was advising:

“The politics behind this Senate hearing can be described as follows. First, even though he takes pride in the Toyota engine factory in West Virginia (approximately 1,000 employees), Senator Rockefeller was guided in the attack on Toyota by Democratic Party members.”

Dr, Malmgren, an automotive expert who was similarly advising Toyota executives put it more plainly:

“In national politics, Senator Rockefeller enjoys playing the role of the American who is most au fait with Japan, and he seems to want to display himself to both the Senate and society at large as being the most appropriate person to make judgments regarding Japan. Due to this role, he is leading the Senate in regard to these aspects of mutual understanding with Toyota and US authorities, in particular NHTSA. Additionally, Senator Rockefeller maintains a position of trade protectionism, and for many years has been critical of Japanese trade measures. It must also be noted that when trade-related government officials become too comfortable with Japanese politics and corporate culture, he has been known to criticize this as well. The Senator is politically close to industrial unions, and perhaps he has been encouraged by industrial unions to apply pressure with more extensive reasons.”

Still, Toyota had friends in higher places. California Rep. Jane Harman was on a retainer paid by Toyota. Indeed, with Toyota factories either under construction or in operation now in Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky, making it responsible for employing 166,000 Americans at a time when the economy could ill afford to shrug off additional manufacturing jobs, a truly impartial hearing was unlikely. The political stakes were too high, and Toyota was the banker.

During the recall era of 2008-2013, Toyota’s operating costs actually fell by around 10%-15%, to $35.47 billion in 2013 (although admittedly they have remained on average about 20% higher since the start of the financial crisis and the recall splurge) even as Toyota internally projected that the recalls would cost the company around $10 billion. In fact, what is so surprising when you look at Toyota’s financial statements is how its growth remains so consistent no matter what challenge is thrown its way. Still, inside Toyota, paranoia was running high in early 2010. It was this year that was the cultural turning point in the organization, according to many familiar with the company. That’s when PR began to assume a centrally-located function and increasing funding was addressed to it.

“NHTSA/DOT are now being criticized by the general public as “soft,” so NHTSA/DOT is like a wounded animal. It’s trying with all its might not to get wounded again. It order to avoid deepening its own wounds, it will not resist injuring Toyota … [now that Ray Tyson is gone] it’s quite possible we will see a pattern of being double-crossed by NHTSA/DOT,” Toyota’s U.S. public affairs manager Martha Voss had panicked to Toyota America (TMA) Vice-President Hiroshi Hashimoto.

Voss is the archetypical spin-doctor, always on edge, she is known for being quick at playing fast and loose with the truth. She gets off on this status, it seems, too.

“I’ve worked for Toyota for 20 years; I can work and persevere because I know from personal experience that this company pursues quality to the end, speaks truthfully, and does not try to hide a thing,” she commented l to Yukitoshi Funo, who was at the time Executive Vice President of North American operations, her direct boss.

“That’s not our corporate culture at all,” Funo replied. Funo’a assurance that this wasn’t the case, in the words of one executive, had “come to [Voss] as a relief.”





Ever since the mass-recalls began in early 2010, the Toyota PR machine has been in overdrive. Empathy had never been a known quality of Akio Toyoda’s, and his callousness was his strength in the hours of alienation that fell about him throughout 2009-2010. In fact, his greatest strength was something of the opposite of empathy: it was merciless, profit-driven ruthlessness – indeed, he was unrelentingly focused at whatever it took to achieve it.

Barely months into the top job in April (9 months before the Senate hearing), Toyoda had begun driving the focus on profitability home to the organization’s senior executives and engineers.

“We need to build a culture that totally rejects the possibility of a loss,” Akio Toyoda told engineers.

The company that had once prided its core principles on being that the quality of its engineering met the very best standards in the world should now instead “rewind to profitable vehicle models and profitable countries,” Toyoda told another group of engineers.

As is the case in nearly every multinational corporation, Toyota’s workforce has a finely tuned political sensitivity to the personal qualities of its chief executive. It wasn’t long therefore before this personal invective of hardened profit obsession had spread throughout the rank-and-file of Toyota’s hundreds of thousands of employees. In short order, engineers could be found frequently sending e-mails to one another about cost-cutting, focusing their quantitative abilities not so much any more on vehicle quality adjustments but rather on refining vehicle manufacturing cost equations. The result was exactly what Akio Toyoda himself had bargained for less than five years earlier: from incurring a $4.4 billion loss in 2009, the same year he had become President, by the end of 2013 TMC was the world’s most profitable automobile company, becoming the first car manufacturer ever to sell 10 million vehicles in a single year and in the process earning close to $15 billion.

The troubles of before were, most of TMC’s employees told themselves, starting to look like something of a vague footnote in Japanese automobile history, rather than the postscript to Toyota’s calamitous ending that some experts had predicted. The doomsayers had been proven wrong, and by Akio Toyoda’s estimate at least, had mistaken his youth for an inability to manage.

There were still some who thought him a short-term profiteer posing as Japan’s most significant corporate executive, but by and large, the number of Toyoda’s critics inside the organization had fallen as the company continued to surge back into the black and beyond.

The thought that it was he who was chiefly restoring the family company’s legacy at the top got Akio Toyoda going every day. He didn’t have to play defense any more: now it was time to put all his energy back into executing his next plan of attack. It was going to be Toyota v. everyone else again, this time in the lucrative rush to sell hybrid vehicles in the green-conscious post subprime world.

This focus on environmentally friendly hybrid fuel vehicles was Toyota’s latest ruse in a long line of sales-oriented public relations stunts designed to enhance the company’s recently dented brand image and set the manufacturer’s course back on track to outdo it’s previously astronomical growth. Just like the corporation’s other acts of false philanthropy, Toyota’s focus on developing greener vehicles paid off big time. After sales topped 1 million vehicles worldwide in 2012, the following year TMC sold more than 5 times that number of hybrid cars worldwide, accounting for over 50% of its annual sales drive. Indeed, the Toyota hybrid was to become nothing short of the company’s answer to all its previous ailments.

While selling hybrid cars was proving a welcome development for the automaker’s bottom line, TMC’s assurance that the vehicles were good for the environment was a rather more debatable fact. For a start, lighter vehicles such as the best-selling Toyota Prius were significantly more energy-intensive to build than the bulkier traditional models, since they were predominantly made of aluminum, which was much harder to forge than steel.

An estimated 20 percent of the total energy lifetime of a non-hybrid vehicle was consumed in the manufacture of hybrid cars. This meant, of course, that in order to be truly energy efficient, hybrid vehicles would have to long outlive their traditional steel counterparts.

Given that the company’s record of building long-lasting vehicles had been so recently called into question all over the world, Toyoda had been vigilant in keeping under wraps the reality that much of these hybrid vehicles were essentially just cheaper remakes of previous models and were ultimately unlikely to last anywhere near as long as to would make them environmentally convincing manufacturing decisions.

The fact of the matter was that TMC was manufacturing hybrid vehicles without any regard for the environmental or engineering improvements that its models claimed, or apparently even, the corporation’s own long-term future branding considerations.

“Toyota’s current cheapskate tactics with the 2014 Corolla will bite them in the ass in a few years and they’ll be left shipping out their Corollas in large numbers to fleet sales [automobile lessors] and bottom-tier buyers, further eroding the brand’s reputation. That’s exactly what’s happening to the 2013 Corolla now, which looks and feels absolutely ancient and it’s only six years old at this point,” wrote Raphael Orlove, a respected automobile journalist in the trade publication Jalopnik, about Toyota’s latest hybrid unveiling, in the first half of 2013.

The company had flown Orlove out to test-drive the car in California on an all-expenses-paid trip designed to cajole the reviewer into submitting an uncritical endorsement of its latest engineering feat, but it seemed the expense – one of a number of increasing marketing costs – was to no avail. The new Corolla was apparently that bad. Amidst the recent relief of its previous financial woes, and with such long-term product quality maintenance uncertainty looming, the fact was that TMC had few options other than to stay on a marketing offensive.

A National Labor Journal report done in 2008 accused Toyota of slavery

“Job opportunity is opening to Vietnamese textile workers as Japanese companies have ordered to recruit more Vietnamese textile workers to make up for a reduced number of guest workers from other countries this year,” announced Tuoi Tre News on February 17, 2014.

Tuo Tre, which means “youth” in Vietnamese, bills itself as “the news gateway of Vietnam” and is one of the Vietnam’s traditionally less establishment newspapers (in 2000, officials burned thousands of copies after the paper published a survey indicating that nationals admired Bill Gates more than they did the late politician Ho Chi Minh) so there are plenty of youngsters reading.

Dam Trung Bac is enjoying a free ride off this local publicity, which began in earnest at the start of last year as Shinzo Abe’s new government sought to ease the passage of additional migrant labor from South East Asia into Japan via loosening the visa entry requirements and extending the maximum period which a worker can stay by two years, to five.

It’s a direct response from political pressures placed on the politicians by car manufacturers – at the front and center of which is Toyota – needing to up the ante on its frayed production lines to meet quotas for its new hybrid vehicles. Last year, Toyota sold 10.23 million cars, making it the top-selling car maker for the second year running; a full 15% of these cars were hybrids, which the US and European gas guzzlers are snapping up in clusters as they an environmentally-conscious mood sweeps through developed countries.

As general director of Gmas Corporation, a recruitment agency which acts on behalf of Japanese manufacturers and their subcontractors to find what is ostensibly meant to be a sort of Asian migrant worker’s internship away from home for a while, this is the moment he’s been waiting for.

The salaries in Vietnam for workers without much skill is just $100 or so, but Bac claims he “regularly” sets up students with $1000 or more in income. Bac says the only catch is that the guest worker ahs to have around $5000 on hand to pay the legal and travel costs. After all, these are not just any old domestic factory jobs that Gmas specialises in, but high class ones, in nowhere else than the country’s richest next door neighbour. Everyone, he maintains, wants to go and work in Japan, and he’s right, too.

Business such as Gmas Corporation are as commonplace in South East Asia as are their misleading marketing messages, which betray the very darkest variety of false advertising around: the promotion of career and income opportunity advancement in place of what amounts to nothing less than heinous labor exploitation.

If you happen to come across a list of local recruitment agencies headquartered in Manila, Jakarta, Vietiane, Ho Chi Minh, and a handful of other South East Asian cities, you’ll begin to notice a lot of companies with the words Overseas or Manpower in them. For example, there’s Cocyan Overseas Labor Agency, Kaohsiung Overseas Manpower Recruitment, Grand Better Manpower, Sam International Enterprise Manpower, Northeast Overseas Recruitment, to name a few of them.

Most of these companies are present in more than one South East Asian capital city, and many of them can also be found operating informally in the poorer, rural cities too.

These companies are the enabling agents through which subcontractors and even major manufacturers are able to recruit foreign guest workers that, once they arrive in Japan, the companies are by law allowed to pay just a fraction of the amount they do for equivalent Japanese laborers. Getting their hands on these workers, who are mostly from Vietnam, China, Indonesia and Myanmar, is not a straightforward process, however, since there’s a requirement that a pre-existing precedent for their employment is already in place for them to get a visa for temporary employment in Japan (usually defined as any length of time up to 3 years).

A multinational organisation cannot explicitly be seen to have anything to do with the dirty business jumping through the necessary legal loopholes to get these workers the appropriate qualifications for them to successfully obtain the foreign guest worker visa in Japan, so that’s exactly what these manpower agencies do for them.

In return for receiving a sum of up to $10,000 (an enormous sum by Vietnamese or Indonesian standards) paid by the prospective employee ostensibly for “pre-job training”, these recruitment agencies go about creating the workers a fake “profile”, giving them the veneer of bona fide hard-hat wearing mid-level members of a Toyota subcontractor plant – and sometimes even of Toyota itself – with all the mandatory educational in place. From there, the recruiters make the requisite visa arrangements on behalf of the applicant.

Running one of these manpower rackets is a lucrative swindle indeed: the Russian owner of one such agency that I spoke with said that incoming cashflow ran to around $20,000 to $30,000 per month, depending on demand.

The sad truth is simply that for many in the region, their own realities are so void of a chance at achieving any sort of economic opportunity that there is never a shortage of would-be workers in search of greener pastures who hand over wads of cash to get into these sorts of promising schemes. Furthermore, the recruitment agency frequently receives a commission paid by the Japanese “employer” in addition to the majority of the cash paid by the applicant, which the agency owners skim off the top tax-free (these amounts being paid in cash; the legitimate source of income on which the tax portion is declared is the commission).

Demand for the recruitment agents is consistent throughout the year, especially if you can supply large numbers of such workers all in one go. In every instance, executives at the top employers, which include companies such as Toyota and Microsoft, are fully aware of the practice of jumping the legal loopholes to hire these foreign guest workers, and of the promises made to them about long-term hiring opportunities at the Japanese firms, which they never intend to keep.

Naturally, with so much money at stake, demand to supply such workers is as consistently high as is supply itself. Thus, the owners of the manpower agencies usually have some sort of political tie inside the Japanese government, the Yakuza (Japanese mob), or at a senior level at Toyota Motor Corporation.

Women such as Jenny Wing*, who’s mother is the inside connection to TMC, are allowed to run these shady outfits from places like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam: Jenny’s mother is the mistress of a powerful and widely-respected Japanese politician who lives in Tokyo most of the time. The relationship, which began only a few years ago, gave Jenny and her family all an “in road” to several key Toyota subcontractors, as well as to Toyota itself, she explains excitedly. Questioned about the direct relationship between Jenny’s outfit and Toyota, she and her husband unreservedly maintain, when repeatedly questioned about the topic, that Toyota itself, and not just its subcontractors, is a client of their fledgling two year-old enterprise.

As she strolled in a long, fashionable brand name summer dress across the huge seven-car courtyard of her husband’s family house to go to lunch with some local celebrities, Jenny bragged enthusiastically in front of a brand new Audi R8 about the huge commissions that could be obtained by providing such workers in a “bulk deal” to the Japanese companies and the sorts of branded clothing she could now afford to wear as a result (Louis Vuitton was right up there at the top of them, while designer was her particular choice of just about everything in the house).

A surge in demand following an uptick in US economic consumption in 2012 and since then had given rise recently to her expansionist vision of starting a series of “training centers” throughout South East Asia in order to lure even more potential workers in greater quantities, whom her husband openly referred to as “slaves”.

Aichi Prefecture is a sub district of Japan in Cibu.

Inside Aichi Prefecture, there are splinter unions, which have gradually risen in number over the years. These desperate gang-land hell holes outside the back of uncared for and unwashed building estates are in fact the one form of personal support network that foreign guest workers at the sprawling auto plants can rely on and even look forward to late in the evening. They are not, of course, official: but as with all Asia, behind the curtains exist numerous informal networks.

These informal networks tend to have colourful titles that reflect the misogynistic lives of their members’ own. For example, there is one network called the Living Dead Bait of Asia. This group maintains ties with the Vietnamese press and with embassy officials, so that if one of its members becomes sick and remains untreated by a doctor for an extended period of time (a frequent occurrence, according to the workers) or dies on the job (less frequent, but still far from being an isolated case) then the others get the word out to whomever can help, or in the case of death, to family members quickly.

“These folks are sometimes called $3-an-hour workers. They are not treated like human beings. They are trafficked like slaves,” says Ippei Torri, as for the second time that dreaded s-word comes up.

“This kind of behavior is destroying Japan’s public morals,” says Ippei-san, one of Japan’s few social activists and the leader of Zentoitsu Worker’s Union, another autonomous labor organization similar to All Toyota Labor Union.

In theory of course, workers are meant to be able to earn enough money over a reasonable period of time to pay back the initial deposits that they put up initially. In practice, it never works like that, claim workers who have come back empty-handed, humiliated and often psychologically scarred from the experience. Some of them have set up internet chat forums in order to assist those looking to take the same gamble, but even they are shy about bringing a lot of publicity their way: the social stigma of being a worker is bad enough, let alone one that got conned.

Usually, it takes the worker at least six months and usually more time just to pay off the initial training fee, a fee from which her manpower firm skims around 60% – 70% off the top, Jenny admitted candidly, while approximately 30% was spent on the costs of filing for a visa and putting the mandatory profile together.

Given that the fee is so high relative to the worker’s annual wage, most of the time this sum of money is obtained via a high-interest loan shark who lends at an interest rate of around 30% – 40% per year and threatens the borrower’s family back home in the event that repayment is not forthcoming on a timely basis. Further, once these guest workers reach Japan, they are frequently mistreated, overworked, and even abused. Others have reportedly been stripped of their passports by the local employer as “insurance” for a minimum number of work hours: the insurance usually isn’t even necessary, given the fact that they have borrowed all the money to get out to Japan in the first place. There is often no choice but to sweat it out for up to a couple years or more – unless they wish their families to come to harm.

Writing in a Vietnamese labor Journal at the end of 2013, Japanese advocate Kamata Satoshi recounts how he received e-mail from Kurematsu Saichi, Assistant Director at the Labor Union Association in Aichi Prefecture. Saichi told Satoshi in the e-mail that he had just returned from visiting Komaki City, where Toyota acts as the employer for up to ninety percent of the population living there, either directly, or indirectly via its subcontractors.

Like Nike, Toyota runs Vietnamese sweatshops too, except the products are potentially lethal

Saichi explained that during his visit he met three Vietnamese guest workers who had just been fired without cause; after looking into the case, he found out that the electrical parts subcontractor had been banned from hiring guest workers for up to three years as a result of continued violations of labor law and mistreatment of its foreign guest workers. The company was a Toyota subcontractor, Saichi noted

When they first arrived in Japan, the workers told Saichi that they had planned to be able to save up to 1 million yen each (around $10,000) by the end of their three years working 20 hour days. With only eight months left to spare, the three workers had instead managed to save just 4 percent of that sum – a measly $400 per head.

“They have no money because they had sent all their savings to their families in Vietnam. Moreover, they had already used up their unemployment insurance when they lost jobs earlier,” explains Satoshi in the trade journal report:

This is just one example of the kinds of problems caused by the Foreigner Training-Internship Program. These kinds of problems—like continually being fired and rehired, violations of contracts, and violations of human rights—happen on a daily basis. Recently, twenty-three subcontractors of Toyota Textiles and the Toyota Technology Exchange Cooperative—which had accepted Vietnamese trainees—were charged with “illegal practices.” Currently, damages are being decided in court. This is a textile-parts factory of the world-famous Toyota automobile conglomerate. These incidents were partially reported in the mass media: abuses included taking away the passports or health insurance cards of the trainees. [1] The trainees were also forced to place their wages in factory savings accounts in order to prevent them from leaving the factory. The factories did not pay overtime, and they skimmed the workers’ room and board, and heating and lighting, expenses. The trainees were also forced to pay fines like ¥15 per minute to go to the bathroom during their work hours, or ¥2,000 for forgetting to clean their facilities after their shift. There were also accusations of sexual harassment by management.

The story of what little salary there is left to go around as a result of having it held aside in the form of a guaranteed work “insurance” deposit is familiar to Le Thi Kim Lien, who had around $400 – the equivalent of a months’ salary, at most – held aside by her employer in the form of a “security deposit” lest she run away at any one time during the while of her 2 year stay in Japan.

She is one of the few brave enough to be seeking recourse for her mistreatment through the courts, a daring task in Vietnam, where Toyota’s immense power makes it hard for such cases to get the attention and impartial hearing such cases deserve, and worse still, social etiquette frowns upon attempting to vindicate one’s personal misfortunes.

In 2007, Lien, by then 22 years old, filed suit against Japanese subcontractor Tokai Craft and against the recruitment agency that sent her to Japan on the false premise of earning Japanese-style wages of up to $25 per hour. The case is still outstanding.

Lien maintains that she was forced to work 14-16 hour days on much less than a quarter of what she was promised per hour, so that she could meet her subcontractor’s minimum daily steel production quotas for the sake of Toyota’s time-sensitive production quotas (called “Just In Time” by its proud management staff). When asked why she came to Japan to work in the first place, she maintains that she was promised a career-enhancing prospect working for as much $1000 per month and an overall “life-changing employment experience”.

This is a far cry from the Toyota that middle-class Americans might be familiar with, but in the Japanese way of looking at things, extremely high standards are the norm, maintain employees. Indeed, men and women are proud of their long hours and lifetime’s of years spent in service to the firm.

It’s a running joke inside the company that the American employees, when working day-time U.S. hours, are frequently able to reach their counterparts in Japan on very short notice by e-mail despite the 16-hour time difference, since the Japanese executives are still up in the middle of the night working on a presentation or finishing their review of a particular divisions’ account statements.

But the expectations of a manager with an MBA are of course a completely different story to the ones that are placed on low paid, uneducated, unskilled employees sleeping in five persons to a tiny dorm, sometimes on the hard floor.

Despite the increasingly public nature of the claims about such slave labor employment, the trend appears to be on the rise. On April 1, 2014, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party submitted a proposal to expand the number of guest workers as well as to extend the maximum period of their stay from 3 years to up to 5 years. When challenged about the previous catalog of controversies associated with the use of such guest workers, LDP party member Yasuhisa Shiozaki was conspicuously unspecific in his response.

“We are aware of the concerns and we allowed people who had objections to voice their objections,” he told the press, maintaining that LDP intended to “strengthen the governance of the program.” Shoibu Ibusuki, a Tokyo-based lawyer who acts on behalf of labor reform advocates, responds to this claim that such broad and superficial proposals are meaningless unless the “structural problem” of the employment process is reformed first.

That, argues Ippei-san, is just doublespeak. “The workers can’t freely choose their workplace after coming to Japan. They are refused the right to sign and cancel contracts, so they have no freedom as laborers in the first place!”

Toyota worker Le Vanh Tach spotted a number of defects with the vehicles coming out of the company’s Vietnam plant | Source: Tuo Tre News

When you dig deeper into what is going on in Vietnamese manufacturing plants, it becomes clear all too quickly why many of the country’s poor nationals might consider it a worthwhile bet spending the big money with the hope of starting fresh in Japan. In many ways, that’s because life as they know it simply cannot get any worse. If they are going to get disenfranchised anyway, they may as well do it with some sort of a chance – however slim – that there’s an upside in it?

A case in point is Le Vanh Tach, an engineer who had worked at the Vin Phuc plant outside Ho Chi Minh city since his mid-twenties in 2006. After a few years, Tach began noticing significant manufacturing defects in the cars and the car parts that the plant was turning out both for consumption in its own market and for sale in overseas ones.

After he was given the job as a junior engineer, around a year after he’d joined the company, Tach saw that a range of problems associated with Toyota’s Fortuner and 7-seater Innover models were being blindly ignored by the company’s quality inspection chiefs.

Specifically, Tach noticed that several of the cars often had problems with balancing properly at high speeds; when he looked at the way the car was bolted together, this appeared to be due to the insufficient tightening of screw, he said.

Bu that wasn’t all. In addition, Tach observed how the vehicles had faulty far more faults with the braking systems than was to be expected, and also that the cars’ chamber bolts and seats were not being mounted in compliance with the company’s internal safety control standards.

Over the next five years, Tach approached his bosses about the problematic vehicle production lines and flagged up his concerns about the associated safety hazards to passengers a number of times. Ignored at first, when he kept pushing the issue on senior management at Toyota Motor Vietnam (TMV), one day, it was Tach’s turn to get a verbal threat to keep his mouth shut about the problems for then on. Still, Tach persisted, believing that the rising number of vehicles being sold with an increasing list of problems associated with their production was too big a moral problem to ignore. Suppose a kid got hit? he figured.

Thus, his mind resolute, despite his agitated higher-up manager, in December 2010 and early in 2012, Tach sent TMV’s President Akito Tachibana three e-mails technically outlining and detailing the nature of his concerns. Still he heard back nothing and witnessed no sign of anything so much as a quality control review.

During the latter part of this episode, Tach, now married with two small children and born with a love of engineering pumping through his veins in the poor upcountry province of Nam Dinh where his mother still lives, took out a number of loans from a handful of Vietnam’s multiple banks and finished what had been an impressive single-handed job of constructing an 80 square meter house for the family in his hours off. There was a bright spot here: although uneducated, Tach was a smart guy, and had built the house in what was fast becoming one of the area’s now up-and-coming Hanoi suburbs in Vinh Phuc province. Depressingly however, it was only a couple miles away from where his bosses at Toyota were starting to cause him serious personal harassment over his prior behavior.

Tach sent Tachibana a final e-mail which contained an ultimatum: either take immediate action to rectify the problems he had advised them of previously, or he would have no choice but to go to the media and the appropriate regulatory authorities and lodge a public complaint. Tach allowed another few weeks to pass by, during which he was surprised and frustrated to receive no response back from either Tachibana or anyone at TMV.

All he wanted to do, he maintained at the time, was clear his conscience.

Tach made good on his promise and submitted his long list of concerns along with piles of internal documents corroborating his accusations to the Vietnam Register, the government body which handles oversight of vehicle construction. His findings – and the evidence he provided – were damning, and offer a window into the frightening lack of concern for how Toyota ensures quality and safety control at the South East Asian manufacturing plants from where it sources many of the pieces of its vehicles for sale to core international markets such as those in the United States.

In addition to the problems associated with the vehicles’ brakes, seats, and motion balance, Tach proved to regulators that there was a host of other much more grievous issues associated with the way the TMV plant was assembling its car parts.

• First, the minimum 2.4kg of glue that is applied in between the vehicles’ steel hull plates was reduced to half that amount as a result of senior management dividing up teams to save on time. The result was that the steel plates which form the body of the vehicle were prone to early rusting, compromising the efficiency and the longevity of the car.
• Second, the shock absorbers were being assembled wrongly on the Innova and Fortuner models, so that oil was not getting to them as they shocked. Shock absorbers are one of a car’s key road safety provisions, and control the car’s suspension, balance and mobility. Faulty shock absorbers such as those reported by Tach are one of the many leading causes of road accidents today, and can result in cars veering suddenly off course or skidding randomly across the road when the vehicle is faced with oncoming headwinds.
• Third, many of Toyota’s Innova cars left TMV’s factory with rusty rear axles, including in some of the cases with potentially hazardous gas leakages. This statement may be especially important for drivers of American and European Toyota cars in particular, since Tach pointed out that the rusting occurred during the shipping of the axles when they had been exported to Vietnam from elsewhere in Asia. (United States Toyota models nearly universally make use of imported axles).

Indeed, it seems that a number of U.S. drivers – particularly those based in areas of high salt contamination but all over as well – have noticed the same thing.

“Has anyone had an axle housing deteriorate to the point it actually broke? … my ’99 Dakota that has 178k [miles on its meter] does not have this problem, so I guess this is a Toyota issue,” writes one Wisconsin-based driver on a popular car forum.

“[My] mechanic said I have 2 major issues. 1st, the vent on the rear differential was plugged causing pressure to build up and pushed out the seals on each end of the axle coating the drum breaks with gear oil and ruining them. He also found that the pumpkin was rusted out so bad that a pin hole had formed and was leaking gear oil also,” notes another driver from Adirondack Mountains, NY about his 2005 Toyota Tacoma Double.

Once the plant began to manufacture the Vios and Altis models around 2011, on those versions the car’s “jigs” that set the vehicle bodies and frames in place were often fitted at an angle of 7 degrees, rather than at the 2.5 degrees they were supposed to be, causing potentially lethal road accidents by interfering with a number of locomotive functions.

Quite simply, with so many cataloged faults in so many technically critical areas of road vehicle functionality and safety, there wasn’t an engineer or mechanic in the country who could credibly take Toyota’s side if tasked with the job of defending the fact that its cars were fit to be driven. They weren’t. They were not even remotely safe to drive, which is what got Tach, who understood the mechanical causes of violent road crashes much better than most, so concerned that he felt wrong just turning up to work as if nothing was amiss.

Within days of Tach making his complaints public, Toyota admitted it was in the wrong and by April 15, barely two weeks later, it offered to recall up to 66,000 cars. If such an instant admission of guilt seems absurd, consider that Toyota doesn’t care particularly if it manages to woo local consumers in Vietnam to purchase its cars. Most of them are all still way too poor to own a brand new car anyway.

As if to prove the point, by 2014 the company had only recalled 9,000 or so vehicles, even as it has recalled over 15 million cars worldwide over same time period in other markets. Quite simply, the prospect of local consumption isn’t what Toyota is interested in when it comes to the Vietnam’s go-go economy. Instead it’s the country’s low cost, easy-to-bully labor.

Which is why no sooner than two months’ later, TMV suspended Tach for three months with half his $200-a-month pay, despite protestations from the country’s legal authorities at the Quang Ninh Bar Association that such suspension was unlawful for someone as junior as Tach. The maximum suspension under Vietnamese law for an employee under administrative investigation is 15 days, with 3 months only applying to supervisors, of which Tach was not one (indeed, it was his supervisors’ attention he was trying to get in the beginning).

In July, one month after the suspension was put in place, Ho Chi Minh’s Anti-fraud Trade Consumer Support Association honored Tach with a cheque for 10 million Vietnamese dollars, around $480 in American money.

Meanwhile, Toyota claimed risibly that Tach’s suspension wasn’t connected in any way with his whiteblowing activities, but rather to his disruptive behavior towards his supervisors on other, personal issues, and chiefly to his “harassment” of TMV President Akito Tachibana by sending the four e-mails he did flagging up the manufacturing problems at the Vinh Phuc plant.

This malignant bullying had a cultural effect on the workforce who Tach was employed with, many of whom had formerly encouraged him to come forward and even been close friends. By the time he was suspended, despite becoming something of a national hero for a while, none of his colleagues would sit with him for lunch at the company’s cafeteria. People began to drift away from him and not come by the door any more, seeing Tach as a troublemaker and a drama queen.

Tach was reinstated at TMV but in a more junior position that offered him a fraction of his former pay. Toyota didn’t let up the taunting, either: Tach’s managers openly circulating rumors that he had been having an extra-marital affair. Additionally, family members were threatened with the possibility they might come to harm. His wife and children feared for his safety, as did his parents, who, being uneducated farmers, couldn’t comprehend what on earth Tach had got himself into.

In September, Tach filed charges against Tachibana for falsely circulating rumors about his infidelity and for demoting him without reasonable cause. Further, he filed charges against his seven other supervisors all for threatening him with physical violence in the aftermath of his whistleblowing.

Toyota said that none of its senior managers acted out of line, admitting that his supervisors had threatened him after he had gone public with his findings, but saying that their threats were not related to the whistleblowing issue and were instead personal (as if that made Toyota somehow less culpable?)

Clearly, any half way legitimate employment tribunal would find heavily in favor of the plaintiff, such was the case’s level of absurdity. But that was exactly the whole point: Toyota wanted to show any of the country’s other socially active laborers how expendable their lives really were. The Toyota mafia would get you in the end, one way or another, was the message sent loud and clear to other would-be whistleblowers, who took the hint and kept their heads down after that.

Despite the verdict, Tach still turned up for work the following day. “A colleague of mine has just asked me why I still come to work every day after all the damage I’ve done to the company,” he told a local newspaper, echoing the question on most people’s minds at the time. “I just told them I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Of course, Le Vanh Tach is absolutely correct, and showing his face around TMV’s gleaming new factory definitely helps his case as far as public perception of the situation is concerned. But there is another, more practical reason that Tach didn’t just quit his job right away and get work somewhere else.

Simply, there are no other employers in the country that can afford to – or want to – employ someone like Tach any more. Not just because of the whistleblowing case, but because employment in a country with just under $1600 per capita of GDP is tough to get anyway.

In April 2013, Tach, still concerned about what he characterized as “potentially grievous” manufacturing problems at the Vinh Phuc plant, wrote to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung outlining his concerns.

Toyota and its cronies in the Vietnamese government had crushed the social crusader. For now, at least. It is likely that the most effective way of ensuring Tach is reinstated is for the public in Toyota’s biggest sales market, the United States, to insist that such a talented assemblyman be promoted and given the free reign to ensure its cars leave the factory safer than they do today.

It’s hard to miss the irony here, so directly does it glare at you in the eyes. For a country that hails from a communist heritage, it seems that Vietnam’s manufacturing experiment is a lesson in many ways into some of the most merciless varieties of capitalism in history.

Examples are everywhere of faulty Toyota vehicles. In 2014, Chelsea Hill, a high school graduate travelling in the back of a Toyota 4Runner that was totaled and rolled over, successfully sued the company for $12 million after being paralyzed as a result of the seat belt she was wearing malfunctioning and damaging her spinal chord. Her attorneys said that for “just a couple hundred dollars” on the part of Toyota, the injury could have been prevented by the company installing a full-body seat belt in the middle seat of the rear of the vehicle.

Only the year before, Jean Bookout, 76, won $3 million after her 2005 Camry’s ECT system caused the failure of her acceleration and breaking system, resulting in the death of her passenger Barbara Schwartz, 70 as well as serious injuries to herself.

On November 16, 2012, a California mother was travelling down O’Hara Lane with her daughter and two the affluent Los Angeles County Stevenson Ranch, with wide roads and sparse traffic.

Due to the sleepy nature of the street, there are usually a handful of kids to be found out on the sidewalk, occasionally dashing across the street on their skateboards, bicycles or rollerblading on the edge of the sidewalk. Drivers in the area know this of course, since there is no reason you’d ever visit O’Hara Road unless you lived there or knew someone who did. It’s classic suburbia.

As she turned into the house of the final friend of her daughter’s that she was picking up as part of her participation in a school car pool round she shared along with three other parents, suddenly her Toyota Highlander, which she had only just purchased earlier that year, seemed to take on a mind of its own. At first, the car lurched forward at an almighty speed, crashing into the garage door in front of the car. Putting the vehicle in reverse, the driver was able to back the car out onto the street. Once she took the vehicle out of reverse however, it accelerated even more wildly this time back into the garage door, hitting the metal plating of the gate with a loud smash. By this time, a few neighbor could be seen standing at their open doors, guardedly. Putting the car into reverse, the mother, conscious of the safety of the three teenage girls in the back, smartly put the vehicle in reverse and once away from building objects, effected a hard handbrake turn so that the Highlander snapped a one hundred eighty degree turn at high speed. Almost as soon as she had managed to do that, she put the vehicle back into reverse and killed the ignition.

The car was handed back to the automobile dealer, who inspected the black box inside the car along with its braking, acceleration and steering systems. Toyota’s response was straight forward although bemusing:

“Your vehicle’s throttle, accelerator and related components were inspected and found operating as designed, within factory specifications. No binding or obstructions were found in the throttle components. The brake system was also inspected and no problems were found.”

Via outsourcing critical – and costly – aspects of the vehicle manufacturing process to offshore South East Asian factories, applying the majority of the electronic component fittings in its cars in Japan, Korea and China and then shipping the product to North America, where Toyota America fits the pedals, wheels and other ancillary parts, it’s very hard to pinpoint what exactly “operating as designed” means.

Operating as designed by whom?

A product is nothing more than the sum total of its supply-chain component installation procedures. Thus every Toyota vehicle, once the cars are on the road in their finished form, reflects each of these different procedures to different degrees, and worse still, without making each other aware of the sum of the parts. Naturally, there’s a distinctly higher-than-usual chance they will fly into the door of neighbors on the way to car pools or off bridges: it’s end result of so many manufacturing procedures combined into one without a single word of communication spoken between the actual manufacturers (indeed, many laborers speak completely different languages in the first place, and thus couldn’t even utter so much as a comprehensible cursory sentence to one another even if they wanted to).

After he witnessed the crash of the Toyota 2012 Highlander in California on YouTube, Dr. Anthony Andersen, an engineer and specialist in automotive design functionality from the United Kingdom, contacted the mother who had been driving the vehicle. They had decided to put up the video – which was caught in the eye of the house of their neighbor’s security camera – for everyone to see after being told by Toyota that the car was working as normal, she explained. Mostly, their examination had been based on the data recorded in the little black box installed inside the vehicle, which recorded the various driving processes on a data sheet.

Andersen, a critic of Toyota who is a Fellow of the Institution of Diagnostic Engineers and a Registered Expert with the European Commission on Integration in Manufacture noticed how the Logitec HD Security Camera that had recorded the crash and see that the video represented 15 frames of high definition video per second, and then synchronise the frames with the readings given by the car’s black box.

By analyzing the footage of the crash with the video readjusted for the camera shutter speed, and then comparing the findings with those recorded in the pre-installed black box, Andersen showed that the latter was reporting the movements of a virtually different vehicle altogether. Simply put, the company had been caught out red-handed by a video clip of the accident itself.

For example, while the black box claimed that the driver had only ever reached a maximum speed of 13 mph, Andersen in fact showed that the car had, within a space of less than two seconds, reached a speed of more than 30 mph.

Further, while Toyota had told the driver that she had not used her brakes at all in the incident, Andersen showed a number of incidents when she had – both to limited effect and without effect at all – tried to get the car’s brakes to work.

“Overall, … there does not appear to be any correlation whatsoever between the video and the [black box] records,” Andersen concluded in his investigation of the crash. “The most likely explanation is that the engine control computer software has suffered from some kind of temporary upset, the result of which is seen in the [black box] results which, quite frankly are haywire.”

Furthermore, Andersen pointed out that even the installation of the brake override system, the very catch-all that the company had bragged was now being installed in all its new models across the world, was at best ineffective. “It is interesting to note that this particular vehicle was fitted with a brake override system which, self-evidently does not appear to have worked. Why it appears to have failed to work is a matter which, in my opinion, should concern the manufacturers. If it did not work in this instance, why not? What can be the guarantee that it would necessarily work in other circumstances?”



The profit center going forward, at least as far as manufacturing vehicles for the North American and European markets are concerned, is in the future success of the hybrid vehicles. With a newly reorganized labor force in South East Asia, and new plant openings scheduled after 2017 in Mexico – another hub of problematic labor histories – spitting out these supposedly green machines is incredibly profitable business, as the company demonstrated in its 2013 annual earnings filings.

That is why the company, which has never paid much attention in years past to environmental problems, recently launched the Toyota Green Initiative. Sensing that the poorer – but rapidly up-and-coming – African American market in the US was an ideal target for these new more fuel-efficient units, the executives at TMC have been quick to espouse racial interest groups.

On October 15, 2013, the company announced that it was initiating a series of ventures “designed to empower Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) students and alumni on the benefits of adopting a sustainable lifestyle”:

“The Toyota Green Initiative is an extension of our key focus to support educational and environmental programs and provides our future leaders the tools and resources to be environmental stewards in local communities,” said Jim Colon, vice president of Toyota product communications for Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. “Continuously working towards sustainable mobility, Toyota strives to preserve the natural environment and establish systems to provide a brighter future for coming generations.” The Toyota Green Initiative Tour will reach HBCU campuses through mobile tour sponsorships of the CIAA (Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association) and the 2010 BET Black College Tour with a fully-immersive educational experience leveraging unique elements of ToyotaGreen.com. The tour will feature a simulated recycling center and energy-efficient monitors centered around an 18-foot tree installation built of sustainable materials, powered by a solar generator.

The fact that hybrid vehicles are proving popular with minorities after such marketing efforts have been enforced may be a cause for concern to those who represent various ethnic minority interest groups since they are the most dangerous cars on the roads today, if you listen to the Asian manufacturer’s side of the story.

According to Le Vanh Tach, the Vietnamese whistleblower, the areas of most worry in terms of the safety of the manufacturing procedure of Toyota vehicles now lies in these hybrid cars, where cost-cutting is in overdrive and the use of untrained manpower isde riguer in the local factory. Hybird cars pose a threat to the lives of their drivers, warns the whistleblower plainly, without a trace of exaggeration entering his voice. So concerned was Tach about this subject in fact, that in March 2013, he wrote to Vietnam’s Prime Minister pleading with him to look into the case. Tach also repeated this allegation in an interview with a local Vietnamese newspaper as recently as May 2015. Nothing was done. He was still earning a lot less than before he had pointed out the quality flaws in Toyota’s factory, but he didn’t regret doing it, he said. On the contrary, it was his social responsibility.

When taken in context with Toyoda’s mission statements to keep pushing manufacturing to overseas hubs where costs can be further reduced, it’s easy to see how Toyota is in the process of utilizing the sloppy Vinh Phuc production lines – and others similar to that one in places such as the Philippines (where there is also social unrest among workers) – to assemble parts and vehicles for its largest export markets today. But does the American public not surely have a right to know? If so, shouldn’t the NHTSA be telling its people, if not Toyota itself? Is this too much to ask?

Recall how TMV didn’t even attempt to address the factory’s assembly production problems correctly, and the situation appears to be one of possible future criminal negligence in the event that another crash such as that Mark Saylor was involved in happens again.

As if to drive this point home, on September 4th, 2013, at a major intersection in Vietnam’s Hai Ba Trung district, a Toyota Venza accelerated into a passing motorbike, and, its driver unable to bring the car to a stop, ploughed directly ahead into a woman and two small children. The four-wheel drive SUV continued to accelerate even as the driver tried to brake and after it hit the wall of a nearby house, eventually toppling itself over onto its own hood.

But Tach was still working for less pay than before he had blown the whistle, and he was still ostracized by colleagues at work, who either frowned upon his actions or feared that association with him would lead them to suffer similar misfortunes. In Vietnam at least, it appeared that Toyota had won the thuggish battle over his laborers. In fact, the company was apparently sufficiently satisfied with its progress and the prospects of further increased savings from its Vietnam operations that it began actively shifting its investment in Thailand gradually to the Vietnamese suburbs, where labor costs, the company claimed, were 2.3 times lower.

“This is a chance for Vietnam to lure investment from Thailand,” Yasuzumi Hirotaka, Japan External Trade Organization’s (JETRO) chief representative in Ho Chi Minh City was quoted as telling the local press in early 2014.

No one was in any doubt that Hirotaka was speaking on behalf of Japan’s biggest multinational manufacturer in the region, Toyota. Since 2011, the automaker had been threatening to move much of its manufacturing base out of Thailand and into Vietnam.

Initially, it cited nationwide flooding as the company’s primary concern. This was somewhat defensible, seeing as in late 2011 much of Thailand’s manufacturing industry had come grinding to a standstill as a result of factories devastated by floods. But once Thailand’s government responded to the floods efficiently, and they appeared to be a one off freak event that posed little recurrent risk to the nation’s manufacturing industry going into the future, Toyota was tasked with finding another cause for shifting its investment, in order to soften its constant reasoning of saving on labor costs.

Thus, when Bangkok-based political protests carried on from late 2013 into the first quarter of 2014, Toyota claimed that political unrest in Thailand might force it to shift up to $600 million in foreign investment to Vietnam. As in the case of the floods, there was some truth to Toyota’s statement about the political environment in Thailand being partially responsible for Toyota’s relocation of capital, but not in the way it was implying.

In reality, political unrest failed to disrupt any manufacturing activity in Thailand at all during late 2013 – early 2014, consisting as it did pretty much only of peaceful sit in protests in the nation’s capital. No other manufacturers were complaining so loudly, so Toyota’s voice seemed a little odd at first, if not untypical. But disruption to operations wasn’t the company’s major concern. Rather, its principle worry was that Thailand was getting more expensive; the year before, the government had introduced a 300 Thai Baht ($10) per day minimum wage. But it was also seriously concerned that an electorate attempting to oust its sitting government from power was a much riskier bet in terms of fitting in with Toyota’s facist management style.

In other words, for Toyota, Vietnam’s centrally planned dictatorship was a far better bet than Thailand’s increasingly democratic, politically active two-party system from a manufacturing output standpoint. China is the exactly same, and the agreement to build additional manufacturing plants one the mainland may have been the ultimate carrot that led to the lax enforcement of safety standards of its vehicles in early 2010.

The question is: what does that say about Toyota’s number one market: the United States?



In many ways, Toyoda has proven himself to be a zen master – his calmness of manner seemed at times irrationally subdued in the face of the severity of problems he had encountered in the four years he had steered the company ahead into the unrivalled sales machine it had become by 2014.

But this was just one facet of the man, who, as so common in children of the super-rich, was equally capable of showing bursts of emotion for his own self-interest as well as for his possessions. When analyzed in the context in which they were made, a certain degree of narcissistic psychopathy is detectable between the lines of Akio Toyoda’s public statements.

“At the hearing, I wasn’t alone. You and your colleagues across America, around the world, were there with me,” Toyoda wept before a group of North American autodealers moments after testifying before the congressional hearing concerning the death of Mark Taylor and his family in February 2010.

Four months later at the company’s annual general meeting, an investor in Toyota understandably admonished Toyoda for turning on the waterworks while appearing as the company’s chief executive: “Mr. Toyoda, you’ve been all over the media this year and you’ve gone teary-eyed on several occasions. For a man of your position, this is unacceptable. Please keep your chin up and try not to weep,” said the investor. Toyoda immediately defended himself saying that he had been weeping “tears of joy” at encountering the support he had from the North American autodealers after sitting through the traumatic session in congress.

The audience silently let the remark about being brought to tears of happiness after the hearing over such a tragic event go.

But the impressions sticks: this is someone who cares more about his own feelings than those of his customers. Such slips of the tongue – if they can be called such without inviting further ridicule or disbelief – fundamentally undermine all Toyota’s philanthropic activities and efforts. They suggest that the only thing the corporation cares about is getting away with its mistakes. Whatever the price.



Wednesday, March 19, 2014, the National Highway Transportation Safety Authority (NHTSA) announced that it was fining Toyota Motor Corporation $1.2 billion for making “deliberately misleading statements about a spate of fatal accidents involving unintended acceleration in some of its most popular models.”

In return for entering a guilty plea, Toyota was cleared by the US attorney general of all criminal charges that its executives might have otherwise faced for lying about car crashes on American roads as a result of its faulty manufacturing.

On the outside, it might have appeared as if the U.S. political system was carrying out justice on behalf of defrauded American drivers. But to what extent was this really the case?

After examining several hundred pages of internal e-mails, technical presentations, and other documentation provided by sources, the extent of corruption inside Toyota and the NHTSA reveals an alarming series of patterns that lead to something much bigger than warranted by a one-off fine.

An emphatic push by public relations and sales divisions on regulator independence and a silencing of all criticism voiced in the manufacturer’s direction makes government officials are as culpable as senior executives for the many deaths that have occurred on American roads in the last decade at Toyota’s hands.

Like so much in the Toyota story, the public version of events on March 19 last year only tells a partial story of what really goes on under the rug of the politically-connected, public-relations oriented brand that runs, either directly itself or with direct knowledge and control over, numerous sweat shops churning out nearly as many victims of heinous human rights abuses as it does ill-fitted equipment to work in its potentially lethal road vehicles.

The announcement last year ignored all of this – the vulgar reality that lies under the hood. Instead it appeared as if Toyota was being placed on some sort of special watch list that would ensure its practices were closely monitored by authorities and as a consequence, secure the safety of consumers.

Except as we have seen, the problems Toyota has in manufacturing its cars doesn’t stem from manufacturing plants in sleepy US states, which serve for the most part as sales machines rather than actual manufacturing plants.

It is overseas, in the clandestine markets of China and South East Asia that the problems stem from, which is not just out of the sight of domestic US regulators, but even the company’s American workforce too. Despite Toyota’s regular claims that it is manufacturing more and more of its vehicles in the United States, this is simply not the case.

The only manufacturing the company carries out in America for the most part appears to be the peripheral installment of ancillary vehicle parts prior to the sale being made. This assumption is evinced by an analysis carried out by Marx Rand of the automaker’s vehicle configuration schedule:


While Toyota claims that its best-selling model, Camry, is 80% American made, the company also states elsewhere that its hybrid models – extending to the Camry and the top-selling Highlander – comprise around 60% market share against traditional models. At the same time, it bundles all sales of non-hybrid vehicles with those of its hybrid range.

The problem with making such an assumption is that it changes the truth that the top-selling brand of car in America is made for the most part in the country where it is driven. For Camry HV and Highlander HV, as the hybrid models are known, are mostly manufactured overseas. Less than 40% of these vehicles are made in America.

When totaled up and weighted by parts, just 40% of cars on American roads made by Toyota are installed with American-made parts, while only 25% of the automaker’s American driven vehicles are 75% or more manufactured in the United States (the metric used by Cars.com to determine a vehicle’s American-made authentic status. Note however that these statistics are compiled by Marx Rand. Other sources post contrasting statistics. For instance, Torque News maintains that Toyota’s Camry supports in total up to 3 times more workers than other vehicles in terms of the manufacturing capacity required to design, configure and assemble it. This is entirely possible.)

The fact that Toyota is making most of its cars overseas while purely installing and assembling basic parts in the United States is also born out in the company’s employment statistics.

In 2010, according to the Center for Automotive Research, the company was responsible for creating 114,078 jobs in the United States. While 79,658 of these jobs were sales jobs, by comparison 28,742 of them were in manufacturing.

In the same year, just 5,678 of employees in the country actually worked for Toyota at all. The remainder comprised manufacturing subcontractors. This in itself may be further evidence that Toyota has never been manufacturing complete vehicles in the U.S. but rather, installing parts as part of the cost-effective on-site pre-sales process.

So who is making Toyota vehicles, if not Toyota itself? Also, where are these cars manufactured? And why doesn’t NHTSA prevent Toyota from making misleading claims about where its vehicles are manufactured? Could this oversight – directed by Toyota – be a potential cause of manufacturer’s status as the most unsafe, yet most profitable, automaker in the world?

Naturally, it doesn’t help that Toyota has, during the Obama Administration, achieved its aim of cosying up to NHTSA chiefs. It is possible that Toyota may have known since 2010 that it was one day going to have to cough up the $1.2 billion as part of a settlement. Internal documents from Toyota’s Aichi Prefecture headquarters refer constantly to the “floor mat coverup” as well as a proposed “100 billion yen settlement” figure – what was at the time of writing, in 2009, exactly $1.2 billion in today’s terms.

The exact same amount (100 billion yen) was incorporated into the company’s early 2010 financial statements as “quality-related costs”. Whether this is the same fine or not as that issued by NHTSA is unclear (thus implying NHTSA chiefs had forewarned Toyota about the 2014 ruling years earlier), but the coincidence stands out.

Either way, the $1.2 billion fine represented just a fraction of the company’s income the previous year, and despite all the time, money, and media frenzy created over the problems at Toyota HQ, the company is still cranking out faulty hardware and component machinery that works unreliably, inefficiently and haphazardly – exactly the same way as does its Asian supply chain process.

In the past half-decade since Akio Toyoda openly wept before a crowd of North American automotive dealers, practices at the company’s Aichi Prefecture headquarters have gotten more out of hand, not less. Engineers who won’t comply with the company’s party line – that it has no vehicle defects coming out of its factories – are demoted or fired. Manufacturing has been decentralized into multiple billion-dollar plus revenue sweat-shops lying all over developing Asia (and South America too). Public Relations (PR) meanwhile was centralized to Japan, next to the Chief Executive’s office.

Toyota filters through the Associated Press (AP) in Japan – a major news organization with syndicated reach into multiple international newspapers and websites – multiple public relations bulletins masquerading as news. It also uses its position as America’s Number 1 advertiser to muscle in on editorial agendas, say insiders.

Even worse, governments that are supposed to look after their citizens are turning a blind eye once confronted with the big bucks Toyota’s presence guarantees in their states and countries. In America, NHTSA chiefs are now backtracking on the issue of unintended acceleration, the very cause of the road fatalities that Toyota confessed to in 2014. Recently, NHTSA announced that it “has not identified any defects with the vehicles that can explain simultaneous failures of the throttle and brake systems.”

This is despite the fact that NHTSA is in direct possession of documentation that clearly shows that the car manufacturer’s throttle, electronic and other parts act up regularly for a whole variety of reasons.

The question is then: why is the regulatory body, which is supposed to keep America’s highways safe, doing Toyota’s bidding now and lying to the American public?

Is NHTSA lying to make good on its part of the cosy deal it struck in 2014 with Toyota to grant senior executives immunity from criminal charges in return for a guilty plea and a small fine?

Or is it involved in some sort of political qui-pro-quo with one of the numerous lobbyists that act on Toyota’s behalf in America as it ostensibly embraces the green theme? Whatever the case, the evidence reveals a potentially unconstitutional matter that requires immediate scrutiny.

Unintended acceleration and the other complications with the acceleration and braking systems that Toyota’s vehicles suffer from are the result of manufacturing and installation issues at the supply-chain level of the configuration process of the vehicles. Practically, this is both complex and costly to identify and repair.

In order to truly rectify such flaws Toyota would have to overhaul its entire manufacturing operations, most of which lie in poor areas of South East Asia where workers are cheap and overhead costs are low. In other words, fixing the problem would take aim at the center of Toyota’s business model and likely bankrupt the company.

New victims surface a number of times every calendar quarter, but the reports of their injuries and crashes are relegated to the back pages of local press bulletins and never get the national spotlight they deserve.

The bigger question, and the one we must ask now is: when will someone in politics or big business stand up and fight for the little guy?

Because so far, he has been swept aside, endangered or silenced by intimidating death threats (indeed, death threats were received by this article’s author when investigating the subject) and relegated to a dismissive footnote that is another public relations coup for the company that makes billions more in profit and whose CEO cashes a sizeable chunk of that every year.

The only acceptable resolution to the real-time carnage of the truth that is portrayed here is that at some point, the questions raised must be answered directly by those who have the answers, and those found to have lied must be held accountable. Otherwise, we must admit to ourselves the sad truth that a human life is worth less than the value of the car that drives it to the fatal ending it causes. 

EPILOGUE: 100 SHADES DARKER

During the later period in which I was writing and researching this story, I stumbled across a book titled: When Cars Decide To Kill: 100 Pages That Just Might Save Your Life written by a reputed “software testing expert” by the name of Patricia Herdman. The book was published earlier this year, and seemed like familiar subject matter relevant to the topic I was researching, so I purchased it off Amazon.

As I began to read, something familiar clicked inside my head – but not in a good way. Perhaps it was the format of the story, with the narrative beginning in the same place in history as this one’s does, at the point of the Saylor’s automobile accident. Or maybe it was the reference to MBA-style managers running factories overseas filled with unskilled workers that you find in the passages of the article dealing with Toyota’s supply chain (gleaned from my personal experience touring such factories in China and South East Asia). It was unlikely, I thought, that others would make the same sort of connections as I had between events, since to do so required having a very specific and eclectic variety of both practical operating experience as well as a certain academic body of knowledge that was unlikely to be shared widely by any one individual.

The problem with the Toyota story is that unless you are accustomed to both American and Asian practices of operating supply-chain intensive industry and selling and marketing products via a digitized news network spun out of mainstream multimedia and social media channels, the likes of which of which brought you here most probably, it’s incredibly hard to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together. What’s more, Toyota’s PR force, via utilizing mechanisms such as its various “keywords” and phony stories masquerading as news, make it deliberately hard for you to do this, even if you do possess such experience and knowledge.

For example, no one is going to tell you that some assembly-line problem in a far-away factory in Phin Phuc, Vietnam, is somehow connected to an incident in which a girl is paralyzed from the waist-down in California. There are no sources as such for this sort of journalism. There is only the mechanism by which you can connect what different sources tell you to one another and figure out the truth. In other words, the only way to make such a connection is to effectively back-engineer the whole scenario – and that takes up a huge amount of time and energy (not to mention second-guessing your hypothesis constantly for plausibility and consistency). It involves reading case after case after case of court transcript and legal testimony, comparing multiple news articles of the same event to one another to detect the missing details such as names, places, component parts and vehicle model types, even misplaced dates. After that, you need to apply all this knowledge to the practical body of experience that you have and ask yourself: is this something I’ve seen somewhere before, only with its own set of unique variables? Needless to say, this process takes up a considerable degree of mental arithmetic that can at certain points become incredibly wearing.

I had shown drafts of this article in its original, unrevised format to some others who work in news, and not all of them I discovered later had been entirely credible individuals (I shall omit their names here out of kindness). The draft that I had shown others was, coincidentally, precisely 100 pages long. So something resonated about these 100 pages that could purportedly save my life.

I had of course heard plenty of times before of stories being plagiarized, but much like the car accidents of which you read about in the Toyota story, if you are a writer and reporter, it’s something you never really imagine happening to you until you face an oncoming barrage of evidence that indicates otherwise.

Was that the case here? Was I being plagiarized? And if so, to what end? It wasn’t like Patricia Herdman – whoever this person was – seemed to be marketing herself very aggressively. She had only recently set up a Twitter account in fact and it was all but impossible to detect her presence elsewhere on the web.

Maybe, I figured, there was no connection at all, and I was just imagining one? This last possibility – that I was finding a pattern where none existed – was entirely plausible. For to be the kind of sleuth who successfully digs deep under such an entangled web of cover-ups, lies and deceit for a story as extensive and at times implausible as the one about Toyota takes a certain amount of personal obsession that can feel unhealthy and as if it is clouding your ability to reason clearly.

This is why as a journalist you must always get the facts to back up everything that you publish and make sure those facts agree with one another according to a specifically logical and plausible arrangement wherein the truth shines through. Or else, journalism would amount to nothing more significant than one man’s word against the next man’s.

Herdman is apparently the one in charge of Glitchwatch.com, a site focusing on recalls as a result of software “glitches”. The book contains a number of clichés about software “bugs” being misplaced in the “more than 20 million lines of code” that lie inside the car, which she describes as a “computer on wheels”.

Here is a typical passage from Herdman’s book:

“Even though, as you drive along, you cannot see your software code, it is the real thing. Someone builds it and puts it in cars. As you read about how software bugs sometimes take control of our cars, making them seem like they’re “possessed”, it helps to understand what is actually making the cars drive a little (or a lot) crazy.”

Somewhere, I had seen a lot of this before, too. It was later on, among the internal source documents from Toyota’s HQ, that I discovered the following comment made by Dr. Sean McAlinden, the center for automotive research’s executive vice-president and chief economist, to Toyota’s senior executives in a private play-back of events at the time during the hearings:

The American populace, unfamiliar with technology – despite a lack of concrete evidence – believe that software and electromagnetic interference (EMI) cause system bugs – ghosts in the machine – which cause problems to occur with electronic controls within equipment.

It is impossible to know without asking Dr. McAlinden personally whether he meant by this comment that system bugs do not in fact cause problems related to automotive equipment, but given the reference to Americans “unfamiliar with technology” believing this to be true, that certainly seems to be the case. In itself this is significant, since one of Toyota’s constant (and it must be said, rather unlikely) explanations for unintended acceleration has been some sort of “electromagnetic pulse” communicated via a random power cable line to a vehicle (which of course, absolves the car company completely).

But when you think about it, “glitches” and “ghosts in the machine”, while quite scary-sounding, ultimately don’t really sound much like something that is Toyota’s fault either. In fact, in a separate stack of internal documents from inside Toyota, PR executives inside the company at one point frequently refer to “glitch” as “just a keyword [we use]”.

Software bugs in cars do happen, but I have yet to find one that has been responsible for a fatality. Anyway, these sorts of problems are usually caught at the last minute by engineers working on the vehicle. Consider the following comment made by a Toyota supply chain partner** to a Toyota engineering team on an e-mail sent on at 11.55 on April 8, 2010:

The other day I told you about the positions into which Denso and 5LF have been put because we must handle‘ global BOS rollout, an urgent response for North America, China, and other countries, and support for vehicles on the road. That’s the way it is. We are doing our utmost to handle the work for the purpose of bringing Toyota out of the crisis. But we have become worried that by now it may be too late to be able to ensure ECU quality. (We managed to prevent this software bug from getting into other vehicles just in the nick of time. But there are examples where a single misstep would have allowed it to get into marketed vehicles.) We are not saying we won’t help you with the Tundra problem. Instead we are requesting a decision based on priorities according to importance, level of urgency, and frequency of occurrence. We recognize this as an important issue because the phenomenon is one that drivers will quite likely regard as UA.

It sounds here more like software bugs are something that are related more specifically to the Brake Override System installation, what it was Toyota was installing in Korean cars back in 2009 that for whatever reason, it deemed it unnecessary to do so in Chinese cars, and which the Chinese government, for reasons one can only speculate as to why, apparently accepted as satisfactory without much contest.

It also doesn’t really sound as if software bugs are causing unintended acceleration, but are instead “regarded” by customers as being the cause of such. So was Patricia Herdman just taking the Kool Aid, then?

Or could it be that Toyota was trying to influence the media dialog of reports related to unintended acceleration? This was an especially heart-stopping premise, but having seen how the company’s PR operatives work via the evidence of their numerous back-and-forth communications to one another in the form of e-mail and telephone conversation transcripts, I could not dismiss this possibility from my mind. For this to be the case, then one of two possibilities was true: a public relations firm had invented Patricia Herdman out of thin air or they had co-opted such a personality to write and produce a book with a specific message and to make herself available for various media appearances as required.

So I decided to contact Patricia Herdman. First of all I asked for her references and also if we could perhaps Skype with one another later in the week. She was quite efficient in getting back to me, and sent me the following reply:

Will get that to you shortly. My websites are in transition from one hosting company to another so I’ll send you my cv.

I’m out of town—at my summer home. Do you have a timeframe?  To add to the matter, I have laryngitis but it will probably be resolved by Monday or Tuesday.  Does that work for you?

Patricia

Sent from my iPhone

There was a series of exchanges subsequent to this one where I informed her that switching hosting companies took only an hour or so, and added that her book was suddenly surging a few thousand places on Amazon since I had contacted her, asking if she had any idea why, before she sent me her resume with the explanation that she didn’t know anything about the sudden book sales she was the beneficiary of. Here is a copy of Patricia Herdman’s resume:

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I discovered that Herdman’s alma mater is actually called UCLA Dept. of Biomolecular & Chemical Engineering. Ask anyone who has attended any University before for their resume and I am certain you will find the name of the school spelt correctly in its entirety. This was a red flag, but so was her education in general – after all, what does a degree in Chemical Engineering teach you about testing software bugs?

I e-mailed the admissions office at UCLA, who said they had no record of such a person attending the school. Another red flag. While going through her Twitter followers, I also noticed that Herdman kept some rather bizarre company, however: specifically, her best friends seemed to be a bunch of web freelancers, a couple of local Toronto-based journalists and broadcasters, a ghost writer and novelist, as well as a PR professional who specializes in crisis PR for “major international companies”.

While I might expect a big media personality to be found among the crowd hanging out at the Friday night bar with such unsavory sorts, it seemed strange that a “software test expert” (whatever that was) would have these friends. Stranger still was the idea that these people would constitute pretty much that individual’s entire social universe. After all, testing software for banks and energy companies sounds like a middle-management job, something done way behind the action of the camera.

The crisis PR person – Jana Schilder – was the biggest red flag of all, since ultimately, Patricia Herdman herself could be explained via that single one individual. So I went digging. Jana Schilder runs a firm called First PR out of Toronto, Canada, but the website address for the firm is JanaSchilder.com. This is the sort of discrepancy as a journalist you are often looking for – and when you see it, you bite on tight and don’t let go. Simply, within inconsistency often lies therein the substance of truth, for reality is not the perfect geometry that we often wish it were.

On February 9 this year, Jana Schilder was highlighted in an excellent article that ran in The New Statesman, a UK weekly, for allegedly fabricating a homeless couple for PR purposes and getting the story placed in the British newspaper The Daily Mail:

There are some intriguing question marks, though. For 21 years, Lane [one of the homeless] has been CEO of a company called Vasgama – International Reputation and Communication Counsel. An international consultancy firm claiming to have clients on all continents, I couldn’t find any trace of the firm on Companies House.

Meanwhile, Jana Schilder of First PR has responded to questions on Twitter explaining that Lane was never on their payroll, but was made redundant by another, unnamed firm. He remains an associate with First PR, with a glittering biography on their website and sporadic pay days. In her own Twitter biography, Schilder describes herself as, “PR guru, early trend spotter, Malcolm Gladwell connector, sh*t disturber.”

The hyperlink to the page at First PR featuring spinner Alan Lane has been removed, but you can actually find it perfectly easily by doing an archive search for the page and getting the result of the old page:

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This connection with the UK harmonized with another oddity about Patricia Herdman – the fact that the company which was behind her book, Ethi-teque, also had a UK presence by the same name that was parked at a virtual office address. (The address that Herdman listed on her resume was also a virtual office address, another red flag.)

At this point, I chose to confront Ms. Herdman with the above information and see what her response was. Here it is:

Hi Daniel,

This week, Wednesday would be best for skyping. I’m travelling today and Thursday-Sunday I will be in Haliburton out of mobile telephone range (friend’s home is tucked into the side of a rocky hill on a remote lake…). Any evening next week is fine as well.

Jana is a personal friend. I met her when she was consulting to TD Bank. I’ve not heard about any “scandal” so I’m not sure what you’re referencing.

I didn’t graduate from UCLA—although I did attend and studied chemical engineering.  One of the reasons I started a career in testing is that (as I’ve always said) in most corporations, testing is a career pit, not a career path….so back when I started, you didn’t need a degree to be stuck in a test lab.

Turned out that I really liked testing.

Married? No.

I’m driving back from Lake Huron today and when I’m near a computer later tonight I’ll send a couple of other bits of info.

I do understand the sensitivities of the subject. In fact, it made me very nervous to put the book out there but I felt compelled, given what I know about how software is made.

In Belgium, people sign off with Kr – kind regards

Apart from the eccentric communication style, the excuses were starting to stack up like defective Toyotas. Wednesday – our Skype date – came and went.

I began to question her about Toyota’s supply chain problems, pointing these out to her. She sent me a report by MIT Sloane on electronic problems Toyota had experienced but couched her criticism with the admission that the CEO had “called this out and [is now] taking steps to REDUCE the number of suppliers of parts/engineers”. Either she was badly informed, or she was spinning for Toyota so that the firm could change the focus of the story from one that was about the clunky stuff – it’s supply chain problems and malfunctioning pulleys, levers, melted plastic caps and so forth, to a more complex red herring calling into question why no software regulation exists.

A day later, by complete surprise, I received the following video from Herdman, under an e-mail with the subject:

Here’s a recent video – dang, I speak too fast:


Notice how she spends the first half of the video vociferously defending Toyota’s position. This is classic Toyota PR. I wonder whether the quote below her name is meant as a darkly ironic reference or not.

But my hard link between Jana Schilder and this form of dialog that Toyota was spinning ultimately materialized via a simple Google search. Searching for “Jana Schilder” and “Toyota” together brought up the following entries:

The first entry is for a conference called Meeting of the Minds taking place on October 20-22, 2015 in California. One of the delegatesat the conference is Jana Schilder, while one of the sponsors there is Toyota.



Ostensibly, the conference is all about urban and sustainable solutions for big brands – read “green” solutions – and it appears as if it is more like a get-together of public relations executives looking for scraps of business selling the new green energy dream than anything else.

This green focus, with PR executives blocking the entry and exit doors resonates perfectly with Toyota’s hard-sales strategy of pushing its more dangerous foreign-made hybrid vehicles into its largest markets.

The second search entry down is the give-away, however – for can you spot the “glitch” that Ms. Schilder has left in the wake of her past web development efforts? Patricia Herdman stated that Jana Schilder was a friend of hers from her days working at TD Bank. Given the fact that Jana Schilder was only recently also dealing with software glitches in automobiles it seems extraordinary that she left out this information! Further, isn’t it just a little bit coincidental that “glitch” is Toyota’s top keyword when the company announces car recalls? (All the ground work being done here suggests that we can expect many more recalls for some time to come in the later half of 2015 and into 2016 too.)

Clearly, Patricia Herdman is either the complete fabrication of public relations staff inside the company or of Jana Schilder herself, or she is paid by Toyota to spin a line that it wants to sew in the public dialogue. Whatever the case, Patricia Herdman is not who she maintains to be – a software testing expert who suddenly decided to raise the public debate one level about defective software in automobiles because of something that a random Google search alerted her to last Christmas. It is propaganda, no less. Just like Akio Toyoda’s statement to U.S. policymakers that he was unaware of any sort of ECTS fault in the vehicles bearing his own name, Patricia Herdman is a bold-faced lie. The extent to which Toyota goes here to put up such a smokescreen so as to divert attention away from the real problem, its own supply chain, indicates the level of seriousness the threat of which poses to the company.

Ultimately, there is the only one plausible conclusion here, when we consider all the facts together:

Toyota’s designs are faulty, the manufacturing of its vehicles is sloppy and inconsistent, and its statements to the public are untruthful.

Who knows whether the original manuscript I wrote had been obtained by these public relations slime that live and breed like bacteria on the lavatory floor of the Fourth Estate. The point is, plagiarism is more likely the case than not here. Consider for a second the likely possibility that public relations professionals are now stealing from journalists and using the reported truth against readers to embolden their own fictional agendas. That in itself is alarming.

It appears not just that we are losing respect for the value of human life, but for something without which, there is no human life to begin with: reality. For in a chain reaction whereby government enforcement of corporate propaganda is becoming the norm today, we are fast losing our sense of the truth. That’s something worth fighting back for, surely?

**Name has been omitted on purpose

Note: this article was updated on July 11, 2015 to reflect the inclusion that 3 times more American workers are involved in the production and design of the Toyota Camry than in vehicle models manufactured by other car companies.



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