Page 115 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

Science.” The firm does not provide any evidence that it has exper-
tise in vehicle electronics or any other area of engineering or that
it offers any services useful to anyone other than trial lawyers.

The NHTSA Complaint Database
The major justification for the speculation about underlying Toy-
ota defects came from looking at the NHTSA’s database of con-
sumer complaints. As a great deal of reporting since last year has
shown, this database can probably best be described as a mess.
Investigative work by several reporters has uncovered the fact that
the database includes complaints that are impossible (one widely
cited example is a complaint about a Lexus accident that killed
99 people in a single vehicle), as well as many, many reports that
are dubious. Another prime example is a woman who claimed
that her Lexus accelerated out of control even though she had
her foot on the brake. The police report following that incident
found that she had twice the legal limit for alcohol in her blood-
stream. Other complaints, like one recounting how a Toyota Ma-
trix went into a skid as it rounded a corner at more than 40 mph
on a wet road while it was snowing, sound a little too much like
accidents in which drivers are unwilling to concede error.
The problems of gleaning useful data from the NHTSA data-
base are much greater than the fact that this database includes
mountains of unverified data and false claims. Anyone can put
in a claim, and it is not necessary to put in any identifying infor-
mation about yourself or even your car. The person making the
complaint classifies the problem into one of a number of broad
categories, and it is only if an investigation is launched that an
NHTSA staff member audits the complaints to make sure that
they are properly classified. The result is that the database conflates

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