Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Is Toyota meeting its obligations to the Justice Department under its Deferred Prosecution Agreement?


Here is the Deferred Prosecution Agreement clause for disclosures by Toyota.
Anyone with relevant information that they think Toyota has not disclosed voluntarily, be in touch with the FBI. It is very easy to submit a "crime tip."



There is still no public announcement of the identity of the Independent Monitor.

About this, Dr. Antony Anderson had this to say:
Toyota’s US division chief Bill Fay says: “we paid the fine and we’ve moved on. “ In his desire to avoid fighting “these things that are in the rear view mirror” hasn’t he forgotten the very large electronic elephant under the hood? Should he not also have told the US Attorney General about Toyota’s long term denial of the possibility of electronic and software malfunctions and about the company’s misleading attempts to claim that sudden acceleration incidents are often caused by driver error? Even now Toyota continues to cover up the deficiencies in their electronic throttle software identified last Fall by Dr Michael Barr in the Bookout v. Toyota case. Shouldn’t the US Attorney General be calling Toyota to account for concealing deficiencies in electronic functional safety of the electronic throttle system that may have considerable bearing on the lives of millions of motorists and others? Dr Barr’s 800 page expert report has remained under lock and key since the Bookout trial, presumably as part of the settlement agreement. But why should Dr Barr’s report remain under lock and key? Surely the proper place for the report is in the public domain where it can be subject to thorough peer review so that all, especially software and electronic engineers, may learn from it? In my opinion, keeping the Barr report under wraps is against the best interests of public safety. It sets a very bad precedent for failure investigations if the results are allowed to be suppressed and in this case does Toyota’s reputation a great deal of unnecessary harm. Imagine if this kind of suppression of safety-related information were to happen following an aircraft crash, a train crash or a ship disaster. Nobody would ever learn anything. If Toyota were now to take active steps to ensure that the Barr report were placed in the public domain this would be a powerful indication that they had indeed “learnt a lot in the past couple of years.” One would hope that the incoming monitor overseeing the deferred prosecution would encourage Toyota to remove their block on the Barr report if they had not done so already. It would signal that the monitor meant business.

See the original article comments here.