Evidence, magnified.
Among many others, I have often wondered why the DOJ did not take up the SUA-related electronics defects as one aspect of Toyota's fraud on the government and the public. I asked two people why. One, a Congressional staffer, answered that the DOJ must have evidence of a defect from a "neutral tribunal." ie NHTSA. LOL!!! Neutral?? Well, there is no one else more "neutral" in the US. The other was a famous reporter. He said basically the same thing. He said that unless the government recognizes the defect, the DOJ cannot go after Toyota for covering it up. 1000 Michael Barrs cannot make up for the lack of an official government finding of a defect.
That large loophole--a kind of wormhole through which Toyota could escape from earthly physical reality--must have been evident to the company's inside and defense counsel from the start, and then that must have driven them to take the steps they did with Exponent and NHTSA--basically to use Exponent to play with statistics to obscure the physical fact of a short circuit in the pedal that caused uncontrollable vehicle speed, just exactly as Dr. David Gilbert had also shown. And with statistical game, the 'neutral' tribunal was officially blinded to the reality of a defect.
Dr. Leidecker once said something wise: "Just because a 'neutral' tribunal, ie a court, does not recognize an event, does not mean that it did not happen."
Here's the story of Kane and Whitfield applying a magnifying glass to NHTSA's report.
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/how-nhtsa-and-nasa-gamed-toyota-data
"SRS’s report noted that the most remarkable discovery of the NHTSA-NASA Toyota Unintended Acceleration investigation was the presence of tin whiskers on every potentiometer-type accelerator pedal they examined. Tin whiskers are crystalline structures, many times thinner than a human hair, which form on the tin solder used on printed circuit boards. They are mighty inconvenient for electronics manufacturers, having been known to produce all kinds of varied and unpredictable electronic malfunction such as shutting down nuclear reactors, satellites and medical devices – to name a few examples.
They proved to be mighty inconvenient to NHTSA-NESC team, too. Not only did they discover the presence of tin whiskers on every potentiometer pedal examined, the researchers actually found them on a pedal tied to a vehicle that had experienced multiple instances of UA. With one promising root cause right there on the lab bench, most scientists who practice their vocation with rigor might have expanded their sample beyond several pedals to determine incidence in the field. They might have looked for tin whiskers in the throttle bodies or ECMs – other components of the engine system that could lead to a throttle malfunction. Instead, NHTSA turned to Exponent, the science-for-hire firm Toyota’s legal team retained to defend the company in class action lawsuits.
Neither agency disclosed this conflict-of-interest. NHTSA claimed that it performed the warranty analysis.
The Whitfields, unpacked the data supporting the alleged Trouble-Not-Found conclusions and they were particularly struck by this:
“It is also extraordinary that the NASA-NESC team, as safety experts, would look upon secret, warranty data reported by a manufacturer’s litigation experts as evidence of the lack of corroboration of an electronics cause of unintended acceleration. This is especially true because the compromised, safety-critical, electronic circuitry was discovered in an accelerator pedal sensor assembly examined in a NASA laboratory... Only NASA’s and NHTSA’s analysis of the complaint data in relation to the secret, warranty data is cited to support the lack of relevance of these findings to public health and safety... It is difficult to imagine NASA itself accepting assurances from a manufacturer of its own spacecraft that similar problems in important safety systems should be regarded as inconsequential. Yet it is the NASA-NESC report on which NHTSA relied to close its investigation,” the Whitfields wrote in their report."
Question: Where is it written in stone that NHTSA cannot examine the Toyota SUA statistics from 2011-2014?