Did Toyota Sway Traffic Safety Regulators?

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Five were closed, meaning NHTSA found no evidence of a defect. In four of the five cases that were closed, Tinto and Santucci worked with NHTSA on Toyota's responses to the consumer complaints the agency was investigating, agency documents show.

The first case where NHTSA records show the involvement of Tinto and Santucci dealt with unanticipated acceleration by 2002 and 2003 Toyota Camrys and Solaras and began in March 2004. The safety agency decided to open a preliminary investigation to determine "if the throttle control system could be the cause of vehicle surge or unwanted acceleration."

Toyota had identified 114 cases where that was a potential issue. But after Santucci and Tinto met with NHTSA officials, the inquiry was narrowed to 11 incidents that resulted in five crashes, according to a deposition of Santucci in a later lawsuit (still pending) filed on behalf of the family of a Michigan woman who was killed in an April 2008 accident involving suspected acceleration problems with a Camry. Investigators back in 2004 decided to focus on cases of acceleration that lasted less than one second and those where the brake could still be used to control the vehicle.

In those instances the Transportation Dept. reasoned the cause was most likely to be mechanical or electronic in nature, rather than human error. The investigation was closed in July 2004 because of lack of evidence, agency records show.

The same pattern repeated itself in 2005 and 2006. Complaints by Toyota owners over accelerator problems made their way to U.S. traffic safety regulators. Toyota's Tinto wrote letters to NHTSA officials. ("No evidence of a system or component failure was found and the vehicles were operating as designed," Tinto wrote to regulators in 2005.) The agency ended probes in both cases in a matter of months. A 2008 federal investigation lasted eight months. Toyota had identified 478 incidents of engine-speed increases of Toyota Tacoma pickup trucks even when the gas pedal wasn't pushed. The NHTSA pursued no regulatory action.

Did the fact that Toyota had former traffic safety regulators on its payroll make a difference? The NHTSA decisions on Toyota weren't necessarily biased just because former agency people were involved, says Sidney Shapiro, a law professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. "I'm not sure regulators set out to say 'I'm going to give a special deal to my old friends in the auto industry,' " he says. "But what happens is it just sort of deteriorates because these are the only people you talk to."

With Angela Greiling Keane in Washington, Alan Ohnsman in Los Angeles, Andrew Harris in Chicago, and Makiko Kitamura in Tokyo

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Green in London at jgreen16@bloomberg.net . Fisk is a reporter for Bloomberg News .

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