Steve Parker Motoring / The Car Nut

Automotive/Auto racing shows this weekend

STEVE PARKER'S THE CAR NUT SHOW
Saturday, 2/27, LIVE @ 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern on www.TalkRadioOne.com

An amazing spectacle in congress this past week --- Akio Toyoda, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp., was interrogated by a congressional committee about his company's recalled cars, safety and quality problems and what did he know about it all and when did he know it. At the same time, the FBI raids three Toyota suppliers in the US. Outside of that, Hummer is officially dead and Saab is officially sold as GM continues as the Incredible Shrinking Corporation. Plus your calls --- 213-291-9410.

STEVE PARKER'S WORLD RACING ROUNDUP
Sunday, 2/28, LIVE @ 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern on www.TalkRadioOne.com

NASCAR had its Disaster at Daytona followed by last week's normally boring race at California Speedway, where Jimmy Johnson started what he hopes (and probably is) a massive streak of victories. This weekend: Las Vegas, home track of Kurt and Kyle Busch. IndyCar opens its season in two weeks on a new street course in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Formula 1 gears up the same weekend in Bahrain and there are plenty of changes in both series we'll cover. Plus Danica Patrick gives up NASCAR. Join in at 213-291-9410.

Follow Steve Parker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/autojourno

• Cars

Toyoda, Toyota, congress and the FBI

The FBI raided three Toyota suppliers in the US yesterday (Yazaki, Denso and Tokai Rika) in an antitrust investigation, and things weren't any better for Toyota in Washington's vast corridors.

In exchanges marked by cultural and language confusion, anger and apparent evasiveness, Toyota's worldwide President and CEO, Akio Toyoda, and COO of Toyota North America and head of Toyota Motor Sales USA Yoshimi Inaba faced the full wrath of a congressional committee investigating Toyota's many safety problems and recalls.

After spending nearly the past 40 years covering the auto industry from Los Angeles, which means a close relationship with all the Japanese makers and spending a lot of time in Japan, I've often joked that Japanese businessmen have 100 ways to say "I don't know" and 1,000 ways to not take responsibility. Those watching the hearings yesterday got about a four-hour example of all that live, in action and with translation provided, presented by Japan's most important car executive and his co-hort.

Shown live in Japan (where it was the start of the working day), the scene was unprecedented and, to me, as strange and shocking as GM going bankrupt and Chrysler being bought by Fiat.

Seemingly most important to many of the inquisitors: What and when the company knew about the many consumer complaints and reports of unintended acceleration, accidents, injuries and deaths and poorly-working anti-lock brake systems going back to at least 2004.

They call him the "The Prince". Since birth, Akio Toyoda has been heir apparent for the company founded by his grandfather.

Toyoda, 53, became CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation in July, 2009. Just the right timing, according to his testimony today, so that he knows nothing about consumer complaints about unintended acceleration and problem brakes, that though top NHTSA officials flew to Tokyo to meet with Toyota management after he took over the company he knew the meeting occurred, but never received a report about it and had no idea what was discussed, while Inaba said he knew nothing of acceleration problems reported in Japan in 2007 which resulted in recalls there because he was busy running the US division.

It became clear after several members grilled the two Japanese on these same points that this is a criminal investigation at heart, with congress intent on showing Toyoda and Inaba were either lying about their lack of knowledge of consumer complaints or, at best, were suffering from severe attacks of selective memory.

QUICK LOOK AT TWO 2012 INDYCAR PROTOTYPES

Here are prototypes for new 2012 Indycars.

The top one is from DeltaWing, an outfit supported by Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi, Michael Andretti and others. Even Tony George (well, they can't all be winners).  The car below the DeltaWing (which was displayed last week at the Chicago Auto Show) is a 2012 prototype from Swift Engineering, a Southern California company owned by Hiro Matsushita, former Indycar driver and He is the grandson of Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Matsushita Electrical Company which owns Panasonic, and as a result, he has always carried Panasonic sponsorship.

General goals for the new car? Develop a turbo 4-cylinder engine which costs $140,000 for the season (as opposed to leasing the current Honda V8 for $1.3 million a year), a chassis price much lower than the $365,000 Dallara is charging for the current model, a price which has never gone down though it's an old design and 10mpg at racing speeds.

 

 

NASCAR's Disaster at Daytona!

What Bill Clinton said about Yasser Arafat - "He never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity" -also applies to NASCAR.

Whether it's the fact that NASCAR Sprint Cup (and next year the Nationwide Series) is now nothing more than a spec series where cheating has become the secret to success, whether it's not choosing NASCAR's first successful African American racer, Wendell Scott, to be in their "first class" of legends at the new NASCAR Museum in Charlotte or whether it's providing a track surface which will not fall apart for the most important race of the year which kicked off the new decade for the sport, NASCAR has a definite penchant for too often being on the wrong side of any opportunity to make itself look good to a national audience.

Last Sunday's Daytona 500 took over six hours to complete, a race which normally runs three to four hours. Why? Because the track started coming apart and the race had to be stopped - red-flagged - for over two hours while track workers tried to make repairs.

Oh, sure, there was a great finish to the race with the universally-liked Jamie McMurray winning his first Daytona 500 (he has the pole for this Sunday's race at California Speedway) but how many people stuck around their TVs to watch Daytona's end?

While I enjoyed my extended nap at home, as I'm sure millions of other viewers did, there are sports car events which run six hours and are called "endurance races". That certainly describes this year's Daytona 500.

Drivers including Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. have talked about the boredom of the middle part of any long race, so NASCAR should imagine what those laps are like to we home viewers. Pure tedium at 190mph, and whoever thought such a thing possible? During one red flag period, at least one driver, Kyle Busch, fell asleep in his parked race car waiting for the green flag to come out again.

Automotive on-line radio shows this weekend

Saturday 2-20-10

Steve Parker's The Car Nut Show on www.TalkRadioOne.com LIVE at 11am Pacific time.

The convoluted Toyota story gets straightened out for you by Steve on the show. Find out how he predicted these kinds of electrical and other problems years ago. Tesla, the California electric car-maker, loses three executives in a plane crash. How will this affect the company? The Sixty Second Road Test covers the 2010 Cadillac CTS Sport Wagon...and YOUR phone calls at 213-291-9410.

Sunday 2-21-10

Steve Parker's World Racing Roundup on www.TalkRadioOne.com LIVE at 5pm Pacific time.

Last week's Disaster at Daytona will be talked about, while we're expecting a rainout of today's race at California Speedway. Rain's scheduled in Southern California from Friday night through Monday at least. What is NASCAR thinking? The Danica Patrick phenomenon keeps rolling along while it appears her Nationwide team owner, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. might finally have the race car under him which he so sorely deserves. And the next-generation Indycar, getting rave reviews and severe complaints will be covered, too. Plus YOUR phone calls at 213-291-9410.

Follow Steve Parker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/autojourno

UPDATE - House subpoenas Toyota documents; Akio Toyoda to testify

A few days after Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder of Toyota, said he would not testify before a House committee created to investigate the company's response to the many safety problems involving its best-selling vehicle (Oversight Committee into Toyota Motors) the committee has subpoenaed Toyota's records involving lawsuits in Texas. An ex-Toyota attorney who represented the company in those rollover-related lawsuits, says Toyota intentionally withheld or destroyed pertinent documents, and he is suing Toyota under federal racketeering statutes.

And as I wrote in the previous post about Toyota's arrogance, too-quick growth and apparent evasiveness, it seems the company and Mr. Toyoda still don't get it.

Akio Toyoda has been "officially invited" to testify before the House committee. Toyoda begged off the original invite, saying US Toyota employees would be better-suited for the job. But the recalls are not just in the US --- they are worldwide --- and Toyoda has now been requested in writing to appear.

UPDATED - Toyota president Akio Toyoda said Thursday he will testify at a congressional hearing next week about the automaker's massive recalls in the United States, meeting face to face with lawmakers after enduring criticism that he responded too slowly to the company's safety crisis. Associated Press

The Los Angeles Times, which has led the media in reporting this story, says today that Toyota has hired Exponent Inc., a California company which the newspaper reports regularly provides research for corporations under fire including Exxon (the Valdez oil leak disaster), NASA (the Challenger explosion), Swiss Re (insurer of the World Trade Center) and FEMA to investigate the Oklahoma City bombing which destroyed the Murrah federal building. The Times says "Exponent's research has come under fire from critics including engineers, attorneys and academics who say the company tends to deliver to clients the reports they need to mount a public defense."

From AUTOMOTIVE NEWS:

A House panel today subpoenaed confidential company documents that a former Toyota lawyer has said prove the automaker routinely concealed evidence from the courts and federal regulators, a committee staffer said.

The subpoena was issued as part of an investigation by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee into Toyota Motor Corp.'s response to complaints of uncontrolled engine acceleration that led to a global recall of more than 8 million vehicles, Kurt Bardella, a committee staff spokesman, told Reuters.

Dimitrios Biller, who headed a corporate legal team that defended Toyota in rollover-accident lawsuits, took some 6,000 internal documents with him when he left Toyota in 2007, and has since sued the automaker under U.S. racketeering laws.

He has said the documents support his allegations that the company systematically hid or destroyed legal evidence that would have led to costly trials in the United States.

The committee's subpoena was accepted by Biller's lawyer on behalf of his client, "and obviously they intend to comply," Bardella said.

The subpoena came hours after the committee issued a letter formally asking Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, to testify before the panel.

Follow Steve Parker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/autojourno

Toyota - Why it's all happening now

Some random thoughts on the Toyota "situation"...

Be careful what you wish for.

Toyota aimed to be the biggest car-maker in the world, and since they achieved that goal through GM's bankruptcy, everything, it seems, has been going downhill for the pride of Toyota City (yep, that's where its Japanese HQ is located).

Toyota will eventually fix the cars, make sure new ones don't have these problems and things, the company hopes, will get back to normal.

But the family-run outfit, for the long-term, is terrible wounded. Not mortally, mind you, but there are already jokes about Toyota all over the Web and in late-night monologues and that sort of thing is not what the most conservative company in Japan can deal with.

In yesterday's Huffington Post, for instance, humorist Andy Borowitz revealed Toyota's new slogan: "Drive a Toyota. You'll Never Stop."

The problems and supposed fixes are myriad and confusing. More than eight million vehicles recalled worldwide; vehicles going out of production and taken off the sales lots while the company finally, perhaps honestly, deals with all this.

Last year the world wondered how GM could go bankrupt; now the world wonders how the company most-associated with product quality has failed so miserably to make their case, or to even seem open and honest.

What happened?

Learning a bit about Japanese corporate culture helps explain.

The Japanese government and their major corporations work very closely, more closely than Americans could imagine. In fact, these companies could be called "quasi-governmental".

Corporate "press conferences" in Japan are akin to kabuki; scripted, run as they've been for decades and no questions are taken from the press. A corporate statement, a bow and that's it. If foreign press are in the room, sometimes questions will be taken ... but only from the foreigners.

But something shocking happened this week. At a press conference, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder and the first family member to run the company in a decade, bowed in apology and contrition to all of Japan.

And, more shocking, the media criticized his bow for not being deep enough. People don't literally fall on their swords anymore, as did the samurai. But a good show is expected when apology time comes calling (Toyoda himself is the subject of much rumor and speculation; many say he simply isn't up to the job).