Part 4: Toyota and the Unraveling of a Cover-Up

. . . Did Toyota really think that a Congressional committee wouldn’t notice that 80% of the reports it gave Congress contained no indication of either floor mat interference or a sticky pedal, and that nearly 70% of the reports in its customer complaint database involved vehicles not included in either  the floor mat or sticky pedal recalls? . . .

. . . Toyota engineers also told Congress that “there is no particular or special testing that would directly prove there is no unintended acceleration.” But this was only another way of saying that proving a negative can be difficult, a banality that was left dangling by thousands of detailed, credible, and often substantiated descriptions of runaway car occurrences . . . .

. . . Had our press conference and meetings with three Congressional Committees helped to convince Congress that a serious investigation of this automotive behavior was long overdue? Perhaps; but as we will learn soon enough, there was no way that the DOT and NHTSA were prepared to let anyone expose their betrayals of the American public . . . .

. . . Although I knew that proving a tacit collaboration between a powerful industry and the federal government wouldn’t be easy, I could never have imagined that in the end it would be NHTSA that would provide clinching proof that its studies and reports blaming drivers are both slanderous and a national disgrace . . . .

“Leon’s head was driven violently forward into the building ‘shattering his skull,’ as one doctor put it, ‘and tearing the covering of the brain so that... there was blood coming out of his ears....’ ”