GM Recall. NHTSA at Toyota’s beck and call.

Bad News

GM is recalling 1.3 million of its compact cars for steering issues. Though they say it’s not a dangerous problem, get it checked if you are driving one of the models. I never thought I’d have so much respect for voluntary recalls, but the Toyota situation has me singing a new tune.

Worse news.

It turns out that there was reason for the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to be ducking the press the past few weeks when they had questions about the role of his agency in the situation with the runaway Toyotas. Here are some interesting facts.

1. The administrator of the NHTSA, David Strickland, who was appointed by the Obama administration, is defending the practices of the agency during the Bush administration.

2. He downplayed spikes in acceleration complaints by Toyota Camry owners, calling them “unremarkable”. He also said NHTSA opened an investigation into the car during the Bush Administration and found no flaws.

3. He also downplayed the internal memo in which Toyota patted itself on the back for avoiding 100 million dollars in recall costs as someone claiming credit for something they could not do.

4. Remember that investigation I mentioned in #2? Two former NHTSA safety investigators who now work for Toyota’s DC office, Chris Tinto and Chris Santucci, were able to successfully convince their former NHTSA coworkers to narrow the scope of the investigation into the accelerator defect back in 2004.

An ABC News investigation found that federal safety investigators agreed to exclude reports of the most serious cases of alleged “runaway Toyotas” after the intervention of Tinto and Santucci, who were hired to be Washington, D.C. representatives of Toyota.

5. Now David Strickland assures us that he will run NHTSA with the “highest level of ethics possible” all while he’s propping this huge fraud up? I don’t think that’s change I can believe in.