Toyota accused of hiding rollover-crash data

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Toyota accused of hiding tests Lawsuit questions use of rollover-crash data Laurence Viele Davidson / Bloomberg News

Toyota Motor Corp. may face demands that rollover-crash cases it won or settled be reopened, in light of accusations by a former company lawyer that the automaker hid records sought by plaintiffs.

The ex-Toyota lawyer, Dimitrios Biller, last month sued Toyota, claiming the world's largest automaker and its U.S. units destroyed engineering and testing evidence relevant in more than 300 suits over sport utility vehicle rollover accidents. Biller managed Toyota's electronic document-discovery program, he said in court papers.

The petition alleges conduct by Toyota that would cause every case ever resolved by Toyota in the past 10 years to be reopened, said Mikal Watts, a lawyer in Corpus Christi, Texas, referring to Biller's suit.

Watts said Biller's claims raise questions about the results of 10 other Toyota cases he handled. They include a trial he lost in Huntsville, Texas, over an accident that left a 6-year-old boy quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator.

"A lot more information can be gleaned from electronic documents than paper," said Sean Kane, co-founder of the advocacy group Safety Research & Strategies in Rehoboth, Mass. "You are looking for who knew what and when."

Biller, 46, said he worked from 2003 to 2008 managing records for Toyota litigation. He suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown battling company executives and finally resigned after objecting to Toyota's insistence on hiding data, he said in a July 24 complaint in federal court in Los Angeles.

Biller's complaint alleges that Toyota has engaged in a "systematic pattern and practice of discovery abuses and criminal acts against plaintiffs in litigation" against it.

Toyota has 27 million vehicles on the road, and rollovers are a rare event, Toyota spokeswoman Sona Iliffe-Moon said in an e-mail.

Iliffe-Moon declined to comment on the specifics of Biller's lawsuit or confirm his former status as national counsel for the Toyota rollover program. She also declined to comment on a $3.7 million settlement he said he received after claiming he was wrongfully discharged from Toyota.

The Biller suit represents a PR challenge to Toyota, said Jim Hossack, an analyst at the consulting firm AutoPacific Inc. in Tustin, Calif., and a former engineer at carmakers including Ford Motor Co. and Hyundai Motor Co.

"Their reputation for quality and durability is very important to them," said Hossack. "These are very serious allegations. But Toyota has built up a lot of goodwill with consumers here."

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Reply to
john
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Lawsuits are why the USA is becoming a third rate nation. A nation run BY and FOR lawyers that know how to use the system and don't care about anything except getting rich.

Reply to
Paul

I don't know of the particulars of this case. But where I work we have proceedures in place that call for all "personal" Emails between individuals to be purged after a year. Anything that is required for you to do your job is to be stored and archived in the proper repository - not as an archived Email. I've seen some people wrtie truly dumb things in Emails that might be treated as factual by some bottom feeding lawyer. I actually think about how things might be interperted in company Emails before I send them. Engineers often have differences of opinion and lawyers can latch on to these and make it seem as if there was a cover up. I suppose the classic example of this is the hatchet job done on the Ford Pinto. In that famous case old documents that had nothing to do with Pintos or fuel tanks were presented as evidence that supposedly proved that Ford executives had skimped on the Pinto's fuel tank design. It was total BS, but apparently juries are easily misled by lawyers. I assume Toyota is just trying to make sure that irrelevant documents are not sifted through to find statemetns that can be twisted to make it seem as if there were problems. On the other hand, over the years, Toytoa has tried to hide, obsure, and outright lie about problems. This was especially evident in the truck ball joint recall that Toyota was forced to institute a few years back.

Ed

"john" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@x25g2000prf.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
C. E. White

Stock brokers ("financial advisers") often will not communicate via email or letter simply because this leaves a paper trail to the lying bastards. It is not only that they can be sued for misrepresenting issues, but there exists direct evidence of the things they did.

They would much prefer to tell you information verbally because they can always say that you just misunderstood.

You may remember Ford and the tire company both shuffled their feet, looked at the sky, farted, and pointed their fingers at each other about who was really responsible for the Ford rollovers. (Probably BOTH were responsible to some degree or the other).

When lawsuits are in the offing, any old tactic that might work - be it true or not - will be rolled out.

Reply to
hls

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