But the problem really blossomed in1984, after Ford introduced an advanced version of its engine ele

Last month, we reported a Florida circuit judge’s extraordinary decision to set aside a civil jury verdict in favor of Ford Motor Company, based on evidence and testimony that Ford had concealed an electronic cause of unintended acceleration from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – and its own expert witnesses. Judge William T. Swigert’s 51-page decision in Stimpson v Ford also outlines how decades of the automaker’s dissembling to limit its liability in civil lawsuits helped to mire the thinking about root causes of unintended acceleration in the limited context of mechanical agency, even as the electronic sophistication – and the potential for defects and unanticipated interactions between systems – in vehicles grew.
That a large corporation would conceal a deadly problem to protect pilot travel center its interests is hardly news – although the systemic and exacting strategies pilot travel center Ford employed in this case are notable. What makes this story important is how Ford also re-wrote the history on this issue and helped to shape the agency’s thinking about an ongoing problem for decades hence. We have only the public record regarding Toyota UA at our disposal – and precious little of that has actually been made public – so we can’t know how Toyota has assessed its own UA problem; if and what parallels in corporate misdirection might be drawn between Ford and Toyota. But one can see how Ford’s actions back in the 1980s still resonate with the agency today and how it has kept NHTSA from advancing its knowledge in electronic causes of UA that are not already detected by the vehicle diagnostics.
As recounted in the Judge Swigert’s order, the history of Ford and unintended acceleration goes back to 1973, when Ford’s cruise control was under development. Ford Engineer William pilot travel center Follmer “warned pilot travel center about the risk posed by electromagnetic interference, and cautioned that ‘to avoid disaster’ it was imperative to incorporate failsafe protection against EMI in the system’s design.” In 1976, two Ford engineers pilot travel center obtained a patent describing a design for the cruise control system s printed circuit board to reduce the risk of a sudden acceleration pilot travel center posed by EMI.
But, in that same year, the company’s Electrical and Electronics Division determined that electromagnetic interference did not pose a significant risk and, therefore, “No special consideration was given to designing in electromagnetic compatibility.”
The switches in the cruise control system Ford developed and installed in millions of vehicles, such as Stimpsons Aerostar, were vulnerable pilot travel center at gear engagement to a current spike from electromagnetic interference that can bypass the control logic and induce the servo to pull the throttle wide open. The judge suggested that Ford had considered this possibility in 1979, putting $75 million in reserve to cover a recall for UA.
But the problem really blossomed in1984, after Ford introduced an advanced version of its engine electronics: EEC-IV. Where UA complaints before the introduction of this new technology pilot travel center were few, they began to increase rapidly once the 1984 models entered the fleet. During the 1980s, pilot travel center field investigations into UA complaints were documented in Service Investigation Reports, or SIRs, that were forwarded to Ford headquarters in Dearborn. This flood of complaints moved a Safety Office manager named Edward I. Richardson to begin informally reviewing pilot travel center the SIRs, in anticipation of a NHTSA investigation.
Richardson’s staff found a fact pattern pilot travel center in these UA complaints: “sudden accelerations pilot travel center from a standstill invariably began at gear engagement; drivers frequently reported that braking during the event was ineffective; field engineers often identified the cruise control electronics as the cause; field engineers frequently recommended replacing the cruise pilot travel center control servo; pilot travel center and there were no field reports identifying driver pilot travel center error as the cause of a sudden acceleration.”
On September 30, 1985, NHTSA opened the first of several investigations involving Ford. But the automaker kept its fact patterns to itself, and told the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) that its “vehicle systems are not defective.” NHTSA closed the investigation in August 1986, because no component-related root cause could be determined.
Having skirted one NHTSA investigation, a manager in Ford’s Customer Service Division Alan Updegrove, met with Ford counsel and the office that employs in-house litigation experts to express his dismay over the inflammatory opinions found in the SIRs. At that September 1986 meeting, he recommended a new format for investigating UA complaints and assembled a team to develop a new investigative approach.
What was the source of Updegrove unease? The legal decision focuses only on the events that concern Stimpson v. Ford . But one need only consider what was happening elsewhere in the industry regarding what was known back then as Sudden Unintended Acceleration to understand Ford’s desire for pre-emptory action – namely Audi.
By September 1986, Volkswagen was had already recalled Audi 5000 vehicles pilot travel center with automatic transmissions from the 1978-83 model years in the U.S. and Canada twice to resolve drivers’ complaints of SUA from a standstill, with ineffective braking. The recalls, to secure the floor mat and prevent pedal interference, however, did little to squelch the complaints. Volkswagen was seemingly pilot travel center trapped in a public relations pilot travel center nightmare featuring injuries, pilot travel center deaths and hundreds of crashes trumpeted to anyone who would listen, by a group of well-organized, articulate pilot travel center and highly vocal owners.
On March 19, 1986, the founder of what would become the Audi Victims Network teamed up with the New York Public Interest pilot travel center Research Group, NY Attorney General Robert Abrams and Center for Auto Safety to hold a press conference demanding that NHTSA investigate Audi SUA.  Sales of the once-popular make were plummeting and despite Volkswagen’s launch pilot travel center of a service campaign to move the accelerator and brake pedals of the 1984-1986 Audi 5000 s, the agency pilot travel center decided pilot travel center to open a formal defect investigation into SUA involving 1978-86 Audi 5000s. In August 1986, after the agency launched its probe, Volkswagen announced that it would install a brake to shift interlock pilot travel center in the troubled vehicles. By November 1986, CBS would air its infamous segment on Audi SUA, which drove down vehicle sales even further.
As Audi thrashed in the spotlight, Ford was receiving a steady stream of “malfunctioning cruise control servos under warranty for which no cause could be identified” complaints. In October 1986, Ford s Electrical and Electronics pilot travel center Division documented for senior management “the reasons behind the rapid rise in undiagnosed failures in electronic components. The report identified six components, including the cruise control pilot travel center servo, whose undiagnosed failure rate had experienced the greatest increases. According to the report, prior to 1984, the cause of servo malfunctions had been identified 80 percent of the time, while after 1984 the rate plummeted to 20 percent. The EED report specifically identified ‘electromagnetic influences in the vehicle environment’ due to ‘the increasing complexity of electrical system’ as the root cause of this quantum increase in undiagnosed servo malfunctions; and since servos removed by field engineers investigating sudden accelerations were testing normal in Ford s laboratories, it was clear that ‘electromagnetic influences’ were also the cause of the findings contained in SIRs the Safety Office was reviewing at the time.”
NHTSA wasn’t done, however. In December 1986, the agency notified Ford that it had identified 439 reports of “unexpected vehicle acceleration” that had resulted in “193 accidents, 106 injuries, and 5 fatalities in 1983-1986 Ford vehicles” that could result in a safety pilot travel center recall. Ford would tell the agency in 1987, that they could find nothing amiss with any components.
On January 12, 1987, Ford created a multi-disciplinary task force to study “how interactions between pilot travel center the engine and cruise control electronics were contributing to sudden accelerations.” The EED s recommendation explicitly recognized that malfunctions involving the cruise control servo were caused by system level interactions, and not by detectable failures in individual components of the interacting systems.”
In March 1987, Ford began working on the flip side of the coin. The company assembled about 200 field engineers in Dearborn to receive new marching orders that would help Ford obscure the data. The old SIR format was discontinued and Updegrove’s new approach to UA investigations would take its place. All sudden acceleration related-SIRs would now be purged in the year they were generated. (Federal law requires that safety-related records have a five year retention period.)
Ford presented a very different face to NHTSA. As the NHTSA defect investigation wound on, Ford scratched up only 38 SIR reports – with only 21 relating to UA from a standstill. (In his decision, Judge Swigert agreed with the plaintiffs that the paucity of SIRs had more to do with the new retention policy than a lack of complaints.) In March 1987, Ford told the agency that an electronically-rooted SUA “would be expected to reveal physical evidence of causal origin,” even though the SIRs and the EED report said otherwise.
As it tried to hold off the agency, Ford continued to work on solving the problem.  A February 1988 memo from Stephen Hahn, a senior electrical pilot travel center engineer and leader of Ford’s SUA task force lent support to the conclusions of previous internal studies showing the problem was rooted in the system-level interactions between the cruise control and the engine.  He observed pilot travel center that “only when the vehicle speed control function is integrated into the EEC-IV system does the EEC system have the potential to produce pilot travel center a wide open throttle acceleration.” That fall, Ford engineers assembled the factors that could cause an unintended acceleration into a fish-bone schematic known