{"id":520845,"date":"2010-04-08T17:00:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T21:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com\/?p=16029"},"modified":"2010-04-08T17:00:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T21:00:56","slug":"toyota-vp-pre-recall-we-need-to-come-clean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/520845","title":{"rendered":"Toyota VP Pre-Recall: We Need to Come Clean"},"content":{"rendered":"

Irv Miller was a Toyota public affairs vice president — a thirty-year veteran of the company who was just a few days short of retirement — when he wrote an email<\/a> to Japanese counterparts on January 16th of this year. It is a document that seems certain to reverberate through hearing rooms and courtrooms around the country.<\/p>\n

“I hate to break this to you,\u201d Miller wrote \u2013 occasionally using all capitals for emphasis, \u201cbut WE HAVE A tendency for MECHANICAL failure in accelerator pedals for a certain manufacturer on certain models. We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean … “<\/p>\n

Noting that key Toyota executives were about to meet with officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Miller added:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe better just hope that they can get NHTSA to work with us in coming [up] with a workable solution that does not put us out of business.”<\/p>\n

The email response suggests the matter was discussed by several Japanese executives. A decision was made to not discuss the pedal issue because it “might raise another uneasiness of customers.”<\/p>\n

That email is among 7,000 documents Toyota has handed over to government officials. It may explain why NHTSA has just slapped the Japanese automaker with a $16.4 Million dollar fine for not bringing safety concerns to government officials in a timely fashion. Toyota dealerships in 31 European countries were notified of pedal problems in the fall of 2009 \u2026 months before the US recall began.<\/p>\n

While some will paint this as evidence of wrongdoing, crisis management expert, Eric Dezenhall, believes it is typical of what often happens inside a big corporation during times of trouble. Not a cover up, but corporate-wide denial that feeds a bunker mentality.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are hysterical they are hiding they are hoping it would blow over they hope somebody else would handle it. I have yet to see a corporation crisis where the company behaves the way they would in a Hollywood portrayal of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The document could cause big problems in the courtroom where Toyota is facing class-action and product liability lawsuits. Fox News contacted Irv Miller by phone. He politely declined further comment on whether he expects to be subpoenaed to testify in hill hearings — or in a court of law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Irv Miller was a Toyota public affairs vice president — a thirty-year veteran of the company who was just a few days short of retirement — when he wrote an email to Japanese counterparts on January 16th of this year. It is a document that seems certain to reverberate through hearing rooms and courtrooms around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5946,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-520845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5946"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}