Former regulators hired by Toyota Motor Corp. helped end at least four U.S. investigations of unintended acceleration by company vehicles in the past decade, warding off possible recalls, court and government records show.
Christopher Tinto, vice president of regulatory affairs in Toyota’s Washington office, and Christopher Santucci, who works for Tinto, helped persuade the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to end probes that included those of 2002-03 Toyota Camrys and Solaras, court documents show. Both men joined Toyota directly from NHTSA, Tinto in 1994 and Santucci in 2003.
While all automakers have employees who handle NHTSA issues, Toyota may be alone among the major companies in employing former agency staffers to do so. Spokesmen for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Group LLC and Honda Motor Co. all say their companies have no former NHTSA people who deal with the agency on defects.
Possible links between Toyota and NHTSA may fuel mounting criticism of their handling of defects in Toyota and Lexus models tied to 19 deaths between 2004 and 2009. Three congressional committees have scheduled hearings on the recalls.
“Toyota bamboozled NHTSA, or NHTSA was bamboozled by itself,” said Joan Claybrook, an auto-safety advocate and former NHTSA administrator in the Carter administration. “I think there is going to be a lot of heat on NHTSA over this.”
In one example of the Toyota aides’ role, Santucci testified in a Michigan lawsuit that the company and NHTSA discussed limiting an examination of unintended-acceleration complaints to incidents lasting less than a second.
“We discussed the scope” of the investigation, Santucci testified. “NHTSA’s concerns about the scope ultimately led to a decision by the agency to reduce that scope. You say it worked out well for Toyota; I think it worked out well for both the agency and Toyota.”
