Little expertise at Toyota hearing

Washington Times:

One thing about the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations — they're not engineers.

"I'm not an electrical expert," Rep. Henry A. Waxman said Tuesday in his opening statement at a hearing on Toyota's response to incidents of "sudden unintended acceleration."

"I never even got a C in any kind of engineering class because I never took one," said Rep. Diana DeGette, Colorado Democrat.

With such a complex problem at hand — reports say at least 34 motorists have been killed when Toyota-brand vehicles suddenly accelerated — the members turned to Rep. Joe L. Barton, a Republican who earned an industrial engineering degree from Texas A&M University in 1972.

"Shows how long it's been since I've worked on a car, but I was under the impression that the steering mechanism and the fuel acceleration mechanism was like it was years ago, that it was mechanically linked. It's not. It's all electronic now," he said in amazement.

To be fair, Mr. Barton said, "I made C's" in electrical engineering classes.

Nevertheless, it was this subcommittee that conducted the first hearing into the causes behind the crashes now attributed to sudden unintended acceleration. The dozen or so TV cameras and standing-room-only crowd in a Rayburn House Office Building hearing room Tuesday morning brought out committee members who don't even serve on the subcommittee.

The star guest was James Lentz, president and chief operating officer of Toyota USA. He quickly informed the subcommittee members, "I'm not an engineer," and that his expertise is in sales and marketing.

...

Maybe the lack of experts is because this was more about political theater. There was a compelling witness who emotionally told of how frightened she was when her Lexus sped up on its own to over 100 after she entered a freeway ramp. She eventually turned the car off and coasted to a stop.

I wonder why it took her so long to think of that. If fact I wonder why none of the other people who have had this problem did not turn off the ignition as soon as they realized the accelerator was stuck. It really should not take an automotive engineer to figure that out.

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