Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in Juleivis to California, just south of San Diego. Sailor was forty five years old, a California HIWI Patrol officer. Ordinarily, he drove a two thousand and six Lexus I S, but his car had a problem with his CD player, so that morning he took it to the dealership and got a loaner a brand new Lexus E. Sailor finished his shift at the HIGWI Patrol and went back home, picked up his wife, daughter, and brother in law Chris Lostrella, and they all set out for the daughter's soccer practice. They were heading up Highway one twenty five and just as they approached a town called Santi, Lostrella, who sitting in the backseat, calls nine one one. What you're about to hear? A morning you is harrowing and see what are you reporting? Yeah, we're Alexis. I'm sorry your cell phone cutting out. We're going one twenty five TV. I'm sorry for alexceritor stuck well one twenty five great, okay, northbound one twenty five. Where are you passing. We are passing up? Where are we passing? Words? We're going on a hundred and twenty mission. Gorge, We're in trouble. We can't We're there's no break, okay, Gorge and three way half mile okay. And you don't have the ability to like turn the vehicle off or anything. Approaching an intersection. We're approaching an intersection. Okay, We're pushing interfect hold on, pray, pray, Hello, oh hello, the o o oh you here is this Jella's horrified response to the Lexus spinning out of control, hitting another vehicle, and plunging down a ravine. Everyone inside the car was killed. The Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story. I hesitated before playing it, but in the end I concluded that you have to hear it to make sense of what happened Next, the tape went viral. It was played on the nightly news, written up in horrified news articles, to the point where a wave of fear swept the country. Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales due to a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives in day runaway. Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to one hundred miles an hour. One died she crashed her camera into a tree and a pole. A car had sped up to more than one hundred miles per hour. Hundreds of people came forward with horror stories about the Alexis accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is a brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings exposs whistleblowers. NASA got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September two thousand and nine and March two thousand and ten, totaling millions of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated to have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended up paying a one point two billion dollars fine to the US government. They spent another one point one billion to settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've settled something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest automobile company was accused of a cover up, of putting profits ahead of people, of having a culture of denial. Toyota's conduct was shameful. He showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers. That's Eric Holder in March two and fourteen. He was the Attorney General of the United States at the time. It's a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement officer of the land calls out one of the largest companies in the world. My name is Malcolm Glaube. You're listening to Revisionist History, where every week we go back and examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted to the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard at least some part of that nine one one tape before. Maybe you had a Toyota at the time and had a sudden pang of worry. What I want to do is go back to two thousand and nine and convince you that something went very wrong in the way the controversy played out very well. Let's go back for a moment to the person we started with, Mark Sailor, California Highway patrol officer. He's driving down the highway and he can't stop his car. The accelerator is stuck. His brother in law says. After the crash, another person comes forward to the police and says he had driven the same loner Lexus a few days before and had a similar incident. It accelerated to get past a truck, and when he pushed the throttle towards the floor, that's what car guys called the accelerator pedal, the throttle stuck. What he realized is that someone had put one of those big, thick all weather rubber floor mats in the car, on top of the floor mat that was already there. That second big thick floor mat wasn't attached to those little hooks that hold floor mats down. It slid around, and so somehow the thick mat got wedged under the throttle. That everyone decides is what happened to Sailor maybe he tried to turn the car off, but the Lexus has one of those push button ignitions, and what he may not have realized is that you have to hold that button down for three seconds if you're trying to stop the car while it's in motion. Maybe he tried to put the car in neutral, but it's not always obvious how to do that, particularly if you're panicking. They crash. The nine one one car goes viral and Toyota launches a massive recall of floor mats across its model line. Problem solved, right. Well, No, here's the problem. Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration crisis thinks that floor mats are any more than a small part of the story. It just doesn't make sense. So that's an all weather matt. That's my producer, Jacob Smith talking to Sean Kane. This is the killer format. Okay, this is the format that brought Toyota to fame. Kane runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research and Strategies. Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean Kane's name comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked closely with many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's not buying the floor matt theory. When the pedal was depressed fully to the floor inkade the way this road here, the pedal extended down to the point where the bottom edge of it would catch here on this rubber piece. Okay, and it would catch on the bottom edge and it wouldn't return. But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell the whole story. Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals. So the way this would have to happen is you'd have to depress your accelerator pedal nearly to the floor all wide overthrooor to wide open throttle, you'd have to mash that accelerator to the floor and to have that catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it. Kane is saying that for the floor mat to trap the accelerator, the driver has to floor it. But why on earth is a guy driving his family to soccer practice flooring it? Not to mention all the hundreds of other people who complained about Toyota's with stuck accelerators, some of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically, since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her camera down the street? Mark Sailor, he was driving with what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while, Why didn't he just reach down on a yank the floormat away from the pedal? Right, I still have a hard time believing, giving a long distance and the travel of his car, that the floormat was the culprit. Kane thinks that something else must have happened in that car. And by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis ended up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming number of those cases, the car didn't even have an oversized, thick plastic floormat. The cars had normal floormats. Something else must have been happening, and a number of people believe that something has to do with software. That there is and was something wrong with the software that governs the throttle in Toyotas in today's cars. Now we're looking at code code that can be up to one hundred million lines of code. The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter is running about seven million lines of code. A luxury car today can run a hundred million lines of code. You what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got a fifty thousand dollars car. In The complexity level of the fifty thousand ar car is exponentially greater. Do you think that that car is now going to be defect free and software clear not likely? This is the argument that Kane has made in lawsuits against Toyota. The cars contain a bug in the lines of computer code that control how the car starts and stops. Speeds up and slows down. The La Times also pursued this question, resulting in one of the most prestigious investigative reporting awards in a country, the Lobe, for its work. If the La Times and Sean Kane are right, then that's terrifying because what it means is that what happened to Mark Sailor could happen to you. I wanted to put this fear to a test, that what happened to Mark Sailor could easily happen to you or me. It's a terrible story, after all, but how much should we be afraid that our cars might do the same thing. To test this out, my producer Jacob and I got ourselves a two thousand and three camera two hundred and twenty five thousand miles on it, the best selling Toyota, in fact, the best selling car in America for eleven of the last twelve years. A lot of the unintended acceleration cases happened in cameras. After getting the car, we called up Car and Driver, the premier automotive magazine in the United States. We wanted them to help us figure out what was behind this epidemic of unintended acceleration to try and replicate one of those runaway car situations. So one chilly winter morning, Jacob and I met up with three guys from Car and Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds just west of Detroit. It's a vast racetrack that Chrysler uses to do all of its testing. I'm guessing a thousand acres big guardhouse at the front. The whole time we were there, Christ had someone in a jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on us, making sure we didn't take photos of any of the new cars they were testing. Oh look, there's the Q seven. What the car Driver guys right there. Our guys are Don Sherman, he's the technical director of Car and Driver, and Casey Colwell, young guy Brooks with Don. Eddie Altiman also came. He's the editor of Car and Driver, Cami, Don, Casey, Eddie. They all car guys, which matters because one of the notable facts about sudden acceleration is how the car guys see things differently from the non car guys. Incidentally, Jacob and I would also describe ourselves as car guys, although not quite at the level of the Car and Driver folks. True story, when I was thirteen, I rode away for promotional brochures on every car sold in the world, except for the Soviet zeal which was really hard to get. I still have every one of those brochures. Anyway, back to the racetrack in Detroit, Silver camera entering VDF, staying out of your way like we were before. The plan is to take the camera up to some serious speeds, keep the throttle wide open, as if the accelerator pedal is somehow stuck, and then see if we can stop the car. What happens if you have your foot full on the accelerator pedal and then you also slam on the brakes at the same time, because intuitively you'd think that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your car surges uncontrollably, you slam on the brakes. We want to figure out what that looks like. You're gonna make it go wide open throttle, then quickly you apply the brakes, not really a panic, but just stop at the best you can. So Jacob goes out first with Casey behind the wheel. He accelerates so bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two, sixty three five, sixty seven, eight nine, seventy and about to do it. All right, We're gonna put the throttle down, so the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits the break with the gas pedal still down and we locked up a little bit. But what I mean that's what the car stops? Oh? Yeah, car stops. But no loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back. Jacob asks Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape are they in? Is it a little cooked or no, it's not. I don't think the brakes are cooked. They smell like we'll know in a second. Don't even sell. Okay, if you have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine, the brakes win. Then it's my turn. I get into Camray with Eddie Aultraman. He's driving. We take the car down straight away? Can we go a little fast? Let me favor? At seventy, Ultiman hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to a halt, throttles open. We've got a really old, not a terribly good shape car, filled with three people and a bunch of equipment and it's still stopping. So what's the What is the difference between breaking with your foot completely off the accelerator and breaking like this. What I mean is how much longer does it take to stop a car with a throttle wide open? About ten feet if you want to quantify it, it can be a little bit more, but not so much that you'd notice. Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and Driver do a version of this very same test. We basically did this with a variety of cars, and we found actually that with the throttle stuck open or going in seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty close to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that had his thrill closed. A camera with the accelerator stuck wide open stops basically as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally. It's not a big deal. Yeah, but of course we're not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the carsons as my demons and we're in a closed kind of situation. But you can see, I'll get it up to seventy Not a big deal. Yeah, it's the most undramatic you try. I would love to truck. Yeah. We were out on the testing ground for two hours. We tried every trick in the book. The car stopped, We loaded up the camera with three adults and a ton of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine while the car was in motion. It stopped once. We took the camera up to one hundred miles an hour. What do we at getting there? It took forever, but it stopped. Afterwards, Don Sherman and I talked about the strangely normal experience of bringing a camera to a full stop with the accelerator to the floor. The brakes are powerful. You got four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them. Think of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline to power and move all that breaking is relatively easy to do, it much more powerful. That's why people don't acknowledge that all the capability built into their car. When Car and Driver did their version of this experiment right after the Sailor crash, they went so far as to do a full throttle braking to on a Ruche Stage three Mustang. If you aren't a car guy, I should explain. Ruche is an independent company that takes sports cars and basically puts them on steroids. The engine of the Stage three Ruche has five hundred and forty horsepower. That's two to three times more powerful than the typical car on the road. A monster a rouche would take a camera and chop it into little, tiny pieces. So car and driver take the ruche Mustang up to one hundred pounds an hour, keep their foot on the accelerator at the same time they slam on the brakes, and what happens. The car stops. Now it takes a good nine hundred feet to come to a full stop. There's all kinds of huffing and puffing, but it stops. Breaks go up against one of the most powerful engines on the road, and the brakes win. I think you can now understand how crucial this pointed Toyota gets embroiled in a massive controversy. They pay billions of dollars in fines, They face allegations of a cover up, all because their cars are supposed to be suddenly and mysteriously accelerating. But if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating, all you have to do is step on the brakes, because brakes beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailor stop his Lexus that day as he sped down Higway one twenty five. I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but it's the only logical explanation because he never put his foot on the brake. Maybe the most important person in this whole story is a man named Dick Schmidt. Sadly, Schmidt died last fall, which is a real loss, because Schmidt was a really remarkable man. As a kid, he was a champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub three hour marathoner. He owned five porsches, He raced cars, a car guy. He was also a professor at UCLA who becomes an important figure in what's called human performance research. Human performance research asks how do people move and act and interact with the physical world. Schmidt starts the Journal of Motor Behavior, and along the way he becomes maybe the world's leading expert on the way your feet behave when you drive a car. I talked to Schmidt about a year before he died. He was in a wheelchair. By that point, he had a neurological disease and you'll hear a little bit of his illness in his speech. I'm going to have to repeat what he says because it's really important and I want to make sure you understand it. Schmidt got involved in the sudden acceleration issue years ago when he got a call from an attorney in Washington, d C. It was a case involving a taxi driver who picked up some people outside a hotel. Nathan knows he's run full rattled on Parkway. What Schmidt's saying is, next thing you know, he's running full throttle down the street and he makes a left turn and realizes, oh god, I'm coming to a big traffic circle, and he ends up putting the car into a wall. That was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal, but it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously, the driver can't stop. It. Was there ever a moment when you suspected it might be a mechanical cause to these incidents? No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever suspected that the problem might be with the car, a malfunction, a faulty bit of software, an engineering failure. And Schmidt, one of the world's leading experts in human factors, is saying that never once crossed his mind. Why Because everything about sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver the car. He starts to look at other cases and discovers that there are some pretty clear patterns. But those patterns don't involve a particular make or model of car. Nothing that could make you say, oh, there's something wrong with that kind of car. Every carmaker gets hit with complaints of sudden acceleration. When it is a high profile case like the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand, like Toyota, but that's just the effect of publicity. It happens to everyone. The patterns involve the kinds of people who have sudden acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances that lead to sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to be older, they tend to be shorter, They tend to be people, and this is really important, they tend to be people who are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance, parking lot attendance, and the majority of these incidents happen right after someone gets into a car for the first time, or when they're parking or driving at very low speeds. Now you have to make sense of these patterns. You could argue, i mean, against all reason, but you could argue that cars just get really upset and misbehave when they're being driven by parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous. The patterns Schmidt found mean it's not the car. What Schmidt concludes is that people are getting into strange cars, and maybe because those people are too short and didn't adjust the seat properly, they were a little further away from the pedal than usual. Or maybe they're trying to park and because they're doing the stopping and starting and getting in and out of a parking space, they get thrown just a little out of their comfort zone. They start making stabbing motions with their right foot, like someone groping in the dark. The term Dick Schmidt uses to describe this is impulse ability. Your brain requests a very specific action, but your body fails to deliver exactly what it's told to do. You mean to say that even when producing a very familiar physical movement, Yeah, there is variability in how I move my limbs in the force with which I so. Baseball players swinging a bat at a fastball may feel that he's reproducing his swing every time, but he's not. That's why even the greatest golfers in the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough, or the best basketball players in the world miss a free throw. I don't think the far is confused if which is a very pedal, which is excelera pally knows, but he is a guess. Schmidt says, I don't think the driver is confused. If you ask him which is the brake pedal and which is the accelerator pedal, he knows, but he gets in this state where he feels like he's acting normally and he's not. In other words, somewhere between intention and action, there's a garble, a glitch on what happens. The driver puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's the break. He wants to stop the car, but in fact he's speeding it up. So back to floor mats. Why do they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because they throw off the expected geometry of the car. A big thick winter mat stacked on top of an existing mat raises the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator and break seem much closer to your right foot, And if you're in a strange car, that just increases the odds of impulse variability. It's one of those little things that leads to a garble between intention and action. Once you understand Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds of scenarios that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor. Let me give you one. He's driving down the highway with the cruise control on. Both of his feet are on the floor mat. He comes up behind a car going slower than he is, so he puts his right foot back on the accelerator hard but as he does that, the floor mat slides under the throttle, locking it open. Now comes the crucial part. He takes his foot off the accelerator to return to his cruise control speed, but the car doesn't slow down. It surges forward. The throttle is locked open by the floor mat. He's alarmed. He picks his foot up to hit the brake, but it's a car he's not familiar with. It's a loaner, and he puts his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, and he presses it down, expecting the car to slow, but it doesn't. That's why Listrella says. The brakes don't work, and Sailor freaks out, so he presses down harder and the car goes even faster, and he freaks out even more. I think it's important to note here that sailor isn't negligent. He's not a fault. He's not speeding or running a red light, or drunk. He's making the mistake that almost any of us could make under the circumstances. What happened to him in that moment is confusion. So they're going into a kind of panic state where instead of asking the question is my foot on the red pedal? They think the problem is not pushing the brake hard enough. Yea perception that the brakes have failed as pedal goes to the floor and the card of the stop. Schmidt says, the perception is that the brakes have failed because the pedal goes to the floor and the car doesn't stop. Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some kind of far fetched theory here. In February twenty eleven, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its report on the whole Toyota business that's the one NASA got involved in, and they basically agreed with Schmidt. They concluded that the overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases were clearly pedal air. The agency knows this because every car has a black box that records when the break and when the accelerator are used time and again. In these cases, the black boxes showed that the brakes hadn't even been touched. So here's my question, why is it so hard for people to accept the fact that there is a really simple, straightforward explanation for what happened in the sudden acceleration cases? Because it was hard. Right after the Sailor case, the Secretary of Transportation Rail Hood went before Congress and said, my advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it. Do you realize how insane that is. This is the guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is completely deluded about the cause of the problem. He wants to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing. They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these cars again and again what we've established with this type of In February of twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC News does a story on a runaway avalon. It's about how the software in Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Ooh, it's like that. But of course, all you have to do if a Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is used the brakes, So ABC rigs up an avalon and essentially stages an episode of unintended acceleration. Grace don't work, Grace give out Gee. The fakery was later uncovered by the website Jelopnik. Here's the editor of Jelopnick, Patrick George. They got a university professor to cut three wires within the electronic throttle control system, then connected two of the wires to each other in a specific pattern and with a specific resistor to create a link between two final wires with a switch in between, so that he can control it. In other words, this car was rigged. It was rigged in away that you would never produce these results in real life. At the same time, they fake a video, or if you ask ABC, they make an editing error that makes it look like the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact, the cars in park in the video you can actually see that the brake light is on the whole time. They go to all of this trouble of splicing wires and revving engines. All that because they're trying to avoid the simplest and most plausible explanation, which is people are hitting the wrong pedal crazy. It gets worse at the height of the Toyota controversy. Consumer Reports releases a video telling driver is what to do in the case of unintended acceleration. So this is one of the most trusted and irreputable brands in the United States. Millions of people look to Consumer Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of automotive testing, Jake Fisher, has to say. A car accelerating out of control is a very serious and scary situation for anyone. A gas pedal could get stuck because of a malfunction, because a broken throttle return spring, or even a jam floormat. Fortunately, to remain calm and follow a few steps, you can easily avoid tragedy. Wait, stop right there. He lists a series of reasons why a car might accelerate out of control, and he neglects to mention the number one cause, which is that a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay, on to the next problem. Here at our track, We're going to demonstrate to you what you should do, and more importantly, what you shouldn't do. If you're ever in this unfortunate situation, if you find that your car is chlorating hard, even after you're taking your foot off the gas pedal, your first and stink's probably the right one. Step one, put your foot on the brake firmly and don't lift off. It's extremely important not to lift your foot off the brake. Wait wait, wait, this is even crazier than an ABC reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon Fisher says it's extremely important not to lift your foot off the brake. No, no, no. The whole problem of unintended acceleration is caused by the fact that people mistakenly think they have their foot firmly on the brake when they don't. He needs to say the exact opposite. He needs to say, it is extremely important to lift your foot off whatever pedal it is on, because chances are you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now place it back on the brake firmly. This is an advice, This is maultpractice. In the spring of two thousand and ten, the people who run the autowebsite edmonds dot com got really frustrated with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration have become, so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that the car was the culprit and sudden acceleration that is an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or a floor mat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them a million dollars. A million dollars they put together a panel of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who came forward to win? I asked Dan Edmonds, who heads up the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a grand total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even met the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five, one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again, and the rest, he says, are just nonsense, so they can't award the prize. The million dollars is still sitting there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any of those plain to Flayers. No, we didn't hear from any anybody of that sort. I think because of the nature of litigation. I mean, this is me speculating. They probably wanted to focus on that. Maybe a million dollars wasn't enough to attract their attention. Remember Sean Kaine, mister sudden acceleration, the guy with the software coding gone awry theory. Not even he wants the million dollars. It was nothing more than than, you know, media circus, and it was. It was ridiculous, a media circus. Kane doesn't want to try and win a million dollars because it's a media circus. I'll tell you what a media circus was the entire Toyota sudden acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kane insisted that some elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, because people like Sean Kane couldn't admit that this was just overwhelmingly a matter of human air. I've used the phrase car guys in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt was a car guy. The three people from Car and Driver or car guys. And what's interesting about the car guys is that none of them doubted ever that This is a problem caused by drivers because they understand what a car is. It's a complicated mechanical object that requires attention and skill to be operated safely, and non car people have lost sight of that fact. Here is Eddie Altiman of Car and Driver All more time. I think there is that really really depressing sense of exasperation about how customers expect the car to take care of them, and how the average driver just expects the car to be completely flawless and to save their lives under any circumstances. What the car guys want the rest of us to acknowledge is that driving is a complicated and dangerous act. It is not just the negligent or the reckless who make fatal mistakes. Ordinary people do under seemingly ordinary circumstances. Mark Sailor did nothing wrong. Nothing. What happened to him could have happened to any of us and will happen again unless we can finally have an honest conversation about what a car is and what it is, and what the responsibility of a driver is when things go awrve. Cars do not have minds of their own. A car just does what the driver tells it to do all right, So here we are, we're in our what is this? What is two thousands three camper? Is a two thousand and three or two thousand and four twenty two thousand miles? Okay, get ready? That was I was completely surprised that that was the most un unremarkable, not remarkable thing. And let's right again, Sigernel hold at sixty. You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks to Eddie Altman, Don Sherman, and Casey Colwell a car and driver for helping us to find and buy a two thousand and three camera and taking a day off to hostess. Also thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for braving the break tests. The Penemptly management team is Laura Mayor Andy Bowers in Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Bushkin. On the morning of August twenty eighth, two thousand and nine, Mark Sailor set out from his home in Juleivis to California, just south of San Diego. Sailor was forty five years old, a California HIWI Patrol officer. Ordinarily, he drove a two thousand and six Lexus I S, but his car had a problem with his CD player, so that morning he took it to the dealership and got a loaner a brand new Lexus E. Sailor finished his shift at the HIGWI Patrol and went back home, picked up his wife, daughter, and brother in law Chris Lostrella, and they all set out for the daughter's soccer practice. They were heading up Highway one twenty five and just as they approached a town called Santi, Lostrella, who sitting in the backseat, calls nine one one. What you're about to hear? A morning you is harrowing and see what are you reporting? Yeah, we're Alexis. I'm sorry your cell phone cutting out. We're going one twenty five TV. I'm sorry for alexceritor stuck well one twenty five great, okay, northbound one twenty five. Where are you passing. We are passing up? Where are we passing? Words? We're going on a hundred and twenty mission. Gorge, We're in trouble. We can't We're there's no break, okay, Gorge and three way half mile okay. And you don't have the ability to like turn the vehicle off or anything. Approaching an intersection. We're approaching an intersection. Okay, We're pushing interfect hold on, pray, pray, Hello, oh hello, the o o oh you here is this Jella's horrified response to the Lexus spinning out of control, hitting another vehicle, and plunging down a ravine. Everyone inside the car was killed. The Sailor crash is a heartbreaking story. I hesitated before playing it, but in the end I concluded that you have to hear it to make sense of what happened Next, the tape went viral. It was played on the nightly news, written up in horrified news articles, to the point where a wave of fear swept the country. Toyota is slamming the brakes on its sales due to a sticky accelerator that could put drivers lives in day runaway. Toyota's cars taking off on their own up to one hundred miles an hour. One died she crashed her camera into a tree and a pole. A car had sped up to more than one hundred miles per hour. Hundreds of people came forward with horror stories about the Alexis accelerators getting stuck and Toyota's too. Since Lexus is a brand of Toyota, there were congressional hearings exposs whistleblowers. NASA got involved. Toyota would conduct seven recalls between September two thousand and nine and March two thousand and ten, totaling millions of vehicles. As many as ninety people were estimated to have died in Toyota's that mysteriously accelerated. Toyota ended up paying a one point two billion dollars fine to the US government. They spent another one point one billion to settle a class action lawsuit, and since then they've settled something like four hundred separate lawsuits. The world's largest automobile company was accused of a cover up, of putting profits ahead of people, of having a culture of denial. Toyota's conduct was shameful. He showed a blatant disregard for systems and laws designed to look after the safety of consumers. That's Eric Holder in March two and fourteen. He was the Attorney General of the United States at the time. It's a pretty remarkable day when the chief law enforcement officer of the land calls out one of the largest companies in the world. My name is Malcolm Glaube. You're listening to Revisionist History, where every week we go back and examine something forgotten or misunderstood. This episode is devoted to the Toyota sudden acceleration scandal. Chances are you heard at least some part of that nine one one tape before. Maybe you had a Toyota at the time and had a sudden pang of worry. What I want to do is go back to two thousand and nine and convince you that something went very wrong in the way the controversy played out very well. Let's go back for a moment to the person we started with, Mark Sailor, California Highway patrol officer. He's driving down the highway and he can't stop his car. The accelerator is stuck. His brother in law says. After the crash, another person comes forward to the police and says he had driven the same loner Lexus a few days before and had a similar incident. It accelerated to get past a truck, and when he pushed the throttle towards the floor, that's what car guys called the accelerator pedal, the throttle stuck. What he realized is that someone had put one of those big, thick all weather rubber floor mats in the car, on top of the floor mat that was already there. That second big thick floor mat wasn't attached to those little hooks that hold floor mats down. It slid around, and so somehow the thick mat got wedged under the throttle. That everyone decides is what happened to Sailor maybe he tried to turn the car off, but the Lexus has one of those push button ignitions, and what he may not have realized is that you have to hold that button down for three seconds if you're trying to stop the car while it's in motion. Maybe he tried to put the car in neutral, but it's not always obvious how to do that, particularly if you're panicking. They crash. The nine one one car goes viral and Toyota launches a massive recall of floor mats across its model line. Problem solved, right. Well, No, here's the problem. Nobody who's ever studied the sudden acceleration crisis thinks that floor mats are any more than a small part of the story. It just doesn't make sense. So that's an all weather matt. That's my producer, Jacob Smith talking to Sean Kane. This is the killer format. Okay, this is the format that brought Toyota to fame. Kane runs a consulting firm in Massachusetts called Safety Research and Strategies. Whenever a controversy around unintended acceleration surfaces, Sean Kane's name comes up. He's testified before Congress, he's worked closely with many of the lawsuits against Toyota, and he's not buying the floor matt theory. When the pedal was depressed fully to the floor inkade the way this road here, the pedal extended down to the point where the bottom edge of it would catch here on this rubber piece. Okay, and it would catch on the bottom edge and it wouldn't return. But Kane doesn't believe that floor mats tell the whole story. Floor mats don't reach up and grab pedals. So the way this would have to happen is you'd have to depress your accelerator pedal nearly to the floor all wide overthrooor to wide open throttle, you'd have to mash that accelerator to the floor and to have that catch wide open throttle is another term for flooring it. Kane is saying that for the floor mat to trap the accelerator, the driver has to floor it. But why on earth is a guy driving his family to soccer practice flooring it? Not to mention all the hundreds of other people who complained about Toyota's with stuck accelerators, some of those complaints come from elderly ladies, your grandmother. Basically, since when does your grandmother flora when she's driving her camera down the street? Mark Sailor, he was driving with what he thought was a stock accelerator for a while, Why didn't he just reach down on a yank the floormat away from the pedal? Right, I still have a hard time believing, giving a long distance and the travel of his car, that the floormat was the culprit. Kane thinks that something else must have happened in that car. And by the way, the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis ended up involving hundreds of cases, and in the overwhelming number of those cases, the car didn't even have an oversized, thick plastic floormat. The cars had normal floormats. Something else must have been happening, and a number of people believe that something has to do with software. That there is and was something wrong with the software that governs the throttle in Toyotas in today's cars. Now we're looking at code code that can be up to one hundred million lines of code. The F thirty five Joint Strike Fighter is running about seven million lines of code. A luxury car today can run a hundred million lines of code. You what a half a billion dollar aircraft, you got a fifty thousand dollars car. In The complexity level of the fifty thousand ar car is exponentially greater. Do you think that that car is now going to be defect free and software clear not likely? This is the argument that Kane has made in lawsuits against Toyota. The cars contain a bug in the lines of computer code that control how the car starts and stops. Speeds up and slows down. The La Times also pursued this question, resulting in one of the most prestigious investigative reporting awards in a country, the Lobe, for its work. If the La Times and Sean Kane are right, then that's terrifying because what it means is that what happened to Mark Sailor could happen to you. I wanted to put this fear to a test, that what happened to Mark Sailor could easily happen to you or me. It's a terrible story, after all, but how much should we be afraid that our cars might do the same thing. To test this out, my producer Jacob and I got ourselves a two thousand and three camera two hundred and twenty five thousand miles on it, the best selling Toyota, in fact, the best selling car in America for eleven of the last twelve years. A lot of the unintended acceleration cases happened in cameras. After getting the car, we called up Car and Driver, the premier automotive magazine in the United States. We wanted them to help us figure out what was behind this epidemic of unintended acceleration to try and replicate one of those runaway car situations. So one chilly winter morning, Jacob and I met up with three guys from Car and Driver at Chrysler's proving grounds just west of Detroit. It's a vast racetrack that Chrysler uses to do all of its testing. I'm guessing a thousand acres big guardhouse at the front. The whole time we were there, Christ had someone in a jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on us, making sure we didn't take photos of any of the new cars they were testing. Oh look, there's the Q seven. What the car Driver guys right there. Our guys are Don Sherman, he's the technical director of Car and Driver, and Casey Colwell, young guy Brooks with Don. Eddie Altiman also came. He's the editor of Car and Driver, Cami, Don, Casey, Eddie. They all car guys, which matters because one of the notable facts about sudden acceleration is how the car guys see things differently from the non car guys. Incidentally, Jacob and I would also describe ourselves as car guys, although not quite at the level of the Car and Driver folks. True story, when I was thirteen, I rode away for promotional brochures on every car sold in the world, except for the Soviet zeal which was really hard to get. I still have every one of those brochures. Anyway, back to the racetrack in Detroit, Silver camera entering VDF, staying out of your way like we were before. The plan is to take the camera up to some serious speeds, keep the throttle wide open, as if the accelerator pedal is somehow stuck, and then see if we can stop the car. What happens if you have your foot full on the accelerator pedal and then you also slam on the brakes at the same time, because intuitively you'd think that's what must happen in sudden acceleration. Your car surges uncontrollably, you slam on the brakes. We want to figure out what that looks like. You're gonna make it go wide open throttle, then quickly you apply the brakes, not really a panic, but just stop at the best you can. So Jacob goes out first with Casey behind the wheel. He accelerates so bringing it back up sixty one, sixty two, sixty three five, sixty seven, eight nine, seventy and about to do it. All right, We're gonna put the throttle down, so the gas pedal is floored, and now Casey hits the break with the gas pedal still down and we locked up a little bit. But what I mean that's what the car stops? Oh? Yeah, car stops. But no loud noises, no smoke billowing out the back. Jacob asks Casey about the brakes. What kind of shape are they in? Is it a little cooked or no, it's not. I don't think the brakes are cooked. They smell like we'll know in a second. Don't even sell. Okay, if you have functioning brakes, breaks win breaks first engine, the brakes win. Then it's my turn. I get into Camray with Eddie Aultraman. He's driving. We take the car down straight away? Can we go a little fast? Let me favor? At seventy, Ultiman hits the break firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to a halt, throttles open. We've got a really old, not a terribly good shape car, filled with three people and a bunch of equipment and it's still stopping. So what's the What is the difference between breaking with your foot completely off the accelerator and breaking like this. What I mean is how much longer does it take to stop a car with a throttle wide open? About ten feet if you want to quantify it, it can be a little bit more, but not so much that you'd notice. Back in two thousand and nine, Ultimate Head Car and Driver do a version of this very same test. We basically did this with a variety of cars, and we found actually that with the throttle stuck open or going in seventy miles an hour, the camera stopped pretty close to the same distance as a Ford Taurus that had his thrill closed. A camera with the accelerator stuck wide open stops basically as quickly as a Taurus breaking normally. It's not a big deal. Yeah, but of course we're not panicking. Yeah, we're not under the impression that the carsons as my demons and we're in a closed kind of situation. But you can see, I'll get it up to seventy Not a big deal. Yeah, it's the most undramatic you try. I would love to truck. Yeah. We were out on the testing ground for two hours. We tried every trick in the book. The car stopped, We loaded up the camera with three adults and a ton of equipment. It stopped. We turned off the engine while the car was in motion. It stopped once. We took the camera up to one hundred miles an hour. What do we at getting there? It took forever, but it stopped. Afterwards, Don Sherman and I talked about the strangely normal experience of bringing a camera to a full stop with the accelerator to the floor. The brakes are powerful. You got four wheels working, and it's fairly easy for them. Think of the poor engine that has to convert gasoline to power and move all that breaking is relatively easy to do, it much more powerful. That's why people don't acknowledge that all the capability built into their car. When Car and Driver did their version of this experiment right after the Sailor crash, they went so far as to do a full throttle braking to on a Ruche Stage three Mustang. If you aren't a car guy, I should explain. Ruche is an independent company that takes sports cars and basically puts them on steroids. The engine of the Stage three Ruche has five hundred and forty horsepower. That's two to three times more powerful than the typical car on the road. A monster a rouche would take a camera and chop it into little, tiny pieces. So car and driver take the ruche Mustang up to one hundred pounds an hour, keep their foot on the accelerator at the same time they slam on the brakes, and what happens. The car stops. Now it takes a good nine hundred feet to come to a full stop. There's all kinds of huffing and puffing, but it stops. Breaks go up against one of the most powerful engines on the road, and the brakes win. I think you can now understand how crucial this pointed Toyota gets embroiled in a massive controversy. They pay billions of dollars in fines, They face allegations of a cover up, all because their cars are supposed to be suddenly and mysteriously accelerating. But if your car is suddenly and mysteriously accelerating, all you have to do is step on the brakes, because brakes beat engines. So why couldn't Mark Sailor stop his Lexus that day as he sped down Higway one twenty five. I know it sounds ridiculous and tragic, but it's the only logical explanation because he never put his foot on the brake. Maybe the most important person in this whole story is a man named Dick Schmidt. Sadly, Schmidt died last fall, which is a real loss, because Schmidt was a really remarkable man. As a kid, he was a champion gymnast, later a champion sailor, a sub three hour marathoner. He owned five porsches, He raced cars, a car guy. He was also a professor at UCLA who becomes an important figure in what's called human performance research. Human performance research asks how do people move and act and interact with the physical world. Schmidt starts the Journal of Motor Behavior, and along the way he becomes maybe the world's leading expert on the way your feet behave when you drive a car. I talked to Schmidt about a year before he died. He was in a wheelchair. By that point, he had a neurological disease and you'll hear a little bit of his illness in his speech. I'm going to have to repeat what he says because it's really important and I want to make sure you understand it. Schmidt got involved in the sudden acceleration issue years ago when he got a call from an attorney in Washington, d C. It was a case involving a taxi driver who picked up some people outside a hotel. Nathan knows he's run full rattled on Parkway. What Schmidt's saying is, next thing you know, he's running full throttle down the street and he makes a left turn and realizes, oh god, I'm coming to a big traffic circle, and he ends up putting the car into a wall. That was nineteen ninety four, years before the Toyota scandal, but it's exactly the same scenario. A car takes off mysteriously, the driver can't stop. It. Was there ever a moment when you suspected it might be a mechanical cause to these incidents? No, what I'm asking is if Schmidt ever suspected that the problem might be with the car, a malfunction, a faulty bit of software, an engineering failure. And Schmidt, one of the world's leading experts in human factors, is saying that never once crossed his mind. Why Because everything about sudden acceleration looked like a problem with the driver the car. He starts to look at other cases and discovers that there are some pretty clear patterns. But those patterns don't involve a particular make or model of car. Nothing that could make you say, oh, there's something wrong with that kind of car. Every carmaker gets hit with complaints of sudden acceleration. When it is a high profile case like the Sailor crash, people get focused on one brand, like Toyota, but that's just the effect of publicity. It happens to everyone. The patterns involve the kinds of people who have sudden acceleration incidents and the kinds of circumstances that lead to sudden acceleration incidents. The drivers tend to be older, they tend to be shorter, They tend to be people, and this is really important, they tend to be people who are driving an unfamiliar car, so for instance, parking lot attendance, and the majority of these incidents happen right after someone gets into a car for the first time, or when they're parking or driving at very low speeds. Now you have to make sense of these patterns. You could argue, i mean, against all reason, but you could argue that cars just get really upset and misbehave when they're being driven by parking lot attendants. But that's ridiculous. The patterns Schmidt found mean it's not the car. What Schmidt concludes is that people are getting into strange cars, and maybe because those people are too short and didn't adjust the seat properly, they were a little further away from the pedal than usual. Or maybe they're trying to park and because they're doing the stopping and starting and getting in and out of a parking space, they get thrown just a little out of their comfort zone. They start making stabbing motions with their right foot, like someone groping in the dark. The term Dick Schmidt uses to describe this is impulse ability. Your brain requests a very specific action, but your body fails to deliver exactly what it's told to do. You mean to say that even when producing a very familiar physical movement, Yeah, there is variability in how I move my limbs in the force with which I so. Baseball players swinging a bat at a fastball may feel that he's reproducing his swing every time, but he's not. That's why even the greatest golfers in the world sometimes hit the ball in the rough, or the best basketball players in the world miss a free throw. I don't think the far is confused if which is a very pedal, which is excelera pally knows, but he is a guess. Schmidt says, I don't think the driver is confused. If you ask him which is the brake pedal and which is the accelerator pedal, he knows, but he gets in this state where he feels like he's acting normally and he's not. In other words, somewhere between intention and action, there's a garble, a glitch on what happens. The driver puts his foot on the accelerator, thinking it's the break. He wants to stop the car, but in fact he's speeding it up. So back to floor mats. Why do they sometimes get implicated in sudden acceleration because they throw off the expected geometry of the car. A big thick winter mat stacked on top of an existing mat raises the floor of the footwell, makes the accelerator and break seem much closer to your right foot, And if you're in a strange car, that just increases the odds of impulse variability. It's one of those little things that leads to a garble between intention and action. Once you understand Dick Schmidt, you realize there are all kinds of scenarios that could explain what happened to Mark Sailor. Let me give you one. He's driving down the highway with the cruise control on. Both of his feet are on the floor mat. He comes up behind a car going slower than he is, so he puts his right foot back on the accelerator hard but as he does that, the floor mat slides under the throttle, locking it open. Now comes the crucial part. He takes his foot off the accelerator to return to his cruise control speed, but the car doesn't slow down. It surges forward. The throttle is locked open by the floor mat. He's alarmed. He picks his foot up to hit the brake, but it's a car he's not familiar with. It's a loaner, and he puts his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, and he presses it down, expecting the car to slow, but it doesn't. That's why Listrella says. The brakes don't work, and Sailor freaks out, so he presses down harder and the car goes even faster, and he freaks out even more. I think it's important to note here that sailor isn't negligent. He's not a fault. He's not speeding or running a red light, or drunk. He's making the mistake that almost any of us could make under the circumstances. What happened to him in that moment is confusion. So they're going into a kind of panic state where instead of asking the question is my foot on the red pedal? They think the problem is not pushing the brake hard enough. Yea perception that the brakes have failed as pedal goes to the floor and the card of the stop. Schmidt says, the perception is that the brakes have failed because the pedal goes to the floor and the car doesn't stop. Dick Schmidt isn't proposing some kind of far fetched theory here. In February twenty eleven, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its report on the whole Toyota business that's the one NASA got involved in, and they basically agreed with Schmidt. They concluded that the overwhelming number of sudden acceleration cases were clearly pedal air. The agency knows this because every car has a black box that records when the break and when the accelerator are used time and again. In these cases, the black boxes showed that the brakes hadn't even been touched. So here's my question, why is it so hard for people to accept the fact that there is a really simple, straightforward explanation for what happened in the sudden acceleration cases? Because it was hard. Right after the Sailor case, the Secretary of Transportation Rail Hood went before Congress and said, my advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it. Do you realize how insane that is. This is the guy in charge of American auto safety, and he is completely deluded about the cause of the problem. He wants to blame the car. Some reporters do exactly the same thing. They have said, there's absolutely no electronic problem in these cars again and again what we've established with this type of In February of twenty ten, Brian Ross at ABC News does a story on a runaway avalon. It's about how the software in Toyota's causes them to accelerate uncontrollably. Ooh, it's like that. But of course, all you have to do if a Toyota accelerates uncontrollably is used the brakes, So ABC rigs up an avalon and essentially stages an episode of unintended acceleration. Grace don't work, Grace give out Gee. The fakery was later uncovered by the website Jelopnik. Here's the editor of Jelopnick, Patrick George. They got a university professor to cut three wires within the electronic throttle control system, then connected two of the wires to each other in a specific pattern and with a specific resistor to create a link between two final wires with a switch in between, so that he can control it. In other words, this car was rigged. It was rigged in away that you would never produce these results in real life. At the same time, they fake a video, or if you ask ABC, they make an editing error that makes it look like the car's engine is revving dramatically. In fact, the cars in park in the video you can actually see that the brake light is on the whole time. They go to all of this trouble of splicing wires and revving engines. All that because they're trying to avoid the simplest and most plausible explanation, which is people are hitting the wrong pedal crazy. It gets worse at the height of the Toyota controversy. Consumer Reports releases a video telling driver is what to do in the case of unintended acceleration. So this is one of the most trusted and irreputable brands in the United States. Millions of people look to Consumer Reports for objective advice. Here's what their head of automotive testing, Jake Fisher, has to say. A car accelerating out of control is a very serious and scary situation for anyone. A gas pedal could get stuck because of a malfunction, because a broken throttle return spring, or even a jam floormat. Fortunately, to remain calm and follow a few steps, you can easily avoid tragedy. Wait, stop right there. He lists a series of reasons why a car might accelerate out of control, and he neglects to mention the number one cause, which is that a driver has his foot on the wrong pedal. Okay, on to the next problem. Here at our track, We're going to demonstrate to you what you should do, and more importantly, what you shouldn't do. If you're ever in this unfortunate situation, if you find that your car is chlorating hard, even after you're taking your foot off the gas pedal, your first and stink's probably the right one. Step one, put your foot on the brake firmly and don't lift off. It's extremely important not to lift your foot off the brake. Wait wait, wait, this is even crazier than an ABC reporter faking a killer Toyota Avalon Fisher says it's extremely important not to lift your foot off the brake. No, no, no. The whole problem of unintended acceleration is caused by the fact that people mistakenly think they have their foot firmly on the brake when they don't. He needs to say the exact opposite. He needs to say, it is extremely important to lift your foot off whatever pedal it is on, because chances are you are mistakenly pressing the accelerator. Now place it back on the brake firmly. This is an advice, This is maultpractice. In the spring of two thousand and ten, the people who run the autowebsite edmonds dot com got really frustrated with how nutty the discussion of sudden acceleration have become, so they announced a contest. If anyone could prove that the car was the culprit and sudden acceleration that is an explanation different from someone hitting the wrong pedal or a floor mat trapping a throttle, Edmonds would pay them a million dollars. A million dollars they put together a panel of experts, engineering professors, car industry veterans, and who came forward to win? I asked Dan Edmonds, who heads up the site's vehicle testing. He says they got a grand total of nineteen submissions, of which only five even met the eligibility requirements of the contest, and of those five, one talks about pedal error, one talks about floor mats again, and the rest, he says, are just nonsense, so they can't award the prize. The million dollars is still sitting there while you had this contest. There are numerous lawsuits filed against Toyota, alleging, among other things, flaws in the software controlling the electronic throttle. You didn't hear from any of those plain to Flayers. No, we didn't hear from any anybody of that sort. I think because of the nature of litigation. I mean, this is me speculating. They probably wanted to focus on that. Maybe a million dollars wasn't enough to attract their attention. Remember Sean Kaine, mister sudden acceleration, the guy with the software coding gone awry theory. Not even he wants the million dollars. It was nothing more than than, you know, media circus, and it was. It was ridiculous, a media circus. Kane doesn't want to try and win a million dollars because it's a media circus. I'll tell you what a media circus was the entire Toyota sudden acceleration scandal, because people like Sean Kane insisted that some elaborate electronic cover up stood behind it, because people like Sean Kane couldn't admit that this was just overwhelmingly a matter of human air. I've used the phrase car guys in this episode a few times. Dick Schmidt was a car guy. The three people from Car and Driver or car guys. And what's interesting about the car guys is that none of them doubted ever that This is a problem caused by drivers because they understand what a car is. It's a complicated mechanical object that requires attention and skill to be operated safely, and non car people have lost sight of that fact. Here is Eddie Altiman of Car and Driver All more time. I think there is that really really depressing sense of exasperation about how customers expect the car to take care of them, and how the average driver just expects the car to be completely flawless and to save their lives under any circumstances. What the car guys want the rest of us to acknowledge is that driving is a complicated and dangerous act. It is not just the negligent or the reckless who make fatal mistakes. Ordinary people do under seemingly ordinary circumstances. Mark Sailor did nothing wrong. Nothing. What happened to him could have happened to any of us and will happen again unless we can finally have an honest conversation about what a car is and what it is, and what the responsibility of a driver is when things go awrve. Cars do not have minds of their own. A car just does what the driver tells it to do all right, So here we are, we're in our what is this? What is two thousands three camper? Is a two thousand and three or two thousand and four twenty two thousand miles? Okay, get ready? That was I was completely surprised that that was the most un unremarkable, not remarkable thing. And let's right again, Sigernel hold at sixty. You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Sky, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Saraka. Special thanks to Eddie Altman, Don Sherman, and Casey Colwell a car and driver for helping us to find and buy a two thousand and three camera and taking a day off to hostess. Also thanks to audio producer Zach Rosen for braving the break tests. The Penemptly management team is Laura Mayor Andy Bowers in Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.