Yamaha Answers Safety Probe With PR Attacks

In response to the August 4, 2009 airing of a CBS news program on the problems Yamaha Motors has experienced with the Yamaha Rhino, one of its off road products, the multi-national corporation unleashed a public relations campaign against CBS News, crash victims, and victims’ lawyers.  While Yamaha’s PR efforts are clearly an attempt to build support for a product acknowledged to be dangerous and defective, they are also an indirect attack on rights that all Americans hold dear—the right to free speech as embodied in a free, unfettered press, and the right of victims to present their cases to a jury of their peers.

A little background: The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been investigating Yamaha’s “Rhino,” a “utility terrain vehicle” or “UTV,” for some time as was disclosed in a November 2008 Wall Street Journal article.  The CPSC’s investigation was prompted by the inordinate number of deaths and literally bone-crushing injuries that have resulted from Rhino rollover accidents, most of which occurred at low speeds and on level ground.  Then, on March 31, 2009, the CPSC “in cooperation with Yamaha Motor Corp.” announced a “free repair program to address safety issues” associated with all Rhino models—a product recall by anyone’s definition.  As a part of the “agreement” with the CPSC, Yamaha suspended the sale of all Rhinos until repairs could be made to “improve handling” and “reduce injuries.”  In order to be safe, the CPSC stated that all Rhinos must have the “repairs” which include : half-doors, additional passenger handholds, spacers on the rear wheels, and the removal of the rear anti-sway bar. The CPSC also advised consumers to “immediately stop using Rhino[s] until the repairs are installed by a dealer.”

Rhino rollovers have resulted in hundreds of lawsuits by injured Americans and their families seeking redress for their injuries.  My firm represents over one hundred Rhino victims, and I know first-hand of the devastating effect these deaths and injuries have had on these people and their families. It is my job to “carry the message” of these victims to a jury and to let the jury decide the case on the level playing field of a trial. It is the media’s job to “carry the message” of the news of the day to the American people and on August 4, CBS News did just that.  In its story, CBS reported the facts of the CPSC investigation, interviewed Inez Tenenbaum, Chairman of the CPSC, interviewed a young man who lost his hand as a result of a Rhino rollover, showed a video of an actual Rhino rollover injury that was caught on tape in the parking lot of one of Yamaha’s own dealerships, and disclosed that two Yamaha executives experienced a rollover accident in 2002—before the Rhino was released.

Yamaha declined to be interviewed on camera. Instead, on the following morning, the company launched a sophisticated internet public relations campaign seeking to discredit CBS News and cruelly, Rhino victims.  In short, rather than directly address the substance of the CBS News report on the safety issues associated with the 150,000 Rhinos in use across the country, Yamaha elected to “kill the messengers” through PR misinformation that alleged, among other things, a conspiracy between CBS and lawyers representing Rhino victims.

Even when faced with what amounts to a government imposed recall of the Rhino, over 400 factually similar lawsuits, and rollover accidents involving its own employees, Yamaha still refuses to accept any responsibility for its product.  Instead, Yamaha has chosen to attack the media, injury victims, and their supporters by using PR mavens tweeting on the internet. The freedom of the press and the right to trial by jury will survive Yamaha’s internet machinations.  The press must continue to report corporate misconduct and reply to untruthful attacks against its reporting.  Ultimately, all of Yamaha’s misdeeds will be revealed in a forum that will prove most inconvenient and difficult to manipulate--a court of law.

Annesley H. DeGaris 

Cory Watson Crowder & DeGaris