the honorable david mccurdy, from the alliance of automobile manufacturers. we welcome you, again, to this subcommittee hearing. we would like to recognize, for five minutes, for the purposes of the opening statement, -- >> thank you so much, mr. chairman. i am the last person to require an out of company to have a recall. this was 31 years ago. i would like to say that when you do find the defect, the automobile companies will do a recall, and you do not have to go to court. but sometimes you will have to go to court. in the toyota case, this elaborates on that. there has been a misconception on the defect. the last case that was litigated by the department of transportation on this issue, the federal court of appeals made several important comments. this is not in my testimony. i hope that this will be on the record and i know that this is an important issue that has come up several times. what you have said is that to find the defect, you must find that the vehicle itself is defective. and that is manifest itself in materials to the automobiles and perform

david mccurdy who is the president of the alliance for automobile manufacturing's. . . i think there has been a misconception on what a defect is. the last page that was litigated on this issue, the central court of appeals made several important comments. this is not in my testimony. i think this is an important issue. it has come up several times. what the court was was do find a defect -- the vehicle must be shown to be defective. it manifest itself in performance of the automobile. it could be performance defect. they do not have to show there are five or 500 or 5000 consumer complaints that have arisen. often, those claims are not allowed in court. it is not going to find the result. george 11 fesays it is not mind any application of identifying the manufacturing failures. it to me be based exclusively on the performance records of the vehicle. i think this changes if you look at the 201toyota agency should approach this investigation. i think the agency has fallen into a trap. it seems to be a burden of having to define what the defect is in terms of the failure f