Global Biz
Toyota faces federal, congressional probe
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-02-23 14:16
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A month later, NHTSA issued an "equipment recall" of floor mats involving 55,000 Toyota Camry and Lexus ES350. In an internal presentation, the company later said the limited recall saved Toyota $100 million or more. The slide was marked "Wins for Toyota - Safety Group."
The internal presentation, obtained by The Associated Press, was dated July 6, 2009, less than two months before a high-speed crash near San Diego killed a California highway patrol officer and his family and renewed concerns over sudden acceleration in Toyotas. In October 2009, Toyota issued its largest-ever US recall, involving about 4 million vehicles, to address pedals getting stuck in floor mats.
The documents could raise concerns in Congress over whether Toyota put profits ahead of customer safety and pushed regulators to narrow recalls' scope.
"You can feel that the staff were thinking more about company profits than customers," said Mamoru Kato, an analyst at Tokai-Tokyo Securities.
Toyota has said its "first priority is the safety of our customers" and promised changes, including an outside review of company operations, more focus on responding to customer complaints and improving communication with federal officials.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding its hearing Tuesday with Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA, and LaHood. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee follows Wednesday with testimony from Toyota president Akio Toyoda, Yoshimi Inaba, president and chief executive of Toyota Motor North America Inc., NHTSA Administrator David Strickland and LaHood, and safety experts and family members of victims. A Senate committee is planning a March 2 hearing.
Stupak, who leads the investigative panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would ask Toyota executives about potential electronic problems and complaints of sudden unintended acceleration.
In his letter to Lentz, Stupak wrote that the committee's "preliminary assessment is that Toyota resisted the possibility that electronic defects could cause safety concerns, relied on a flawed engineering report, and made misleading public statements concerning the adequacy of recent recalls to address the risk of sudden unintended acceleration."
Stupak said the documents show the sole report produced by Toyota on the acceleration issue purported to test and analyze potential electronic causes. The report, by consulting firm Exponent Inc., "was initiated just two months ago and appears to have serious flaws," Stupak wrote.
He said experts interviewed by the committee demonstrated that the report used an extremely small sample that would not get to the root of the problem. One of the primary authors of the Exponent report said they did not examine any vehicles or components that had the unintended accelerations.
