Page 100 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

top of one another, it would provide an extra margin of safety
against the more common practice of putting an all-weather mat
on top of the existing carpet mat for the winter and removing it
in the spring.
Toyota began notifying customers of this effort in late Oc-
tober. In its letter to customers, approved by the NHTSA per
regulations, Toyota was at pains to clarify that the “defect does
not exist in vehicles in which the driver side floor mat is compat-
ible with the vehicle and properly secured.” In its press release
about the plan to alter gas pedal size, however, Toyota stated that
the letter “confirms that no defect exists in vehicles in which the
driver’s floor mat is compatible with the vehicle and properly
secured.” The NHTSA quickly rebuked Toyota for that state-
ment because the agency felt that it implied that the NHTSA
agreed with Toyota’s conclusions. The NHTSA issued a state-
ment saying that the Toyota press statement was “inaccurate” and
“misleading” and that removing floor mats “did not correct the
underlying defect”; the agency had decided that pedal entrap-
ment resulting from drivers using the wrong—and improperly
installed—floor mats was a vehicle defect. Of course, this inter-
action only served to ramp up the public tensions in the United
States. The rebuke from the NHTSA convinced many people
that Toyota was not being honest and was not acting in the best
interests of customers.
Given what we now know about the very specific situation
that led to the Saylor accident, the floor mat recall seems like
something of an overreaction: it wasn’t floor mats in general that
caused the Saylor accident, or even floor mats that weren’t clipped
down, but using the thick rubber floor mats from a much larger
vehicle in a smaller vehicle and not clipping them down. Many
customers and the general public were understandably skeptical.

69