Page 128 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

from other manufacturers. That was the same conclusion that
TMC quality engineers in Japan reached. The sticking pedals
they were examining were not sticking at wide-open throttle—
and the brakes stopped the vehicle in the same amount of time and
distance as vehicles without a sticky pedal. Based on those data,
they concluded that the sticky pedals were not a safety issues and
that therefore there was no need to issue a recall.
This is obviously not a clear-cut decision. There is an argu-
ment to be made that any unexpected behavior of a gas or brake
pedal is a safety defect and should be treated as such. A driver
who finds his vehicle continuing to accelerate or maintaining
speed after he has taken his foot off the gas pedal may panic and
make poor decisions rather than simply stepping on the brake
to bring the vehicle under control. But the Toyota engineers’
position—that the sticky pedals were not a safety defect—is also
quite understandable. A driver who wanted to bring her car to a
stop could do so without taking any action different from what
she would do normally.
Buttressing the Toyota engineers’ perspective was the fact
that no accidents had been reported as a result of the sticky ped-
als (and the NASA study also did not find any examples of an ac-
cident caused by sticky pedals*); the vehicles in question had all
been brought to a Toyota dealer by customers who were unhappy
with the pedal operation rather than for investigation after an
accident. It’s also worth noting that this perspective—that the
sticky pedals were not a safety defect—has held in Europe, where
the sticky pedals were first found. Toyota did not initiate a recall
of the European pedals until after discussions with NHTSA led
* Matthew Wald, “Electronic Flaws Did Not Cause Toyota Problems, U.S.
Says,” New York Times, February 8, 2011; http://www.nytimes.com/2011
/02/09/business/09auto.html.

97