Page 129 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

to the U.S. recall. Toyota has not been fined or reprimanded by
any European regulator.
It’s easy to second-guess this decision in hindsight, knowing
what we do now about the effect that the sticky pedal controversy
would have on Toyota’s reputation. But the decision that the sticky
pedals did not represent a safety defect was made well before allega-
tions of runaway Toyotas came to dominate headlines. So instead
of issuing a recall, engineers began designing an alternative version
of the pedal to put into production. By July 2009, still a month
before the Saylor accident, TMC and CTS engineers had changed
the design of the pedal (replacing the synthetic material and alter-
ing some pedal components so that, even if the material became
sticky, the pedal would operate normally), and a plan was in place
to, on a rolling basis, replace the existing design on all new vehicles,
beginning with right-hand-drive vehicles in Europe, but eventu-
ally expanding worldwide to all vehicles that used CTS pedals.
Toyota Motor Europe issued a technical bulletin to distribu-
tors in Europe, warning them to keep an eye out for the problem
and to replace any pedals that seemed to be sticking. While some
information about the sticky pedals was shared between customer-
quality engineering personnel in Europe and the United States, it
was still perceived to be a European-only issue.
It wasn’t until the period between August and October 2009,
when a Toyota Matrix and several Corollas in the United States
were found with the same stickiness in the pedal operation, that
Toyota engineers in Japan began to suspect that the problem
could affect any vehicle with the CTS pedals. The vehicles identi-
fied in the United States had the same symptoms as the vehicles
in Europe, but just as in Europe, there were no reports of acci-
dents. Engineers in Japan were able to reproduce the stickiness,
and, after extensive testing, by December they concluded that the

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