Page 140 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

wholly unrelated to vehicle electronics—after months of deni-
als from Toyota that there were issues other than floor mats with
vehicles meant that Toyota had been dragging its feet on sharing
information with the agency. That feeling was amplified as details
came out about the months that had passed between reproducing
the sticky pedal problem reported in Europe and sharing the full
details of the phenomenon with U.S. regulators.*

Finding a Fix for the Sticky Pedals

When the recall was announced, Toyota had not yet identified a
viable approach for fixing the sticky pedals. While a new variant
of the pedal, one that was not susceptible to stickiness, had gone
into limited production in mid-2009, there were not enough of
the new pedals being produced to replace the more than 2.3 mil-
lion in use in the United States, much less all of those in use
worldwide. Toyota decided to shut down assembly of all vehicles
using the new CTS pedals so that the relatively small number of
new pedals could be allocated to repairing customer vehicles. As
Bob Carter, group vice president at TMS, explained:

We stopped production of all 11 assembly lines and
transported 27,000 pedals to dealers. We knew that
27,000 was just a drop of water in the Pacific Ocean
compared to the 2.3 million we needed. But we wanted
to do something for the customer.

* The NHTSA’s perception that the sticky pedals in Europe were a safety defect
and should have been reported much earlier ultimately led the agency to fine
Toyota more than $16 million, the maximum fine allowed by law and the larg-
est fine for an automobile manufacturer ever.

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