Page 95 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

all doubt about the real cause of the accident: a floor mat from
the wrong vehicle, incorrectly installed in the Saylors’ car by the
Lexus dealer who loaned it to the family.*
One of the first things that the investigating officer noticed
when examining the car was that the floor mat in the ES 350 was
a rubber all-weather floor mat (AWFM) designed for the Lexus
RX400h sport utility vehicle (a vehicle with much more driver
floor space) and that the mat was not clipped down. Further-
more, as a result of the fire, “the accelerator pedal had melted and
fused to the upper right hand corner of the mat,” indicating that
the pedal had been jammed in the mat when the accident oc-
curred.
Despite a checklist distributed by Toyota to its dealers that spe-
cifically identified the importance of checking the proper instal-
lation of the correct floor mats in the ES 350, developed after the
2007 recall of ES 350 all-weather floor mats, Mark Saylor drove
away from the dealership with the wrong floor mat. When the
investigator placed one of the large RX400h mats in an ES 350
back at the Lexus dealer, he reported: “Each time I depressed the
pedal, it became trapped on one of the edges of the AWFM. This
was not the case with the ES 350 AWFM. Not only did the pedal
become trapped in the SUV mat, but it remained trapped.”
The most compelling piece of evidence implicating the floor
mat, however, is that a jammed accelerator resulting from hav-
ing the wrong floor mat in the car isn’t just a theory—it had hap-
pened to another customer using the same vehicle just a few days
before the Saylor accident. Frank Bernard had been issued the
loaner vehicle by the Lexus dealer on August 24. The following
* All quotes and details here are taken from the official San Diego County
Sheriff’s Department report, available at http://autos.aol.com/gallery/saylor
-crash-report/.

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