said Monday it would start shipping parts to dealers for repairing
accelerator pedals in 2.3 million cars and trucks this week, vowing to
move as quickly as possible while admitting the problem was an
embarrassment.
The Japanese automaker said it had quickly designed
a steel reinforcement bar for the pedals to keep them from sticking in
certain situations, and that the repair would take about 30 minutes per
vehicle.
already planned to shut down or curtail production at six North
American assembly plants this week, and said its supplier was shipping
a revised design to its factories.
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety and reliability of the vehicles our customers drive,” said
U.S. sales arm. “We deeply regret the concern that our recalls have
caused for our customers and we are doing everything we can – as fast
as we can – to make things right.”
Lentz defended the company’s actions, saying the two recalls would solve any problems
“This is embarrassing for us, to have this kind of
recall situation,” Lentz said in a conference call. “But it doesn’t
necessarily mean we have lost our edge on quality.”
Safety advocates and attorneys say
has yet to fully explain why its vehicles appear to have far more
complaints of sudden acceleration than any other automaker. The issue
has been linked by one advocate to 19 deaths and 341 injuries stemming
from 815 separate crashes, with more than 2,000 complaints.
Lentz said
“The number of deaths, number of accidents, whether
it’s one or whether it’s 2,000, doesn’t really make a difference,” he
told the “Today” show. “We’ve been investigating this for a long time.”
The decision to recall vehicles for faulty gas pedals reversed calls
that the pedals didn’t pose a safety threat. Lentz said the recall was
spurred by three complaints the automaker received in October.
The Japanese automaker made several similar
decisions in earlier investigations involving sudden acceleration, and
had to be pressured by federal regulators into a recall of floor mats
that could trap gas pedals. That recall has grown to cover 5.4 million
vehicles, and as part of the repair
has vowed to install software in some models that would override the
gas pedal if it and the brakes are pressed at the same time, and make
it standard on all models by the end of the year.
Lentz said
“I drive Toyotas, my family members drive Toyotas,
my friends and neighbors drive Toyotas,” Lentz said. “I would not have
them in products that I knew were not safe.”
Lentz said dealers should be getting parts over the
next few days, and after training mechanics should be able to start
repairs this weekend. He said
would tell dealers to repair customers first before fixing vehicles in
stock, but it was up to individual dealers to apply their own schedules.
While
issued a “stop sale” order on eight models nationwide, Lentz said
dealers could resume sales once they fix any particular vehicle. It
plans to restart production
The pedal recall, along with the expansion of a
separate recall of floor mats that could trap pedals open to 5.4
million vehicles, has raised several questions about how
The automaker faces two congressional hearings on the recalls, including one set for Thursday.
release that some dealers would stay open 24 hours to provide repairs
for the accelerator pedal recall, and that if possible, it would repair
models covered by the floor mat recall as well.
The automaker first received complaints about the
pedals in 2007 and 2008, and changed the parts in production, but only
decided it was a safety issue after receiving more complaints last
year.
declined to say how many or how severe the complaints were that
triggered the move, but the company that supplied the pedals has said
it was fewer than a dozen, none of which were linked to an injury.
Several automakers, including all
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