Toyota Canada Inc. officials were under attack on Tuesday from federal MPs for their failure to notify regulators about safety issues regarding its accelerator pedal when the car maker first became aware of the flaw.
The company received its first complaint of unintended acceleration in late October, but MPs wanted to know why the world’s No. 1 car maker didn’t notify Transport Canada and Toyota owners until January, after it issued a recall for Canadian cars.
They acknowledged Canadian regulators had recently received 17 complaints regarding Toyota vehicles — but only one of those was related to unintended acceleration. Further, a review of its Canadian models, with all-weather floor mats built specifically for this market, did not share some of the same potential flaws as Toyota’s U.S. models.
Still, “we have 100% on the remedies for the floor mat and pedal assemblies,” Mr. Beatty said, adding nearly two-thirds of recalled Canadian cars have been repaired.
Over a quarter of million Toyota-made vehicles, or 270,000, were recalled across Canada – a.nd eight million worldwide — in an effort to address issues leading to unintended acceleration.
The Japanese car maker, No. 1 worldwide, has blamed sticky accelerators and floor mats for the cases of unintended acceleration. When he appeared before U.S. legislators, Mr. Toyoda apologized, and acknowledged the company’s rapid expansion in recent years might have affected the quality of its vehicles.
As a precautionary measure, Toyota temporarily halted production of eight models in Canada and the United States as it searched for a solution to the accelerator glitch. Production has since resumed.
“There was a serious safety problem, and you are talking to [the supplier] about a redesign but no one told Transport Canada until after the recall [in January]?,” a frustrated Mr. Watson told Toyota officials.
Mr. Beatty later explained the potential pedal problem in Canada was due to wear and condensation, and the company could not “trigger” a response before it had “a solution it could deploy.”
The acceleration cases have caused a public relations nightmare for Toyota. Last week, just as the car maker had appeared to put the worst behind it, a California driver claimed his Toyota Prius raced out of control on a California highway. But both Toyota and U.S. regulators said they found no evidence to support the driver’s claims.
Car analysts have focused on the prospect that drivers could be making mistakes — hitting the accelerator instead of the brake — or that Toyota vehicles could be subject to a software glitch or other problem that is hard to replicate.