Toyota used ‘secret recalls’ for floor mat issues

[DainBramaged]

When Toyota Motor Corp concluded that seemingly harmless floor mats posed a danger in all of its cars and trucks, the automaker sent a stark warning intended to prevent crashes.

"If the floor mat is NOT properly placed and secured, it could slip and interfere with the movement of the pedals during driving and may cause an accident," Toyota said. "NEVER install more than one floor mat at a time in the driver's seating position."

The only problem: almost no one in the American driving public saw the warning, which was issued in September 2007 — two full years before Toyota announced the first in a string of recalls taking aim at the problem of unintended acceleration. That is because it was sent as a so-called "technical service bulletin" to about 1,500 Toyota and Lexus dealers.

A nearly identical bulletin went out in April 2008, cautioning that improperly installed floor mats could cause crashes right across the Toyota lineup, in the Camry, Corolla, Matrix, Sienna, Tundra, Sequoia and Land Cruiser.

In both cases, the notices quietly provided to Toyota dealers and filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration carried a more explicit warning than anything that regulators or company officials said to the public.

In September 2007, under an arrangement negotiated with Toyota, NHTSA issued a six-paragraph "consumer advisory" that urged owners of the Camry and the Lexus ES 350 to swap out recalled all-weather floor mats for new ones and to make sure that they were secured to keep from slipping forward and "causing the vehicle to accelerate uncontrollably."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36036209/ns/business-autos/

[DainBramaged]

1. More

As Toyota struggles to bounce back from a safety crisis that has tarnished its reputation and as regulators probe what went wrong, a key questions is how an industry-wide practice of sending technical notices to auto dealers was allowed to morph into what critics describe as a channel for conducting recalls in all but name, extending warranties and sending safety notices outside the glare of public scrutiny.


A Reuters review of the technical service bulletins sent by Toyota in recent years shows the automaker used the process to address quality and potential safety problems on hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Such repairs outside the recall system provide a counterpoint to Toyota's claim that it has outperformed the industry by limiting vehicle recalls over the past decade to just 11 percent of the total, less than its 13 percent U.S. market share.

That message was the centerpiece of a Toyota fact sheet handed out by the automaker in late February in Washington, just as Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda was finishing up a grueling day of testimony before a U.S. congressional panel.