Transportation Secretary LaHood gets tough with Toyota then backs off?
Caught up in the swirl surrounding the ongoing Toyota safety recalls, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood apparently took things a step too far, at a Wednesday morning hearing on Capitol Hill, initially suggesting that owners of more than 4 million vehicles vehicles equipped with potentially sticky accelerators “stop driving.”
This afternoon, the Secretary said his comments were a “obviously a misstatement,” though he continued to stress that owners of the vehicles involved in Toyota recalls bring them to a dealer for repairs.
LaHood has been unusually outspoken, in recent days, about Toyota’s problems, revealing that it took extensive pressure on senior company officials, in Japan, before Toyota would approve the latest recall. That prompted him, on Tuesday, to call the company, long seen as an industry leader in terms of quality and reliability, “safety deaf.”
“We’re going to keep the pressure on,” the Secretary said, during a breakfast meeting with reporters. He said he would talk “soon” with Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda, “to make sure they realize how serious this is.”
But U.S. regulators are now getting some support from their Japanese counterparts, the Ministry of Transportation behind Toyota’s latest announcement that it has begun an investigation into reports of potentially serious braking issues with the Prius hybrid – a story first reported on TheDetroitBureau.com.
LaHood released a timeline of the government’s interaction with Toyota, but while the Secretary suggested the automaker is “pretty close to getting it,” the day-by-day report raises some questions about what Toyota knew, when, and why it chose to act – or not act.
It apparently took a visit by acting NHTSA Administrator Ron Medford to Tokyo, on December 15 to get the automaker to understand the seriousness of the problem and get working on a solution. But even then, it took until January 19 for the company to agree to a recall and yet another two days to publicly announce it. At that time, Toyota’s comments suggested it still hadn’t isolated the cause of sticky accelerator pedals, but within days it indicated it had a fix and was getting repair parts into production.
At this point, 5.4 million Toyota vehicles face recall for the “carpet entrapment” problem announced last October, while another 4.5 million in the U.S. and abroad will need repairs to their accelerators. Toyota has shut down five assembly plants until new accelerator assemblies can be delivered – with plans to resume production next Monday. Meanwhile, sales of 8 models, representing sales of about 4,000 vehicles a day, have been put on hold until they can also be repaired. Toyota is believed to have about 200,000 of the affected vehicles sitting on dealer lots around the country.