Thus far the tally is up to 8.1 million Toyota cars and trucks in North America and Europe are being recalled for unintended acceleration problems.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into this issue, and is focusing on whether this is due to an electronic system malfunction, rather than the floor mat or mechanical throttle return springs, as previously suspected. Not that they have an ax to grind now that the Federal government owns GM, and Toyota just overtook them in sales last year.
While the cost of conducting the recall campaign will certainly be expensive (billions), the potential damage to the brand and loss of goodwill is immeasurable. Look how long it took Audi to recover from the 60 Minutes allegations of unintended acceleration in the 1980’s. I can already imagine the Mastercard ad spoofs (priceless…).
There are no allegations of wrongdoing or cover-ups by Toyota, but they are accused of not fixing the problems correctly or as quickly as they could have if they were more vigilant.
On top of that, both the Japanese and US governments are looking into reports of, shall we say, iffy brake performance on 2010 Prius vehicles, specifically the electrically regenerative portion.
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