Federal Regulators Must Share Some Blame for Toyota Recall Delays

April 15th, 2010. By Hunter West

Much has been made about the delays attributed to Toyota for acting on safety deficiencies with its vehicles—delays that didn’t appear to affect consumers in Europe and Canada but impacted those in the US. And while James Lentz, the president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales USA, stated in Congress in February that he did not know of reports of sticking pedals in Europe until the month prior (January, 2010), documents showed that engineers in the US were told about the sticking pedals as early as April, 2009. 

That said, US safety regulators—which have been famously holding Toyota’s feet to the fire throughout the recall process—couldn’t escape blame either. If Toyota is to blame for dragging its feet, so too did federal safety regulators. 

Case in point: according to the April 11th issue of The New York Times, officials from Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) met in Washington to discuss the accelerator pedals and floor mats issue—an issue linked to a fiery crash in California the previous month that killed four members of one family. At the meeting, the agency also pressed the automaker to announce just how it intended to fix the problem. 

Toyota made that announcement on November 25^th. However the meeting took place September 28^th. Two months went by before the announcement was made. 

There are those who feel the agency could have pressed Toyota to act sooner, or at the very least keep up the pressure. 

Recent federal fines levied against Toyota cite the breach in protocol that requires, by law, an automotive manufacturer to report a product safety deficit to federal regulators within a handful of business days. And yet while the Transportation Secretary was vowing to hold Toyota’s “feet to the fire” for delays in bringing the US into a loop that had already included Canada and Europe months earlier, the question remains why the NHTSA allowed Toyota so much lead time up to November 25^th. 

Since then there has been a steady diet of sensational media headlines and stories, congressional hearings and angry congressmen playing the role of protector to the American consumer. Toyota missed the deadline. Toyota allegedly withheld information. Toyota’s feet must be held to the fire for delays. Hardly a day has passed without some story on Toyota accompanied by a talking head from Washington crying foul. 

But for two months, Washington appeared to stand at the sidelines while Toyota sorted all this out. 

Says Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “The bottom line is that both industry and regulators failed.” 

And in so doing, the regulators appear to be talking from both sides of their mouths.

Tags: Toyota, toyota recall

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