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Yoshi Inaba, Toyota’s highest ranking executive in the United States, says that his company’s latest recall of millions of vehicles has taught Toyota some valuable lessons. Speaking to an audience gathered at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit, Inaba seemed eager to hit the re-set button with the American public through admission of Toyota’s past errors.
Yesterday I finally received the letter from Toyota announcing the recall of my Tacoma truck and 7 other Toyota and Lexus models manufactured in recent years. Toyota announced last month that it would notify owners of certain models that their vehicles had the potential to accelerate suddenly and unexpectedly. The company has been working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to discover the cause of the problem, develop a solution, and keep consumers informed.
“Neither driver error nor floor mats can explain away many other frightening instances of runaway Toyotas,” said an attorney for two men who filed a lawsuit against the car manufacturer in a California federal court on November 5. “Until the company acknowledges the real problem and fixes it, we worry that other preventable injuries and deaths will occur,” the attorney for the men said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a statement on Thursday to correct what it said was “inaccurate and misleading information” announced and circulated by Toyota about its latest safety recall. The car manufacturer is recalling 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles to correct a defect that can cause the vehicles to accelerate suddenly and unintentionally.
A safety feature common in most German vehicles, which reduces the likelihood of an unintended acceleration, could have prevented the injuries and deaths of people caught in runaway Toyotas. According to a report published by the New York Times, the technology isn’t new. It just hasn’t been adopted by most automobile manufacturers outside of Germany.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced a recall of 127,183 Firestone FR380 tires manufactured by Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC. The tires, size P235/75R15, were made between September 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008.
Passenger seat belts will soon be a requirement on commercial buses – a measure that the National Transportation Safety Board has long advocated but didn’t have the authority to enforce. Yesterday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has the legal authority to establish transportation safety standards, told Congress that it will require commercial motor coaches to have safety belts for their passengers.
The Ford Pinto is a car that became notoriously associated with fuel-fed crash fires in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the compact vehicle showed a propensity for catching fire when involved in even low-speed crashes. In 1977, a Ford Memo revealed that the company was aware of design problems with the Pinto that made it more susceptible to crash-related fires, but that it had deemed the overall benefits of redesigning the automobile – which included preventing an average of 180 deaths each year – to be not worth the cost – an estimated $11 per automobile.
In February, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety raised the bar on the auto industry, announcing that it would require automobiles to withstand 4 times their own weight in a static roof crush test to qualify as contenders for the institute’s highest vehicle safety ranking. The test, also known as strength-to-weight ratio, has made the IIHS “Top Safety Pick” rating a little harder to earn. But that is good news for the consumer, as the auto industry covets good IIHS grades. Car manufacturers generally will work harder and make the improvements they need to make in order to earn higher IIHS rankings.
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