Five days before Toyota launched a recall of 2.3 million U.S. vehicles due in January, Toyota's top U.S. public relations executive warned that the automaker needed to "come clean" about the sticking accelerator pedals. Since retired PR executive Irv Miller wrote "We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over."
As the LA Times reported today, at the time of the email exchange, Toyota was publicly blaming the sudden unintended acceleration problem associated with the vehicles on floor mats, not gas pedals.
The January 16th email was a response to another email from a Toyota executive in Japan to another Toyota PR executive that said, "We should not mention" the accelerator pedal failures because "we have not clarified the real cause" and mechanical failures "might raise another uneasiness of customers." The document was one of 70,000 pages of documents collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has collected as part of its investigation.
About two weeks later, Miller retired from the company. A Toyota spokesman said his resignation had been long planned and was not related to communications regarding disclosure of the gas pedal defect.
Following the recall covering 2.3 million vehicles on January 21st, Toyota took the unprecedented step of shutting down North American factories and suspending car sales while it worked on a fix for the accelerator pedal problem.
The NHTSA believes the way Toyota handled the whole matter was in violaion of U.S. law. As we mentioned earlier this week, under federal law, automakers have five days to report a safety defect to the U.S. government once it has been discovered. Toyota has been slapped with a $16.4 million fine for failing to report the defect to the government.
The Toyota lawsuit attorneys at Estey Bomberger are closely monitoring developments with Toyota and the US government. If you have been injured in an accident caused by sudden unintended acceleration in a defective Toyota, contact us for more information and to discuss your legal rights with an attorney.
Sources: Detroit Free Press, LA Times
Leave a comment