Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 6, Issue 6, December 2009

NEW YORK, NY— Toyota ended the old year trying to decisively shut the door on sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) problems in its Toyota and Lexus vehicles, but it’s unlikely that the automaker’s troubles are gone with 2009.

A one-car crash in Dallas, Texas that left four dead the day after Christmas may be yet another incident to punch a hole in Toyota’s floor mat interference theory. The four occupants of a 2008 Toyota Avalon died after the sedan inexplicably went off the road, crashed through a fence and landed upside down in a pond. Investigators have already ruled out the floor mats – which were found in the trunk – as the cause.

Safety Research & Strategies, which has been tracking Toyota SUA, continues to review incidents that can’t be explained by floor mat interference, including one which a Toyota dealer witnessed.

One New Jersey owner of a 2007 Avalon described multiple instances of the vehicle accelerating of its own accord. In the first incident, the driver was able to slow the Avalon with brakes, and stop it by shifting into neutral as the engine raced to maximum RPMs. An initial check by the dealer didn’t reveal any problems. The most recent incident ended with the dealer witnessing the out-of-control vehicle engine and overheated brakes – with no floor mat interference. The owner was driving on the highway when the vehicle began to accelerate on its own. Despite brake pressure and a shift into neutral, the Avalon kept revving uncontrollably. He immediately headed to the nearby Toyota dealership by shifting between Drive and Neutral with the engine at full throttle.  He pulled into the lot with the Avalon revving and the brakes smoking. The dealer service technician tried to physically move the pedal, but was unable to stop the vehicle engine from revving. The dealer contacted a Toyota corporate representative, who authorized replacement of the throttle body, accelerator pedal and the associated sensors and paid for the labor and a car rental for the owner.

The replacement part repair – and an event witnessed by Toyota – is another new wrinkle in the ongoing investigation into sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles and the automaker’s response to the issue, going back seven years. Toyota has religiously stuck to pedal interference as the root cause. The only “parts” it has ever offered to replace was a floor mat or carpet and a shortened accelerator pedal.. The emergence of a more substantive repair raises new questions about what Toyota knows about this problem and how candid it has been with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the past.

The Avalon was one of 3.8 million vehicles Toyota recalled in October for sudden acceleration problems that the automaker has insisted was caused by floor mats inadvertently jamming the accelerator pedals of its vehicles. In November, Toyota announced that it would reconfigure the shape of the accelerator pedal to remove the risk of floor mat entrapment by first offering to cut down the current design. In the Spring Toyota would replace the accelerator pedal assembly with a shortened version. For the ES350, Camry, and Avalon, the automaker said that it will change the shape of the floor surface to increase the space between the accelerator pedal and the floor. Vehicles with Toyota or Lexus brand floor mats will receive newly-designed replacement driver- and front passenger-side all-weather floor mats. And Toyota would install a brake override feature on the Camry, Avalon, and Lexus ES 350, IS350 and IS 250 models only. Toyota did not explain why other affected models was not getting this safety feature.

The recall was big enough to push Toyota to the top of a list it didn’t want to be on: automakers with the most recalled vehicles in 2009.

On the upside for Toyota, disgruntled ex-corporate counsel Dimitrios Biller’s explosive allegations of withholding evidence in about 300 rollover cases has ended with a whimper – for at least some litigants. E. Todd Tracey of the Tracey Law Firm in Dallas was hoping to use some of Biller’s documents like a crowbar to re-open 17 rollover cases. But just before Christmas, he asked a federal judge in Marshall, Texas to dismiss the case, based on the contents of four boxes of internal materials Biller claimed would prove his allegations. Last summer, Biller, who handled Toyota’s rollover cases for more than four years, sued his former employer in a Los Angeles federal court, alleging that the automaker routinely hid or destroyed evidence. Several thousand documents were delivered to the Texas court, where they remained under seal. Tracey pulled the plug after Biller showed him a duplicate set of the documents. But, other attorneys with similar intentions are still proceeding with their inquiries.

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