Toyota Hearings Reveal Multitude of Problems at NHTSA
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has long been criticized by product liability lawyers in Indiana and around the country for its failure to come down stronger on automakers who refuse to admit to auto defects. This criticism has become stronger as hearings into Toyota’s failures continue in Washington DC this week.
The hearing saw family members of victims who died in crashes involving Toyota vehicles, as well as Toyota chief Akio Toyoda testifying before a House committee set up to look into the recent massive recalls announced by the company. What the crisis has also done is increase scrutiny of the NHTSA. One victim’s family member criticized the agency openly for its failure to keep Toyota in check. As we know now, the agency had plenty of opportunity to investigate the complaints of unintended acceleration involving Toyota vehicles when they first began to surface several years ago. Complaints had been trickling in since 2002. An investigation by the NHTSA did not reveal defects that were substantial enough to announce a recall, and the NHTSA let the matter lie.
The agency was shaken out of its complacency in August of 2009 after a crash in California involving a Toyota Lexus, killed four people. The crash was traced to defective or incompatible floor mats in the Lexus, which Toyota said, caused the accelerator pedal to jam. The company reacted quickly with a massive recall, and a public apology by Akio Toyoda.
If Toyoda believed the apology and the recall would end matters right there, he was wrong. Since the San Diego crash brought the unintended acceleration problem sharply into the international limelight, other Toyota owners who have experienced the problem themselves, have been coming out with their stories.
Meanwhile, the automaker has said that repairs its engineers had developed to deal with the acceleration problem, may not be the permanent solution that Toyota owners and Indiana product liability lawyers were hoping for.
