Toyota Canada Apologizes For Slow Response To Safety Issues

Toyota Canada officials extended an apology to Canadians about the safety problems of their vehicles Tuesday, and admitted they should have acted sooner to remedy the problems.

Appearing before a Commons committee of MPs, Toyota officials conceded they were looking for a solution to a problem involving sticking gas pedals before they notified Transport Canada or the public.

Company officials turned out in full force in an attempt to soothe anger among the Commons transport committee that the company has treated Canada like a second-class citizen.

Acceding to demands by opposition MPs, the company decided at the last minute Monday that its North American head, Yoshi Inaba, would also appear with his Canadian executives.

The officials faced stiff questioning from MPs on all sides of the floor, including a testy exchange with Conservative Jeff Watson who asked Toyota officials why they had not reported customer complaints about a sticky gas pedal to Transport Canada during a meeting on Nov. 25.

At that time, both sides talked about whether a U.S. floor mat recall had any impact on the mats in domestic vehicles.

“In retrospect, would it (have) been good to have had a dialogue about it (with Transport Canada),” responded Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada.

But he said Toyota had still not confirmed it had a defect in the car at the time, only that it had “an issue” that it was investigating.

Under current law, automakers are not required to report complaints to Transport Canada, only defects they have identified, Beatty said.

Prodded, Inaba extended a belated, if indirect, apology to Canadians, saying previous apologies by the company president Kiichiro Toyoda were meant for all countries.

But for MPs, the officials’ testimony left many questions unanswered, with several saying they were still not convinced Toyota had found the solution to the unintended acceleration problems in their cars.

Conservative MP Jeff Watson continued to pounce on Toyota’s delay in reporting the sticky pedal problems. Officials said they had received five complaints from late October to Jan. 15, but a recall was not issued until Jan. 21.

The Windsor area MP noted that Toyota had been in discussions with U.S.-based CTS Corp. about the pedals in December as part of an effort to find a solution.

The delay, said Watson, exposed Canadians to a serious safety issue.

“You know you’ve got a problem and you told nobody about it,” he charged.

About 270,000 recall notices were sent out in Canada, about 60 per cent of which have been completed, officials said.

More than eight million Toyotas and Lexus brands have so far been recalled in the United States and elsewhere, bruising the reputation of a company once hailed for its safety and reliability.

But opposition MPs also pounced on the government for failing to take the situation seriously, and used an observation by Toyota officials that Transport Canada lacks resources, as evidence to government neglect.

“Transport Canada knew about this and the minister knew about this quite some time ago … and Transport Canada had already compiled a list of all kinds of problems,” said Liberal critic Joe Volpe.

“Until about a week and a half ago, the minister said there’s no problem, we’re not going to beat up on Toyota.”

Volpe revealed that Transport Canada had received a total of 125 complaints about Toyotas, besides the 17 previously reported.

But Toyota officials responded by saying that many were unproven and stemmed from incidents dating several years back, which they said suggested that media publicity often drives customers to recall previous problems they may have ignored at the time.

Earlier, Beatty told the committee Toyota Canada ordered a voluntary recall of the floor mats in the fall not because it believed they presented a safety issue, but because there had been a recall in the U.S. and felt pressure to do something.

At one point, he held up the mats and explained why the Canadian version was different from the faulty U.S. one, particularly in the area near the gas pedal.

“We have 100 per cent confidence in the remedies we have put in place,” said Beatty.

Officials said they are also in the process of changing the decision-making process on recalls, removing the final say from the company’s Japanese headquarters to a four-person global committee on which North America has one representative.

Opposition MPs said they were still not convinced Toyota had gotten to the bottom of the accelerator problem, noting that in the United States many customers said their vehicles had not been fixed.

NDP critic Brian Masse, a former auto worker in Windsor, Ont., said he is concerned the fault lies with the cars’ software, an issue being investigated in the U.S. but not Canada.

“It’s really incredible that we have to rely on the American system to find out if there is going to be a computer or software problem related to the chip for acceleration. Transport Canada is not going to even investigate that,” said Masse.

He added that at the very least the government must change the system so that complaints received by automakers are immediately shared with Transport Canada.