• 01
  • November
    2010

In August of 2009, four members of a family were killed in a car accident in San Diego, CA. The accident was not caused by another vehicle but by a defective design in their car that caused the car to accelerate unexpectedly. Though Toyota has reached a settlement regarding that claim, they recalled over 6 million cars thought also to have the same acceleration problem.

Toyota believed that the problem was the accelerator sticking to floor mats in the car. Apparently, over 200 Toyota owners thought the same thing because they filed lawsuits against the car maker after the recall was announced. Now Toyota is being accused of concealing knowledge of the sudden acceleration problem from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The new charges specifically accuse Toyota of buying back cars that had been reported to inadvertently accelerate and then forcing owners to keep quiet about the buy back. Toyota admits to voluntarily buying back the vehicles but states that their engineers were not seeing any sort of unintended acceleration during their testing process.

Unintended acceleration is a dangerous defect for a vehicle. The accident in San Diego is only one example of how fatal this sort of defect can be. Imagine if there had been other vehicles around and the driver could not control the acceleration. The fatalities could be doubled if the accelerating car hit another vehicle. It can also cause the driver to lose control of the vehicle, which could result in pedestrian accidents or deaths.

Toyota acknowledges that there is a problem and maintains that they are taking it very seriously and investigating consumer concerns. But if they had known about the acceleration problem and hid it, they may be liable for losses that people have incurred. A recall is one way for a company like Toyota to mitigate damages. But for some 200 consumers and the family from San Diego, the recall came too late.

Source: Detroit Free Press online, "Class action: Toyota hid defect," Greg Gardner, 19 October 2010