Safety advocates starting with Ralph Nader have argued that dealer service bulletins can become a way for automakers to conduct “silent recalls” or to keep problems from the public view even as they work to correct them. NHTSA also “strongly urged” drivers of the popular Prius hybrid and Avalon sedan to make sure that their floormats were set up properly.īut nothing in that public message, which was reviewed by Toyota before publication, referred to the risk of crashes or to the potential danger to other Toyota and Lexus vehicles.Īs Toyota struggles to bounce back from a safety crisis that has tarnished its reputation and as regulators probe what went wrong, a key questions is how an industry-wide practice of sending technical notices to auto dealers was allowed to morph into what critics describe as a channel for conducting recalls in all but name, extending warranties and sending safety notices outside the glare of public scrutiny. In September 2007, under an arrangement negotiated with Toyota, NHTSA issued a six-paragraph “consumer advisory” that urged owners of the Camry and the Lexus ES 350 to swap out recalled all-weather floormats for new ones and to make sure that they were secured to keep from slipping forward and “causing the vehicle to accelerate uncontrollably.” In both cases, the notices quietly provided to Toyota dealers and filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration carried a more explicit warning than anything that regulators or company officials said to the public. That is because it was sent as a so-called “technical service bulletin” to about 1,500 Toyota and Lexus dealers.Ī nearly identical bulletin went out in April 2008, cautioning that improperly installed floormats could cause crashes right across the Toyota lineup, in the Camry, Corolla, Matrix, Sienna, Tundra, Sequoia and Land Cruiser. The only problem: almost no one in the American driving public saw the warning, which was issued in September 2007 - two full years before Toyota announced the first in a string of recalls taking aim at the problem of unintended acceleration. “NEVER install more than one floor mat at a time in the driver’s seating position.” “If the floormat is NOT properly placed and secured, it could slip and interfere with the movement of the pedals during driving and may cause an accident,” Toyota said.
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