The Obama administration is considering a requirement that all cars and trucks sold in the United States must have brakes that can override gas pedals to prevent sudden acceleration problems like those that led to reports of deaths and the recall of millions of Toyotas, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Congress on Tuesday.
"We're looking at it," LaHood told the Senate Commerce Committee. "We think it is a good safety device."
LaHood testified as the government raised to 52 the number of reported deaths linked to runaway Toyota vehicles, and as Toyota executives returned to Congress for the third time in a week to try to convince lawmakers they are urgently repairing any problems.
The executives said the automaker will start making available to U.S. safety regulators sophisticated electronic readers capable of deciphering "black box" data on Toyotas involved in sudden acceleration episodes.
Yoshimi Inaba, president of Toyota Motor North America, told the senators the company would be delivering three data readers to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Wednesday and hoped to make the data more accessible to other systems by the middle of 2011.
A reliable override system could be important to U.S. motorists, relieving anxieties created by the Toyota acceleration reports. The "black box" information could help investigators make their own judgments about what has been going wrong.
Multiple recalls have damaged Toyota's reputation and set the stage for large numbers of death and injury lawsuits amid a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in New York, a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission and more scrutiny from the Transportation Department. Since September, Toyota has recalled 8.5 million vehicles, about 6 million of them in the United States.
There was a fresh indication Tuesday of how the broad recalls and safety questions have affected Toyota's business. The company's U.S. sales fell 9 percent in February while rivals General Motors and Ford posted healthy gains. As part of its effort to rebuild customer loyalty, the company said it will offer repeat buyers two years of free maintenance.
The giant Japanese automaker has said all new models sold in the United States will have the override system by 2011, and many recalled vehicles will be refitted with it.
The system automatically deactivates the accelerator when the brake pedal is pressed, which allows the driver to stop safely even if the car's throttle had been stuck open.
Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller asked whether the United States should mandate such a system on all cars sold in the country.
LaHood responded: "We are looking at the possibility of recommending the brake override system in all newly manufactured automobiles."
The Commerce Committee is one of three congressional panels studying Toyota's recall crisis.
The new number of 52 reported deaths, up from 34 previously, came from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation. Federal officials have not formally confirmed links between deaths and Toyota defects but have received a spike in complaints since Toyota began a series of big recalls in October.
Toyota executives told the panel the company will give the United States up to 100 "black box" readers and dispatch its engineers to train U.S. technicians how to use them.
The recording devices, similar to the ones that have long been on aircraft, are common safety features on modern automobiles. But the ones on Toyotas can be read only by Toyota technicians with specialized readers. Toyota generally has refused to share such data with others. Only one laptop containing the necessary decoding software is in the United States.
As they had told congressional panels last week, Toyota executives maintained that sudden unintended acceleration episodes were due to mechanical problems, shifting floor mats or sticking gas pedals, and not by anything in the electronic throttle control systems of Toyota vehicles.
Still, the company "will continue to search for any event in which such a failure could occur," the lawmakers were told by Takeshi Uchiyamada, an executive vice president at Toyota who is considered the father of the Prius hybrid.
Safety experts and many lawmakers have said the electronic systems of Toyotas could be to blame and should not be ruled out.
Inaba, Toyota's North American president, said in an attempt to reach out to its huge North American market, the company was setting up an outside panel to advise North American affiliates on quality and safety issues. He said Rodney Slater, a U.S. transportation secretary during the Clinton administration, would lead the group.
The panel will have direct access to company president Akio Toyoda and will make sure the company's new safety and quality controls "conform to best industry practices," Inaba said.
He said Toyota would be "deploying SWAT teams of technicians to make on-site inspections of unintended acceleration reports as quickly as possible."
Skeptical committee members were critical of both Toyota and regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and its parent agency, the Transportation Department. They pressed on whether Toyota and federal regulators had acted swiftly enough.
Rockefeller, whose state is the site of a Toyota plant, said, "It is clear that somewhere along the way public safety took a back seat and corporate profits drove the company's decisions."
He said that federal investigators were reluctant to investigate whether vehicle electronics were to blame for problems with cars speeding out of control because it is harder to detect electronic problems. NHTSA "would rather focus on floor mats than microchips because they understand floor mats," Rockefeller said.
LaHood responded that his agency will do a "complete review" of the electronics issue.
Sen. Daniel Inouye, like Rockefeller a Democrat, said other automakers have been subject to millions of recalls, too.
For instance, in 2002, he noted, quoting NHTSA figures, 15.2 million cars were recalled. General Motors recalls totaled 4.6 million, Ford 2.3 million, Chrysler 6.4 million and Toyota 496,000
"If it is an industry problem, we should hear from the industry, instead of just Toyota," Inouye said.
Adding to Toyota's woes, the automaker said Tuesday it is repairing more than 1.6 million vehicles around the world, including the United States and Japan, for potentially leaky oil hoses. NHTSA also continues to look into steering complaints from drivers of Toyota Corollas.
The committee released a January 2008 draft presentation in which Chris Tinto, a Toyota vice president for technical and regulatory affairs, raised questions about the company's safety image. "Although we rigorously defend our products through good negotiation and analysis, we have a less defensible product," Tinto said.
He said NHTSA's management was "aggressive, and not technical."
"Toyota must remain vigilant to guard its quality reputation," Tinto wrote in the draft presentation.
