Toyota Recall Negotiated with NHTSA?

Posted on February 25, 2010 by Greenberg & Bederman

There have been thousands of automotive recalls over the years. As long as cars are designed, built and driven by human beings, mistakes will always be made. If you do a quick survey of your friends and neighbors, you will probably find that more than one of them has received a postcard in the mail, or received an e-mail, or gotten a phone call from an auto manufacturer requesting that they bring their car in for a free repair.

As we have mentioned before, a lot of car recalls involve problems that are merely inconvenient. There have been recalls involving radios, heaters, paint jobs and even seat warmers. But this Toyota recall is different. In the first place, there have been several recalls involving almost every Toyota model, and in the second place, none of these recalls involve “no harm, no foul” parts of the cars. They involve accelerator pedals, brakes and steering, each of which are crucial to the safe operation of these vehicles.

And these malfunctions aren’t simply theoretical. It isn’t a matter of if your accelerator pedal sticks, or your brakes fail, or your steering stops working. It’s a question of when.

Examples of this have been happening all over the country. In Nashville, Tennessee, a man named Dustin Ricardo was killed when his 2007 Toyota Camry crashed when the floor mat became wedged underneath the accelerator pedal. This caused the car to speed up, which then caused the Camry to crash into a tree.

In San Diego, an off-duty police officer and his entire family were killed when the Lexus that they were driving accelerated to a speed of over 100 mph. In a 911 call, someone from inside the car called before it crashed to say that the accelerator pedal was stuck.

These are some of the more high profile occurrences, but there have been 34 deaths that have been allegedly linked to various defects in Toyota models. There has yet to be a precise determination of the number of injuries to both drivers and passengers who were in the defective vehicles, and there has yet to be a specific determination in the number of “collateral injuries,” or people who were directly injured due to a Toyota malfunction but weren’t traveling in the car, but you have to assume that the number won’t be small.

And on February 18th, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal hearing into steering problems on Corolla’s. So now the question isn’t so much “Which Toyota models are on the recall list” as much as it is “Which Toyota models aren’t on the recall list?” Between accelerator pedals, floor mats, brakes and steering, there don’t seem to be very many models that aren’t experiencing some seriously dangerous problems.

And now we are reading that one of the initial recalls was “negotiated” into a smaller and less effective process with the NHTSA, which strikes us as a failure on the part of the NHTSA and unbelievable callousness on the part of Toyota.  The idea that one of the largest car manufacturers in the world finds it acceptable to “negotiate” over a critical matter of safety is almost as disturbing as the idea that a government agency that is responsible for car safety found the idea of “negotiating” acceptable as well. Safety shouldn’t be “negotiable.”

The Toyota Corporation is certainly making all the right signs of public remorse, but we have a feeling that their attitude will change dramatically when the injury and wrongful death lawsuits start being filed. If you have or a loved one has been injured due to a Toyota malfunction, you might believe that you can handle it yourself, or that an initial settlement that Toyota offers you would be enough. But handling a complex auto recall injury case on your own is practically a guarantee that you will not be treated fairly, and any settlement that you are offered without consulting with experienced legal counsel will be based on what Toyota thinks is financially convenient rather than what is fair to you.

The attorneys at the Washington, D.C. based law firm of Greenberg and Bederman have decades of experience at handling complex product and automotive recall injury cases, and are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to Toyota models that have malfunctioned. If you have suffered from an injury due to a defective Toyota, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today. We serve injured victims in the Maryland, Washington, DC, and northern Virginia metropolitan area.

 
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