Once again Toyota has issued a massive recall of more than 2.14 million vehicles. What’s the reason this time? Many Virginia (VA) and North Carolina (NC) drivers themselves own a Toyota and need to know. Well, it seems one major problem the company says is, that the gas pedal can get stuck in the plastic pad part of the driver’s side floor mat, if the floor mat isn’t replaced properly after it’s removed
In other cars, a retention clip used to secure a piece on the vehicle’s center console can come loose and interfere with the gas pedal causing sudden acceleration. The recalls come after a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation to determine if Toyota’s 2009 recall for pedal entrapment had gone far enough to cover all possible causes, NHTSA and Toyota said.
Still it seems like Toyota themselves may not know the full answer. Experts first thought the gas pedal was too long, now it seems the floor mat is the problem. Even NASA has tested the car. We might now know all the answers yet, but what we do know is that Toyota must continue addressing the problem until a permanent solution is found. At the same time, the company must be willing — or, when necessary, compelled in court — to compensate drivers, passengers, and those people’s families when defective gas pedals cause sudden acceleration and injuries or deaths.
Many remember the horrible accident last year involving Toyota made Lexus that took the lives of a family of four, one which was a 19 year veteran of the California Highway Patrol. Our thoughts still go out to that family and any other who has been harmed by the Toyota’s defects.
“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reviewed more than 400,000 pages of Toyota documents to determine whether the scope of its recalls for pedal entrapment was sufficient,” NHTSA administrator David Strickland said in a statement. “As a result of the agency’s review, NHTSA asked Toyota to recall these additional vehicles, and now that the company has done so, our investigation is closed.”
NHTSA recently closed a separate 10-month investigation into whether electronics could have caused unintended acceleration in Toyotas, as some auto safety advocates had contended. Working with scientists from NASA, the agency concluded that electronics were not a factor.
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