Early issue with accelerators raised no alarm among European consumer advocates, Toyota owners

Pedal issue at first drew little notice in Europe

GENEVA — Long before Toyota’s serious problems with surging accelerators, reports surfaced in Europe of a less catastrophic problem with gas pedals that didn’t ease off when drivers removed their foot.

Officials in Europe and the United States are now asking if those early issues — instead of being treated as minor glitches — might have served as a red flag for the bigger problems to come.

Yet instead of connecting the dots, Toyota dismissed the sticky gas pedal issue as a quirk of the right-hand drive vehicles used in the UK for months after the reports began in December 2008.

Initial response to the European problem appears to have been hindered by Toyota’s culture of secrecy, and by sluggish response by European consumer advocates and regulators.

Until, that is, drivers started reporting sticky pedals last October in the United States — where Toyota was already grabbing unwanted headlines for fatal crashes caused by sudden unintended acceleration.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to know more, and in a move safety experts say is unprecedented the agency has begun looking for data not just in the United States, but overseas as well.

It asked Toyota last week to provide detailed information on when it noticed problems — a step that no European regulator appears to have taken.

“The record for Toyota has been one of secrecy. Its version of: If you don’t ask, we won’t,” said Clarence Ditlow, a safety expert who leads the Center for Auto Safety, a U.S. consumer group.

“Sudden acceleration? Is that related to the sticky gas pedals? In the public’s eye and in Toyota’s eyes it is related,” Ditlow said. Especially in the absence of any concrete evidence of what has caused the fatal sudden acceleration crashes.

Tadawshi Arashima, the CEO of Toyota Europe, said Monday in Geneva that they don’t believe the sticky gas pedal is the cause of the sudden acceleration accidents, but they are still investigating possible causes, including the electronic control system.

“We tested vigorously .. and we couldn’t find any malfunction. We are asking a third party to do this,” Arashima told a group of reporters on the eve of press days for the Geneva Auto Show.

Some 1.7 million cars in Europe alone were recalled in January to fix the sticky pedal.

That’s more than one year after the first European reports, in December 2008, about the problem, in which accelerators didn’t return to their position when the driver removed his foot. When that happens, the car does not slow down as the driver would anticipate — but neither does it surge ahead as in the cases of sudden acceleration widely reported in the U.S.

Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., acknowledged at a congressional hearing this week that Toyota had a weakness in handling information. “We didn’t do a very good job of sharing information across the globe. Most of the information was one-way. It would flow from the regional markets, like the United States, Canada or Europe, back to Japan.”

“My translation of that,” said safety expert Ditlow, “is that the U.S. didn’t know what was going on in Europe.”

If Toyota wasn’t seeing the picture, neither were European consumer advocates and regulators who weren’t rushing in to fill the void. Europe has no single auto safety agency, and national agencies generally rely on automakers for data. And recall notices are shared on a system called Rapex, which a spokesman described as a “market surveillance” system for member states based on information provided by producers.

But it is something short of an early alert system: The Rapex alert on the sticking pedals went up after Toyota’s recall notice.

Even consumers didn’t seem alarmed.

Gerry Broughan, a 52-year-old Dublin taxi driver who owns a 2008 Yaris, says he’d known for months about “the slippy, sticky pedal” on his car — long before the news broke of the mass recall in January.

He says when the accelerator sticks, it’s dislodged by pumping it quickly, though it’s as easy to step on the brakes and wait for the accelerator to eventually glide slowly back to neutral.

“I’m an alert driver so it’s just a pain. Fortunately the brakes on the vehicle are grand,” he said.

Analysts point out there have been no serious accidents reported in Europe from any Toyota malfunction. And that the number of reported incidents involving the sticky accelerator is quite small — 26 confirmed mechanical malfunctions out of 5.5 million sold vehicles of eight different model lines involved in the January recall, including the AYGO and the Yaris.

But in Britain, safety advocates are questioning whether the agencies charged with monitoring vehicle safety are active enough.

Robert Gifford, the executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, a nonprofit group that seeks to advise British legislators on safety issues, says the UK’s structure for dealing with recalls is an issue “that is beginning to emerge.”

“The issue for me is whether our agencies should have the authority to insist that it be a safety recall rather than leaving the decision primarily in the hands of the manufacturer. And I think that is still open to question,” Gifford said.

Europe’s underdeveloped consumer culture also may play a role in the low number of reported sticky accelerators — and the absence of official reports in Europe of the more dramatic unintended sudden acceleration problem. There have been some media reports, mostly in Britain.

Walter Schwarz, 79, a retired journalist from Colchester, England, rammed into a van in November when his four-year-old Toyota Avensis accelerated suddenly as he drove in a slow-moving lane on the M25 motorway.

There were no serious injuries to Schwarz, his wife, and the three people in the van. Schwarz at first concluded that it had been a “senior moment” and not the fault of the car — until he started hearing reports from across the Atlantic.

He said he did not report the problem to Toyota, nor did his insurer inquire about it.

AP correspondents Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin, Bob Barr in London, Juergen Baetz in Berlin, Greg Keller in Paris and Stephen Manning in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.