Toyota Tops Complaints of Unintended Acceleration, Report Says

 

-The New York Times

12/09/2009 - Toyota’s unintended acceleration problem just won’t go away. Now Consumer Reports takes a look at complaints of unintended acceleration from owners of 2008 models. And the publication found that 41 percent of the complaints, filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came from Toyota owners.

Given all the attention Toyota has been getting for the unintended acceleration issue, that statistic is not surprising. But what was surprising was that Ford had 28 percent of the complaints.

“What really stood out to me is – and this isn’t I guess surprising — that Toyota is not the only one that has these problems,” said Jeff Bartlett, deputy online autos editor for Consumer Reports. “I know a lot of attention has been on Toyota and whatever the causes are and they may be unique to their product, but they are not unique in having these types of problems.”

Mr. Bartlett said that Consumer Reports researchers went through almost 6,000 complaints and were very fussy about what they used. The new analysis includes only complaints that happened at higher speeds and seemed dangerous, resulting in 128 total cases.

Consumer Reports also took overall automaker market share into account because Toyota, Ford and General Motors sell more vehicles than most other automakers. For the period 2007-8, Toyota and Ford each held a 16 percent market share, while G.M. had 23 percent. There were only five complaints of unintended acceleration from G.M. owners.

“The sudden-acceleration incidents were distributed over 22 brands, but they were not spread evenly,” Consumer Reports wrote. “Forty-seven complaints were about Toyota models and five were for Lexus vehicles.” Toyota’s 52 complaints were more than Chrysler, G.M., Honda, and Nissan combined. Ford had 36 complaints.

“Statistically, the incidences are not common, but they are more frequent than with other kinds of brands,” said Mr. Bartlett.

In some of those cases, Mr. Bartlett said, the consumer complaints made it clear their vehicles did not have floor mats. “There was something else, outside of the cabin, that was causing the problem.”

In response Ford, issued a statement saying “our preliminary review of this randomly selected data shows a very small number of allegations across millions of vehicles.” The automaker added all its vehicles “offer a high level of safety” and it has “not identified a trend that would suggest this type of risk to motor vehicle safety.” It also noted there were no allegations of fatalities.

Toyota did not have an immediate response.

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