DETROIT: When Toyota Motor Corp concluded that seemingly harmless floormats posed a danger in all of its cars and trucks, the automaker sent a stark warning intended to prevent crashes.
“If the floormat is NOT properly placed and secured, it could slip and interfere with the movement of the pedals during driving and may cause an accident,” Toyota said. “NEVER install more than one floor mat at a time in the driver’s seating position.”
The only problem: almost no one in the American driving public saw the warning, which was issued in September 2007 — two full years before Toyota announced the first in a string of recalls taking aim at the problem of unintended acceleration. That is because it was sent as a so-called “technical service bulletin” to about 1,500 Toyota and Lexus dealers.
A nearly identical bulletin went out in April 2008, cautioning that improperly installed floormats could cause crashes right across the Toyota lineup, in the Camry, Corolla, Matrix, Sienna, Tundra, Sequoia and Land Cruiser.
In both cases, the notices quietly provided to Toyota dealers and filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration carried a more explicit warning than anything that regulators or company officials said to the public.
In September 2007, under an arrangement negotiated with Toyota, NHTSA issued a six-paragraph “consumer advisory” that urged owners of the Camry and the Lexus ES 350 to swap out recalled all-weather floormats for new ones and to make sure that they were secured to keep from slipping forward and “causing the vehicle to accelerate uncontrollably.”
NHTSA also “strongly urged” drivers of the popular Prius hybrid and Avalon sedan to make sure that their floormats were set up properly.
In 2004, GM was fined $1 million for attempting to quietly fix a problem with windshield wiper assemblies on the factory line rather than with a recall notice for vehicles already on the road.
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