New York:
Toyota said on Monday that some cases of sudden unintended acceleration still occurring in vehicles that had been repaired might have been the result of fixes being done incorrectly.
The carmaker said it was confident that the repairs were effective when done properly.
Federal safety regulators are looking into the reports of unintended acceleration in repaired vehicles - it received more than 60 as of last week - and warned Toyota that it could order a new remedy if the current one did not solve the problem.
The regulators, along with officials from Toyota, have been trying to contact all of the drivers who filed the reports. "Only a few of them have we been able to confirm and verify," a Toyota spokesman, Mike Michels said. "Many of them are not verifiable."
But Michels added, that "in some cases, it had to do with the repair not being done completely."
The repair process varies for different models among the more than eight million vehicles that Toyota has recalled worldwide because of problems with their accelerator pedals.
For vehicles recalled because the pedal could stick or become hard to operate, technicians must insert a small steel shim into the pedal assembly. For vehicles with pedals that could become trapped under the floor mat, some of the pedal is shaved off and technicians may remove some floor padding. Dealerships are also adding brake override systems, which are meant to deactivate the accelerator when the brake pedal is pressed.
Toyota has highlighted its technicians in several television ads aimed at assuring customers that it is fixing the problems. "Our dealers are repairing up to 50,000 vehicles a day with confidence," the voiceover in one ad says.
Michels made the comments at a news conference that Toyota held in an effort to rebut a Southern Illinois University professor who told a House panel last month that he was able to replicate an electronic cause for sudden acceleration in Toyotas.
Engineers from a consulting firm hired by Toyota said the professor's conclusions were attained by manipulating the vehicle's circuitry and that the situation would not occur in the real world. The engineers also showed that they could produce similar results on non-Toyota vehicles, including those from Ford, Honda and BMW.
The professor's demonstration "is not evidence of a design flaw or a safety risk, whether in Toyota vehicles or in any other manufacturer's vehicles," Shukri J. Souri, a principal with the consulting firm, Exponent, said.
Te professor, David W. Gilbert, acknowledged in his testimony that he was trying to deliberately manipulate the vehicle into speeding up without generating an error code or entering a fail-safe mode, and said his ability to do that should be cause for concern. Safety Research & Strategies, a Massachusetts consulting firm that hired Gilbert and is compiling data for plaintiffs in lawsuits against Toyota, posted a response to Toyota's arguments Monday.
"In general, Exponent's report mischaracterizes Dr. Gilbert's findings, but it does validate his primary findings - Toyota's fail-safe system does not always detect critical errors or go into fail-safe mode as the company has claimed," the response said.
The demonstration did not directly address questions about whether sudden unintended acceleration might be caused by a defect in a vehicle's electronic throttle control system, though officials said they have not found evidence of such a flaw.
Also on Monday, the head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform asked Toyota to turn over a 2006 memo in which six company employees in Japan raised questions about the safety of the vehicles. The memo was reported in The Los Angeles Times on Monday.
"If senior Toyota officials ignored important safety concerns raised by their own employees, it calls into question Toyota's corporate priorities and its commitment to safety," Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., wrote to Yoshimi Inaba, the president of Toyota Motor North America.