Toyota casts doubt on 'runaway' Prius claim
- Source: Shanghai Daily
- [08:18 March 17 2010]
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Toyota Motor Corp said March 15 it had found no evidence to support the driver's account of a widely publicized "runaway" Prius incident in California that overshadowed the company's attempts to restart sales after a punishing series of recalls.
US safety investigators said separately that they had yet to pinpoint any evidence to support or disprove the claim that a 2008 Prius sped out of control near San Diego a week ago.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration engineers drove the hybrid in an effort to recreate the episode reported by the driver, James Sikes, but failed to do so, the agency said in its first statement on a hurried and high-profile analysis.
"We would caution people that our work continues and that we may never know exactly what happened with this car," NHTSA said.
Sikes, 61, had reported in a call to emergency telephone operators that his Prius was racing out of control for some 20 minutes before he could slow down the vehicle and bring it to a safe stop with coaching from a California Highway Patrol officer who pulled alongside him.
Highway patrol spokesman Brian Pennings said on Monday that the initial findings of Toyota and NHTSA did not constitute sufficient grounds to reopen an inquiry into the incident.
"Up until now, they've presented no physical evidence that's like a smoking gun to disprove Mr. Sikes' statement," Pennings told Reuters. "We have to take Mr. Sikes at his word until there's evidence to discount his statement."
Pennings added that observations of the highway patrol officer who came to Sikes aid supported his claim. When the state trooper caught up with Sikes' Prius on the freeway, the car was traveling at 90 mph with the brake lights illuminated and the smell of burning brakes in the air, he said.
Pennings said that even when Sikes managed to slow the car by following the officer's instructions to apply the footbrakes and emergency brake simultaneously, the driver appeared to be "literally standing on the brakes."
Had the brake override system been working correctly, as Toyota says it was, that "should have killed the engine," Pennings said.
Toyota said it had found no evidence that Sikes had been applying the brake forcefully and said he should have been able to stop the Prius by doing so, or by shifting into neutral or turning off the electronic power switch.
The March 8 incident came at a crucial time for Toyota. The automaker has been struggling for almost two months to reassure a jittery public it has turned a corner in dealing with safety issues that sparked a recall of 8.5 million vehicles.
Although Toyota's March US sales have been up sharply because of cash rebates and zero-percent financing offers, some analysts have said the long-term commercial damage from the automaker's safety crisis remains harder to assess.
Scrutiny of the Prius, a vehicle the automaker considers its most important, has also raised the stakes for the automaker in ongoing US investigations of unintended acceleration.
Toyota plans to cut output of the Prius by 10 percent starting this month due to a sales slowdown, a source with knowledge of the plans told Reuters.
The 2010 Prius was the subject of a February recall for braking problems, and the 2004 to 2009 model-year Prius hybrids were included in an October recall for loose floor mats.
But the San Diego case was the first to trigger a federal examination of the Prius for unintended acceleration, something US consumers have complained about in a range of other Toyota models, including its top-selling Camry.
