Local Toyota dealers say drivers taking recall in stride

The stream of news stories about Toyota's safety recalls - including reports last night from Japan of a new recall of hybrid Priuses for a braking problem - may be raising the anxiety of the automaker's customers. But Philadelphia-area dealers say drivers seem to be taking the company's multimillion-vehicle recalls in stride.

Repair kits for potentially sticky gas pedals in other Toyota models began arriving yesterday at dealerships. By this afternoon, dealers here said they had completed dozens of repairs and scheduled hundreds more for owners of recently produced Camrys, Corollas, Tundras, and other affected vehicles.

Some customers have been calling anxiously since Jan. 21, when Toyota said gas pedals in 2.3 million of its vehicles could, in rare instances, cause unintended acceleration - the same scary and dangerous problem that the automaker had blamed since October on loose floor mats that can trap gas pedals.

But today, two area dealers said in interviews that most of their customers had been patiently awaiting the repairs - sometimes almost too patiently.

"We have the parts. We're calling people to tell them to come in, and they say, 'We'll come in Tuesday,' " said Paul Muller, owner of Team Toyota in Langhorne and Lawrence Toyota in Lawrenceville, N.J.

Muller said his technicians had agreed to work extra hours, and even to help the dealerships stay open round-the-clock to perform the gas-pedal repair: a 30-minute task in which a reinforcement bar is inserted into the pedal.

He said both dealerships planned to open this Sunday, a day they are ordinarily closed. But so far, working through the night does not look necessary.

"We're finding that people aren't eager to come in at 1 a.m.," Muller said.

Brad Paul, owner of Ardmore Toyota, said the Lancaster Avenue dealership stayed open an hour late yesterday, and planned to do the same tonight, to accommodate customers eager to get the recall behind them.

Paul and Muller made it plain that they recognized the role Toyota dealers were playing in damage control.

"It's a time for us to prove how we really do business, and to connect with our customers and to be there for them," Paul said.

Paul said staffers had been pitching in to handle the tide of calls since the latest recall. He said most customers seemed reassured when told that the pedal problem occurred rarely, and mostly in higher-mileage vehicles.

"They're a lot more at ease after they've spoken with us," Paul said. "There are a very few that seem to be overalarmed, and we handle those individually."

Muller and Paul said none of their customers had so far reported experiencing unintended acceleration because of a sticky gas pedal, which both said reflected the relative rarity of the problem nationwide. One Ardmore Toyota customer has reported a problem in which a floor mat interfered with his gas pedal, Paul said.

Paul said many customers had brought their cars in since the recall to have their pedals inspected for wear, even before the repair protocol was approved last Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"There isn't one that we saw that had any sign of the condition they're talking about in the recall," Paul said.

The extent of Toyota's safety problem remains the subject of debate, although the company and its critics agree that instances of unintended acceleration are rare given the millions of Toyota vehicles on the road.

Federal safety officials say five deaths and 18 injuries have been linked to the floor-mat problem since 2006, and none so far to the sticky gas pedals. Based on a variety of sources that include complaints filed with NHTSA and media reports, a Massachusetts analyst has tallied 19 deaths and 341 injuries since 1999, tied to a total of 2,262 incidents of unintended acceleration.

But in recent days, Toyota has continued to face a drumbeat of bad news.

On Tuesday, federal officials said that they were considering civil penalties against the carmaker and that safety investigators were taking a new look at a theory Toyota has long dismissed: that at least some cases of unintended acceleration could be caused by a rare, so-far-unidentified, electronic failure - perhaps a software bug or electronic interference - rather than the mechanical problems the company has acknowledged.

Yesterday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood briefly suggested that Toyota owners stop driving recalled vehicles until they are fixed - advice he quickly retracted as a misstatement.

Then came today's announcement of a formal defect investigation into the 2010 Prius - the automaker's flagship gas-electric hybrid - and the report of a recall in Japan.

According to the Associated Press, Japan's top business newspaper, Nihon Keizai, said Toyota would soon notify Japan's transport ministry and the U.S. Department of Transportation that it planned to recall 270,000 Prius hybrids over brake problems.

NHTSA said today that Prius owners had reported 124 incidents in which their vehicles' brakes seemed to malfunction as they were driven over uneven road surfaces or hit bumps or potholes. Toyota spokesman Bryan Lyons said the company, which manufacturers the Prius in Japan, had implemented a software fix last month in the cars' antilock brake system to address the problem.

To dealers such as Muller and Paul, Toyota's aggressive response to safety concerns, at least since the January recall, demonstrates why they believe the company will emerge from its corporate crisis with its reputation mostly intact, even if some analysts say its reputation is at risk.

"Toyota has a 50-year reputation for building great cars and customer satisfaction," Muller said. "They didn't get sloppy or stupid overnight."