Consumer 11.0: Sales accelerate, but Toyota still faces safety concerns

Last January, Toyota was wrapping up what must qualify as its worst month ever.

The Japanese automaker had just added "sticky gas pedals" to "loose floor mats" as its explanation for hundreds of complaints that vehicles were accelerating when drivers weren't stepping on the gas - a problem first brought to light by a fiery fatal crash in California a few months earlier.

Toyota Motor Corp. recalled 2.3 million vehicles to solve the pedal problem, on top of 5.4 million recalled because of the floor-mat issue. Dealers were staying open round-the-clock to do repairs, and a lot of hand-holding, for concerned drivers whose cars often needed both fixes. Congressional hearings and additional scrutiny were still to come.

A year later, mystery lingers over the causes of unintended acceleration, even as experts at NASA continue to examine whether a glitch in Toyota's electronics might be to blame and as the National Academy of Sciences considers whether the automotive industry as a whole faces similar risks.

The two reports - NASA's may be complete by mid-February - should help clarify whether anything more went wrong beyond Toyota's current set of explanations: loose floor mats, sticking pedals, and driver error.

Toyota has been working for the last year to try to put the issue into its rearview mirror. As the auto industry gears up for what it hopes will be its best year since 2007, it's worth taking a snapshot of where the company stands.

Toyota still leads all automakers in worldwide vehicle sales, ahead of General Motors Co. and Volkswagen. Earlier this month, Toyota executives touted 2010's results as evidence that the company had turned the corner quickly on the year's ugly start - including a January that senior vice president Don Esmond said made 2010 into "essentially an 11-month year for us."

"I know the common perception is that Toyota has been reeling this year as a result of those recalls," Esmond told analysts and reporters. "But in fact, the final results include some remarkable accomplishments any company would love to report" - including a continued strong position in U.S. sales, with Camry leading all other car models for the ninth straight year. Esmond said the Toyota brand was "in full recovery mode."

Clouding the corporate optimism, on the other hand, are those unsettled questions about the acceleration complaints - in particular, whether there might be an unrecognized bug in the design of Toyota's electronic throttle control. The company and its customers may be long past full panic mode, but there is plenty of disagreement about whether all underlying problems have been addressed.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is awaiting the report it requested from NASA before making further public statements. In mid-June, NHTSA reported that it had received complaints about 75 fatal accidents since 2000, involving a total of 93 deaths, that allegedly were linked to unintended acceleration in Toyotas.

At the time, NHTSA said that it had confirmed the linkage in just five deaths, including four in the California case, and that all could be attributed to pedal entrapment by floor mats.

For its part, Toyota says its fixes to the floor mats and sticky pedals have addressed the vehicles' problems, even if it faces lawsuits that suggest an electronic problem as well.

"There's never been an issue with the electronic throttle control that had caused uncommanded acceleration," said Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons. "And in the cases where that has been alleged, we are vigorously defending ourselves."

Not surprisingly, plaintiffs' lawyers such as Eric Snyder of Charleston, W.Va., question Toyota's confidence.

"We still believe that there's a problem with the electronics in the Toyotas," said Snyder, who represents victims or survivors in a half-dozen cases. "We're still seeing wrecks that are caused by suddenly accelerating Toyotas. The problem isn't fixed completely - that's the bottom line."

Outside experts say the jury is still out. But at least some continue to offer theories about how Toyota - and perhaps other automakers as well - could face rare but deadly glitches when electronic systems replace mechanical linkages in controlling key functions such as a car's throttle.

Some data analyses, including one by the Los Angeles Times, have shown a rise in unintended-acceleration complaints after Toyota introduced electronic "drive-by-wire" systems about a decade ago.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, says the institute has examined its data to look for a similar pattern in insurance claims for Toyota and Lexus vehicles, and hasn't found one.

"Basically, most of these vehicles are about what you'd expect for their class - they're neither better nor worse than comparable vehicles," he said.

But Lund, who is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel looking into industrywide questions, rightly cautions against reaching a conclusion from the lack of a claims spike.

He says a rarely occurring glitch - perhaps comparable to the rare but deadly side effects sometimes linked to prescription drugs - may not be enough to show up in claims data that encompass about six million vehicle crashes a year.

How might such a rare event occur? The National Academy of Sciences panel heard one theory Thursday from Ronald A. Belt, an electronics expert who holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Notre Dame.

Belt, who works at Honeywell but presented his report independently, suggested that a kind of short circuit called a "latch-up" could cause a Toyota's electronic throttle to open and stay open - without the gas pedal depressed and outside the control of the vehicle's electronic control unit (ECU). Another electronics expert likened a latch-up to "a faucet getting jammed in the open position."

Lyons dismissed Belt's report via e-mail, saying Belt "admittedly guessed at the design of Toyota's ECU and, as a result, has made a number of incorrect assumptions that have led him to draw erroneous conclusions."

But a year after Toyota's awful month, there are still more questions than answers.