LaHood: Toyota is slow to respond

February 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Toyota was slow to deal with safety problems with its gas pedals, asserting in an interview Tuesday that it took government pressure to force the company to recall millions of its most popular vehicles.

LaHood, in an interview with The Associated Press, defended his department’s handling of the Toyota investigation and said the Japanese automaker was “a little safety-deaf” during its probe of the problem. The company was so resistant, LaHood said, that it took a trip from federal safety officials to Japan to “wake them up” to the seriousness of the pedal problems.

“They should have taken it seriously from the very beginning when we first started discussing it with them,” LaHood told AP.

“If it had not been for the work of [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] pushing Toyota to make the recall, traveling to Japan, meeting with the top officials of Toyota in Japan and telling them that their folks in the United States seem to be a little safety-deaf when it came to us talking to them, I don’t know if the recall would be taking place,” LaHood said.

LaHood’s remarks were his most pointed since Toyota recalled 2.3 million vehicles in the United States due to concerns over gas pedals that can stick when drivers step on the gas. The Jan. 21 recall followed a separate action in October to recall millions more over problems with pedals catching on floor mats.

The transportation secretary said the government was considering civil penalties for Toyota but declined to elaborate. NHTSA has fined automakers in the past for delaying a recall. The largest came in 2004, when General Motors paid a $1 million fine for failing to conduct a timely recall to correct a safety defect involving the failure of windshield wipers.

“It took a trip from [NHTSA deputy administrator] Ron Medford to Japan to wake them up to the idea that this is a serious issue, it’s a serious safety issue,” LaHood said. “We’re not going to sit by and let these kinds of crashes occur without them taking very, very quick action.”

LaHood later clarified his remarks, telling AP that Toyota’s North American office took the safety problem seriously but had difficulty convincing their counterparts in Japan about its severity. “It wasn’t the case that they weren’t listening. It was the case that Japan wasn’t listening to North America,” LaHood said.

“That’s the reason that Ron Medford went to Japan. Because I think he was frustrated that the people at the North American office ... were listening to him but I think he felt that that wasn’t really getting across to the folks over in Japan,” LaHood said.

Toyota apologized to its customers Monday and announced a fix that will involve inserting a piece of steel about the size of a postage into the gas-pedal assembly to address potential excess friction.