3 at Toyota Face Probe on Defects
Three Toyota executives are under a criminal investigation on suspicion of professional negligence for allegedly shirking recalls for eight years and not fixing a defect that may have caused an accident, police said Tuesday.
Toyota Motor Corp. denied that the three had engaged in any wrongdoing. The automaker said it was cooperating fully with the investigation.
Kumamoto police in southern Japan filed papers to prosecutors Tuesday, a police spokesman said. The suspected executives, ages 62, 58 and 55, oversee quality control, he said. Their names were not disclosed. Toyota said at least one of them had left the company.
Five people were injured Aug. 12, 2004, in Kumamoto in a head-on crash when steering failed in a Toyota Hilux Surf sport utility vehicle, causing it to swing out of control into the wrong lane. One person in the other vehicle suffered injuries requiring 52 days of treatment, and four suffered less-severe injuries, police said.
Toyota said a recall was carried out in October 2004 for 330,000 Hilux Surf vehicles manufactured from December 1988 to May 1996. The recall was for a problem part used in the steering system that could break, the automaker said.
Toyota said the vehicle involved in the accident was manufactured in 1993.
The company had received five reports of problems with the steering by 1996, but the problems were limited to repeatedly turning the wheel during parking, and no recall was made then, it said. After additional problems were reported in 2004, Toyota conducted another investigation and decided to carry out a recall.
Eighteen cases of problems were reported from overseas, but there were no accidents or injuries, it said.
A Toyota representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, quoted police as saying that reports about problems began in 1992, and company executives are accused of being aware of them as early as 1995 or 1996.
The automaker, based in Toyota City in central Japan, said it would continue to make quality a priority.
“We will continue to strengthen quality control under our belief that we must put the customer first and make quality No. 1,” Toyota said in a statement.
Toyota has been reporting booming sales in recent years, and some analysts expect it to overtake struggling General Motors Corp. as the world’s biggest automaker.
But Toyota has suffered something of an image problem lately because its number of recalls has soared, raising doubts about whether the automaker can continue to maintain quality standards as it embarks on the next step of global expansion.
