Toyota Educates Customers as Floor Mat Alert Ignored

Toyota Motor Corp.’s U.S. sales chief said many owners still ignore warnings not to stack floor mats beneath accelerator pedals and wants dealers to familiarize buyers with model features so they’re not mistaken for flaws, Bloomberg reported.

The world’s largest automaker has discussed unintended acceleration concerns with as many as 7,000 owners in the months following record vehicle recalls for floor mats that could slip, jamming accelerators, and for sticky gas pedals, said Jim Lentz, president of Toyota’s U.S. unit. In some cases, people weren’t familiar with how automatic cruise control worked, didn’t know air-conditioners could boost engine revving or failed to remove extra mats, he said in an interviewyesterday.

“A large number, I don’t know the exact result, but I’m going to peg it at 15 percent, of vehicles we’re seeing have multiple numbers of stacked floor mats, even now,” Lentz said. “Six months ago we talked to customers about taking the floor mat out, and six months later it’s still there.”

Toyota recalled more than 8 million autos worldwide in the 11 months since an off-duty California Highway Patrol officerand his family were killed in August 2009 when the Lexus ES350 sedan he was driving sped out of control near San Diego. Reviews by Toyota and government investigators pinned the cause to a gas pedal trapped by the floor mat, leading to a September 2009 warning that owners should remove driver’s side mats.

Subsequent recalls and four congressional hearings hurt the Toyota City, Japan-based company’s reputation as a leader in vehicle quality.

“There’s no question it hit bottom,” Lentz said. Still, in the past 90 days, surveys conducted by Toyota of how consumers view its quality show “a fairly strong recovery,” particularly among repeat Toyota buyers, he said.

Toyota’s American depositary receipts, equal to two ordinary shares, fell $1.65, or 2.3 percent, to $70.75 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They’ve declined 16 percent this year. Toyota shares fell 1.3 percent to 3,135 yen today in Tokyo.

“Toyota’s priority is to regain customers’ trust and satisfy them with how they are handling safety,” said Tadashi Usui, an analyst at Moody’s K.K. in Tokyo. “Educating customers is one reasonable way to achieve that, but it may be difficult to bring home the message.”

Rather than running through all features immediately after the sale of a vehicle or expecting customers to read the owner’s manual, Toyota wants dealers to be more flexible, Lentz said. This includes making more information available on an owner website and arranging follow-up training sessions at dealerships around a customer’s schedule, he said.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda has pledged a comprehensive overhaul of quality control steps.

“Even if the customer makes a mistake, we never want to blame the customer,” Toyoda told reporters last week in Nagoya, Japan. “If they make some error, it should not lead to any fatal accident. That’s our ultimate goal.”

The company this week said that in accidents involving unintended acceleration where motorists said they’d pressed the brake pedal, in “virtually all” cases drivers pushed the accelerator instead, based on reviews of data collected by vehicle computers.