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Japanese carmaker Toyota announced yesterday that it plans to extend its US accelerator pedal recall programme to include vehicles manufactured in Europe.
A spokesperson for Toyota’s UK operation said the company has yet to determine the number of vehicles involved in the recall, which has been initiated by discovery of a progressive wearing problem in some injection-moulded plastic accelerator pedals. The company says this could cause the accelerator to seize or stick in the depressed position.
“We can’t say at the moment. Everything is under investigation and until we have done that we can’t say which models are affected,” said the spokesperson.
The company said it hopes to have quantified the number of vehicles involved by early next week.
The US recall is associated with certain pedals manufactured for Toyota by CTS Corporation, a $500m (€360m) turnover manufacturer of electronic sensors and components headquartered in Elkhart, in the US state of Indiana.
The Toyota spokesperson said that CTS is one of a number of suppliers of accelerator pedals to its European production units.
The carmaker could not confirm whether these pedals are supplied from CTS’s US-based manufacturing facility or from one of its European plants; CTS has manufacturing units in Scotland and the Czech Republic.
At the time of writing, the component maker had not responded to a request from European Plastics News to disclose which locations supply Toyota’s European production.
However, in a statement issued on 27 January, it said: “The products we supply to Toyota, including the pedals covered by the recent recall, have been manufactured to Toyota’s design specifications.”
Toyota said the recall will not stop its manufacturing lines in Europe, as it had implemented a pedal design modification across its model line in August of last year following a number of customer complaints during the previous winter.
According to the Toyota spokesperson, the design modification was made after 26 customers in Europe had complained about occasional pedal stiffness in winter conditions. The company said none of these reported cases involved a pedal seizing or jamming.
CTS describes Toyota as a “small but important” customer. In a statement, it said the carmaker accounts for approximately 3% of its annual sales.
Toyota said the accelerator pedal recall in the US affects around 2.3m vehicles. It is already in the process of recalling around 4.4m Toyota and Lexus models over concerns of pedal entrapment due to incorrectly located floor mats.
From:http://www.europeanplasticsnews.com
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