Toyota Casts Doubt On Claim Of Runaway Prius

March 15, 2010 | NPR

Company officials question the account of a California man who said his Prius sped out of control earlier this month, saying the vehicle's accelerator was tested and found to be working normally.

Toyota is casting doubt on a California man's claim that his Prius sped out of control, saying the report is inconsistent with the findings of the company's preliminary investigation.

Toyota's tests show that the accelerator was fully depressed and that James Sikes lightly hit the brakes more than 250 times during his 24-minute ride last Monday.

"Even if it would have been stuck to the floor for whatever reason, by applying the brakes, it would have stopped the vehicle because it would have shut down the motor," Toyota Vice President Bob Waltz said.

The company says the accelerator pedal was tested and found to be working normally and a backup safety system worked properly. The automaker says the front brakes showed severe wear and damage from overheating but the rear brakes and parking brake were in good condition.

Toyota spokesman Mike Michels stopped short of calling Sikes a liar.

"We really have no comment on Mr. Sikes' story," he said. "Our job is to determine the facts. This is what our examination determined and we will leave that for others to explore."

Sikes says his car raced to 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego last week. The March 8 incident ended when he stopped the car with help from a California Highway Patrol officer. The officer says the Prius' brake lights were on and he could smell the brakes burning. The car finally came to a stop after he told Sikes to use both the foot and emergency brakes at the same time.

Earlier Monday, federal regulators said they were reviewing data from the gas-electric hybrid but so far had not found anything to explain the out-of-control acceleration reported by Sikes.

"We would caution people that our work continues and that we may never know exactly what happened with this car," the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement.

Inspectors said they tried to duplicate the acceleration during a two-hour test drive but could not.

Toyota spokesman John Hanson would not comment on what the company would say at the news conference, but he said Toyota and investigators for NHTSA were able to pull data off the Prius' control computer.

"We have been able to download a fair amount of information that will help us," Hanson said, declining to give specifics.

The data, he said, should show whether the brake and gas pedals were depressed at the same time. Sikes has said the car sped up to 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. He said he jammed on the brakes trying to stop it.

Sikes called 911, and a highway patrol officer helped bring the vehicle to a safe stop. Though no one was injured, the episode is quickly becoming a high-profile headache for Toyota, which, like NHTSA, sent in an engineering team to investigate.

Toyota officials say the problems have turned into a media frenzy, but they haven't hurt car sales, says Karl Brauer, editor of Edmunds.com.

"Plenty of people out there have never thought that these cars were as unsafe or dangerous ... as has been suggested for the last several months now," Brauer said.

Both Toyota and federal officials say they haven't completed their investigation. However, federal highway safety officials says they may never have a definitive answer about what happened on that San Diego freeway.

John Gomez, an attorney for Sikes, said the failure to re-create the incident was insignificant and not surprising. "They have never been able to replicate an incident of sudden acceleration. Mr. Sikes never had a problem in the three years he owned this vehicle," he said Sunday.

But Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) suggested the failure to duplicate the stuck accelerator, and the presence of a backup system in the car, raised questions about Sikes' story.

"It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but let's understand, it doesn't mean it did happen," Issa said on CBS' The Early Show.

NHTSA is looking into claims by more than 60 Toyota owners that their vehicles had accelerated unexpectedly even after they were supposedly fixed.

Regulators said in a statement that Sikes' Prius was equipped with a backup safety device that reduces power to the wheels when the brakes and gas are pressed at the same time.

"The system on Mr. Sikes' Prius worked during our engineers' test drive," the statement said.

While investigators from Toyota and NHTSA reviewed the Prius during the same two days, a Transportation Department official said their investigations are separate.

"It does not appear to be feasibly possible, both electronically and mechanically that his gas pedal was stuck to the floor and he was slamming on the brake at the same time," said a memo prepared for Congress that cited a Toyota official.

Toyota has recalled millions of cars because floor mats can snag gas pedals or accelerators can stick. Sikes' car was covered by the floor mat recall but not the one for sticky accelerators. He later told reporters that he tried to pull on the gas pedal during his harrowing ride, but it didn't "move at all."

From NPR staff and wire reports