Toyota Sudden Unintended Acceleration Complaints Update

December 15, 2009

Safety Research & Strategies has completed our latest review of Toyota unintended acceleration complaint data.  Our database consists of incidents from the following sources:

• Consumer complaints to NHTSA
• Toyota-submitted claims from several NHTSA investigations into unintended acceleration
• Incidents reported by media organizations
• Consumer contacts made to our firm and other firms that are reporting incidents they have received.

Every effort has been made to identify duplicate records and combine them.  However, often the reports do not provide enough detail to link incidents to other reports.  There are likely some duplicates among our records – if there are, they are few.

SRS’s database consists only of incidents reported from 1999 to the present (regardless of model year).  We have defined unintended acceleration as any incident in which the complainant reported an engine acceleration that was unintended – regardless of whether the car was in gear.  We understand that this is a broader inclusion than others have considered; however, because we are still at a stage of trying to understand the incidents we believe this inclusiveness will help us discern vehicle years / models and incident types that we may want to investigate further.

Table 1 below is a summary of the data: