Toyota’s Slow Awakening to a Deadly Problem/Toyota Says It Will Start Fixing Recalled Cars This Week/Answers to Questions About Toyota’s Repair Plans

Stop Driving Recalled Toyotas, Says Agency Chief
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
COPYRIGHT BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: February 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/business/global/04toyota.html?ref=global-home


Ray LaHood, the Transportation secretary, said Wednesday morning during a House Appropriations panel hearing that owners of recalled Toyotas should stop driving them and take them to their dealers to be repaired.

Mr. LaHood said his advice to owners of recalled Toyotas was to “stop driving it, take it to a Toyota dealer because they believe they have a fix for it.”

“We need to fix the problem so people don’t have to worry about disengaging the engine or slamming the brakes on or put it in neutral," Mr. LaHood said in response to questions.

His comments at the hearing, which appeared to be off the cuff, came shortly after he told reporters that he planned to call the president of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, about the recalls and after the Japanese government told the carmaker to examine the brakes on its hybrid Prius. Drivers in Japan and the United States have complained that the brakes momentarily stopped working when driving at low speeds.

“I’m going to take the initiative to have a conversation with Mr. Toyoda very soon, to talk to him about how serious this is, and to make sure that he understands,” Mr. LaHood said. “I think he understands, but I’ve never talked to him. I just feel like I need to have a conversation with him.”

Mr. LaHood’s comments Wednesday were the latest in an aggressive campaign by his department over the Toyota situation. Last week, Mr. LaHood took credit for the company’s decision to stop building and selling eight models involved in a recall over accelerator pedals that could potentially stick, saying Toyota did not take the step until urged to do so by the department.

Some safety advocates said however that Mr. LaHood might be trying to protect federal safety regulators from potential liability issues over their role in investigating defects.

Mr. LaHood told reporters that regulators have the resources and expertise to conduct a thorough review of consumer complaints regarding unintended acceleration in Toyota focusing on electronic throttles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “is not finished with this safety issue involving Toyota,” he said, explaining that the department would look into the possibility of electromagnetic interference with the accelerator system.

“I think at the department, we will continue to look at the electronics, continue to study that, continue to work with Toyota on that, and then make a judgment about that,” Mr. LaHood said.

He confirmed Wednesday that the Transportation Department was considering a civil penalty against Toyota over the handling of the recalls.

Toyota had no immediate response to Mr. LaHood’s comments. The company’s shares on Wall Street were down 7.2 percent.

Lawmakers and the Transportation Department have stepped up pressure on Toyota, seeking proof that problems that could cause its cars to speed up unexpectedly were limited to floor mats and sticking pedals.

In a letter to James E. Lentz III, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Representatives Henry A. Waxman and Bart Stupak asked the automaker to provide documents showing that the computer systems on its cars were not at fault — something Toyota has vigorously denied.

Mr. Waxman is the chairman and Mr. Stupak a subcommittee chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. LaHood said in a statement Tuesday that Toyota had announced the recalls only after department officials flew to Japan “to remind Toyota about its legal obligations.”

In a statement, Toyota said it had received and was reviewing the committee’s letter.

“We will of course cooperate with the committee’s inquiry,” Martha Voss, a Toyota spokeswoman, said. She did not comment on Mr. LaHood’s statement.

As it worked on solutions to the acceleration problem, Toyota has said that computers on its cars were not at fault.

But lawyers, safety advocates and consumers continue to raise questions about the cars’ electronic systems, which they say could cause a car’s throttle to stick. Toyota faces 11 class-action lawsuits over accidents involving the defect.

In their letter, Mr. Waxman, Democrat of California, and Mr. Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, told Mr. Lentz that statements he had made in interviews appeared to contradict information Toyota officials gave to committee staff members in a meeting last week. The Energy and Commerce Committee plans a hearing late this month to explore two recalls of Toyota vehicles related to reports of cars speeding up unexpectedly.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform plans its own hearing on Toyota next week. Mr. LaHood is expected to testify, as is Yoshimi Inaba, the chief executive of Toyota’s North American operations.

On Monday, the company announced a remedy meant to prevent accelerator pedals from sticking on 2.3 million vehicles in the United States. Toyota also has recalled more than five million vehicles because their floor mats could become stuck in floor pedals.

In a conference call with journalists on Monday, and in interviews on NBC, CNBC and ABC, Mr. Lentz emphasized that Toyota was confident its fixes would solve the problem.

“It is not an electronics issue,” Mr. Lentz said.

In response, the Energy and Commerce Committee asked Toyota to submit documents supporting the claim as well as information that might counter it. It is seeking the documentation by Friday. In the letter, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Stupak also took issue with Mr. Lentz’s comments that Toyota first knew of sticking gas pedals in late October.

During a meeting with committee staff members on Jan. 27, Toyota officials said they first learned of this problem through reports of sticking pedals in vehicles in England and Ireland in April or May 2009.

In August, Toyota began production changes on models sold in Europe, and it recalled 1.8 million vehicles there last week for the pedal problem. They will receive the same repairs as cars sold in America, a Toyota Europe spokesman said.

The letter asked Toyota to clarify when it first learned of the problem and any action that might have been taken.

The representatives also made note of Mr. Lentz’s comments Monday in which he expressed confidence that the repair to the Toyota vehicles “is going to stop what’s going on.”

In the meeting with committee staff members, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Stupak said company officials had said the causes of sudden acceleration were “very, very hard to identify.”

The statements by Mr. LaHood came as he criticized the company Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Mr. LaHood contended that federal safety officials, in the meeting with Toyota in Japan, had to “wake them up” to the seriousness of the situation.

Last week, Mr. LaHood contended that pressure from his department was the reason Toyota had decided to stop building and selling eight models involved in the recall for sticking pedals. Toyota initially said the action came voluntarily.

“They should have taken it seriously from the very beginning when we first started discussing it with them,” Mr. LaHood told The A.P. “Maybe they were a little safety deaf.”

However, the federal safety agency faced its own criticism Tuesday from the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer group.

It said federal documents on Toyota acceleration cases did not give a clear picture of how the agency had conducted investigations, or what the results had been.

“Toyota unintended acceleration to date raises more questions than answers,” Clarence Ditlow, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.


Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.










Toyota’s Slow Awakening to a Deadly Problem
By BILL VLASIC
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/business/01toyota.html?th&emc=th


DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego.

Jordan Ziprin of Phoenix said regulators had focused exclusively on mechanical issues. “I believe this is an electronic issue.”

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus ... we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck ... we’re in trouble ... there’s no brakes ... we’re approaching the intersection ... hold on ... hold on and pray ... pray ...”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The Lexus ES 350 sedan, made by Toyota, had hit a sport utility vehicle, careened through a fence, rolled over and burst into flames. All four people inside were killed: the driver, Mark Saylor, an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law.

It was the tragedy that forced Toyota, which had received more than 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, to step up its own inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.

Yet only last week did the company finally appear to come to terms with the scope of the problem — after expanding a series of recalls to cover millions of vehicles around the world, incalculable damage to its once-stellar reputation for quality and calls for Congressional hearings.

With prodding from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Toyota halted production and sales of eight models, including its top-selling Camry sedan.

And late last week, the government allowed the company to go ahead to try yet another new fix for its vehicles, which it is expected to announce on Monday.

At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes.

As recently as the fall, Toyota was still saying it was confident that loose floor mats were the sole cause of any sudden acceleration, issuing an advisory to millions of Toyota owners to remove them. The company said on Nov. 2 that “there is no evidence to support” any other conclusion, and added that its claim was backed up by the federal traffic safety agency.

But, in fact, the agency had not signed on to the explanation, and it issued a sharp rebuke. Toyota’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate,” the agency said. “This matter is not closed.”

The effect on Toyota’s business is already being felt. Its sales in the United States in January are expected to drop 11 percent from a year earlier, and its market share in the United States is likely to fall to its lowest point since 2006, according to Edmunds.com, an automotive research Web site.

The company has not yet projected the cost of its recalls and lost sales. But a prolonged slowdown in sales could substantially hurt a company that once minted profit.

Toyota’s handling of the problem is a story of how a long-trusted carmaker lost sight of one of its bedrock principles.

In Toyota lore, the ultimate symbol of the company’s attention to detail is the “andon cord,” a rope that workers on the assembly line can pull if something is wrong, immediately shutting down the entire line. The point is to fix a small problem before it becomes a larger one.

But in the broadest sense, Toyota itself failed to pull the andon cord on this issue, and treated a growing safety issue as a minor glitch — a point the company’s executives are now acknowledging in a series of humbling apologies.

“Every day is a lesson and there is something to be learned,” Yoshimi Inaba, Toyota’s top executive in North America, said at the Detroit auto show in January. “This was a hard lesson.”

In Davos, Switzerland, on Friday, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota’s founder who now heads the company, told a Japanese broadcaster that he was “deeply sorry” for the problems.

Toyota’s safety problems may prove to be a hard lesson for the N.H.T.S.A., as well. Six separate investigations were conducted by the agency into consumer complaints of unintended acceleration, and none of them found defects in Toyotas other than unsecured floor mats.

In at least three cases, the agency denied petitions for further investigative action because it did not see a pattern of defects and because of a “need to allocate and prioritize N.H.T.S.A.’s limited resources” elsewhere, according to agency documents.

The investigations, and Toyota’s handling of the problem, will be the subject of Congressional hearings.

But the publicity surrounding the accident near San Diego, and Toyota’s repeated inability to quell consumer concerns with a definitive solution, has also prompted a flood of lawsuits reminiscent of the litigation a decade ago arising out of the rollovers of Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires.

In addition to cases related to individual accidents, several class-action suits have been filed against Toyota. The cases are expected to focus on why the government and the carmaker were unable to identify problems beyond the floor mats, despite mounting instances of runaway cars.

David Ennis, a Washington lawyer, said he was working on three lawsuits that had been in the works for five months. “Over the last 24 hours, everybody’s a Toyota lawyer now,” he said last week.

Toyota now believes that the trouble with its cars is twofold — a combination of loose floor mats that can interfere with accelerator pedals, and a pedal that itself can stick when a driver depresses it.

Toyota has told its dealers that it will announce its fix for the faulty accelerators on Monday, but has yet to release details. The CTS Corporation, the supplier of the pedals used in recalled models, is making replacement parts. But Toyota is also expected to try to repair or modify the pedals in some vehicles.

Before last August, Toyota had issued three limited recalls to replace floor mats and change an interior part that could catch on accelerator pedals.

But after the fatal crash near San Diego, and the public release of the 911 tape, Toyota was forced to, as it said in the fall, “take a closer look.”

That crash, said Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, “was a watershed event.”

“It captured on tape the deaths of four people in an uncontrolled acceleration where the driver was an experienced highway patrol officer,” he said. “If he couldn’t bring the car under control, who could?”

A lawyer for the Saylor family said he wished that the federal government had acted more quickly about concerns over the sudden acceleration.

“They’re clearly starting to become more interested in the problem and more attentive to it,” said the lawyer, John Gomez, of San Diego. “Do I wish they would have done more sooner? Obviously.”

In one federal inquiry on Toyota models built from 2002 to 2005, investigators found that 20 percent of the 432 complaints studied involved “sudden or unintended acceleration.”

But no defects were uncovered in any of the vehicles, and the rate of incidents was considered “unremarkable” in the context of the millions of cars on the road.

The petitioner in that case, Jordan Ziprin of Phoenix, said the regulators had focused exclusively on mechanical issues with his car, a 2002 Camry.

“I believe this is an electronic issue, but they have been avoiding that possibility entirely,” Mr. Ziprin said in an interview.

Several lawsuits against Toyota also suggest that the company’s electronic system could be at fault.

A Toyota spokesman said the company had looked extensively at its computerized electronic throttle system, which controls the speed of its cars, and had found no faults.

“If we found anything, we would take appropriate action,” said the spokesman, Mike Michels. “But we continue to think it’s entirely unlikely that an electronic malfunction is the cause.”

A lawyer for a California man whose wife died in a 2007 crash of a Camry said the company was avoiding a potentially more pervasive problem by focusing on mats and stuck pedals, rather than its electronics.

“There are thousands of these complaints, and we’re not seeing floor mats and we’re not seeing stuck throttles,” said the lawyer, Donald H. Slavik, of Milwaukee. The traffic safety agency “simply doesn’t have the resources to analyze the electronic systems of these cars.”

The agency, which is part of the Transportation Department, has stepped up its oversight of Toyota drastically since the fatal accident that involved the Saylor family.

Agency officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was still being investigated, say their responsibility is to identify defects in autos, not to develop remedies to fix them. That responsibility, these officials said, rests with the automaker.

Many complaints by consumers were eliminated by the agency during its investigations because of possible driver error, or the lack of sufficient information about the circumstances of the incidents.

The agency separated braking problems from acceleration issues, further narrowing the number of complaints that could be linked to a faulty pedal or an electronic malfunction. Cases involving brief periods of acceleration were also considered separately from those that involved prolonged, high-speed incidents, many of which involved accidents.

Sean Kane, whose consulting firm, Safety Research and Strategies, counts plaintiffs’ lawyers among its clients, contends that the agency did not push Toyota for more data, and too quickly accepted the company’s explanations about floor-mat problems.

“The agency has not been very forceful with Toyota at all,” Mr. Kane said. The agency “always took the low-hanging fruit for an explanation, which is the floor mat.”

The discussions between federal officials and Toyota intensified in December, when the acting chief of the agency, Ronald Medford, flew to Japan to hold meetings with senior company executives, according to a government official with knowledge of the trip who was not authorized to speak publicly.

On Jan. 19, two days before the recall for the sudden-acceleration problem, Mr. Inaba of Toyota met in Washington with Mr. Medford and the new head of the agency, David Strickland.

The mounting number of complaints and accidents has led the agency to be more outspoken than it usually is during continuing investigations.

Last week, the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said in an interview with a Chicago radio station that Toyota had halted production of recalled vehicles “because we asked them to.”

Indeed, Toyota had to be told by regulators to shut down production and suspend sales of the cars and trucks in the latest recall until it had the parts necessary to fix them. It was yet another example of a slow response from a company long known for its meticulous approach to building cars and servicing customers.

Mr. Michels, the Toyota spokesman, said the company never before had to halt production or stop selling millions of vehicles involved in a recall.

“It’s not a typical case,” he said. “Usually in a ‘stop sale’ it’s a very small quantity.”

In its attempts to play down the problem, Toyota may have raised more doubts among consumers.

“It thinks it can control this crisis, and in the process has thrown its own credibility out the window,” said Mr. Kane, the safety consultant whose firm has documented thousands of reports of unintended acceleration.

Some owners of recalled Toyotas are now saying they are afraid to drive them. “I live only a half mile from the office and I drive there,” said Elaine Byrnes, a Camry owner in Los Angeles. “If I had to go farther, I wouldn’t consider it.”

And the scrutiny of Toyotas will not end with its new plan to replace the pedals. Accidents are receiving swift attention from federal regulators.

On Dec. 26, a 2008 Toyota Avalon — one of the cars under recall — crashed just outside of Dallas. A police officer in Southlake, Tex., Roderick Page, said in an interview that “for undetermined reasons, the vehicle left the main roadway, and went through a metal pipe fence, striking a tree and causing the vehicle to flip and land upside down in a pond.”

All four people in the car died. “There was no evidence that they attempted to hit the brake or slow down,” he said. “Honestly, my reaction is, ‘Wow.’ ”

Two weeks later, an investigator from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration visited Southlake to inspect the car, accompanied by a Toyota engineer. Mr. Page said one factor they immediately ruled out was the floor mats, which were in the trunk.


Matt Richtel contributed reporting from San Francisco, Clifford Krauss from Houston and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.











Toyota Says It Will Start Fixing Recalled Cars This Week
By NICK BUNKLEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/business/global/02toyota.html?ref=global-home


DETROIT — Toyota Motor on Monday said repairs to accelerator pedals in millions of recalled vehicles would begin later this week as it tried to reassure customers and show that it had the situation under control.

Toyota said many dealers had extended hours and some would stay open around the clock so that the pedals could be fixed as quickly as possible.

The president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., James Lentz, maintained that the pedal repairs, along with modifications aimed at preventing the pedal from getting trapped under the floor mat, would resolve the problems with unintended acceleration that prompted the recalls.

“These two fixes solve the issues that we know of,” Mr. Lentz said on a conference call with reporters. “It is not an electronics issue.”

Mr. Lentz maintained that the vehicles under recall were safe to drive, even before the repairs were made, unless drivers experienced signs that the pedal had become worn and was more difficult to use.

“I feel comfortable having people that are close to me driving our products,” he said. “That’s what I tell my friends and neighbors when they as me as well. I am confident that these vehicles are safe.”

The company said its engineers had developed and “rigorously tested” a remedy that involved reinforcing the pedal before vehicles leave the factory to eliminate excess friction. On cars and trucks that already have been sold, dealers will perform what Toyota said was an “effective and simple” process that involved installing a steel reinforcement bar into the pedal assembly to reduce the surface tension that could cause it to stick.

Toyota said that the parts needed were already on the way to dealers and that it had begun training workers how to make the repairs. Each repair is expected to take about 30 minutes, or less after dealers become accustomed to the process, Mr. Lentz said.

Mr. Lentz said dealers would prioritize repairs to their customers’ vehicles before the cars and trucks on their lot.

The announcement came nearly a week after Toyota suspended sales and production of eight models, including the top-selling sedans in the United States, the Camry and Corolla.

The company plans to send notices by mail to owners of the vehicles affected by the recall, but the letters could take several weeks to reach everyone. It is urging customers to wait until they receive a letter before contacting their dealer for a repair appointment.

Mr. Lentz said Toyota first received reports of sticking pedals on three vehicles in October but he denied that the carmaker waited too long to react. Robert M. Waltz, Toyota’s vice president for product quality and service support, said in the conference call that duplicating the problem was difficult and that tests did not immediately show the need to issue a recall. On Nov. 2, another American Toyota executive, Bob Carter, told reporters that the company had no evidence of problems beyond the vehicles’ floor mats, which it had told customers to temporarily remove.

Mr. Lentz said Toyota was “sorry for what we’ve put our customers through” and said the company was just as focused on building reliable cars as it ever has been.

“This is embarrassing for us, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have lost our edge on quality,” Mr. Lentz said. “Our reputation is based on safety.”

Sales figures being released Tuesday are expected to show that Toyota’s market share in the United States fell in January to the lowest level in four years as a result of the sales suspension and recalls, according to a forecast from Edmunds.com. Several rival carmakers have been offering $1,000 discounts to consumers who trade in their Toyotas.

Since November, Toyota has recalled more than eight million vehicles globally in two recalls for problems with their accelerator pedals. About six million of the vehicles are in the United States.

In 4.1 million vehicles, the company says, worn pedals can become hard to depress, slow to spring back or become stuck partly depressed, while 5.4 million have a design flaw in which Toyota says the pedal can become trapped beneath the floor mat. Several models are covered by both recalls.

The models with the sticky pedal problem are the ones for which sales in North America were suspended last week. (European versions already were being built with different pedals.) Production of those models stopped Monday at five factories in the United States and Canada and is scheduled to resume next week, Toyota said.

Sunday and Monday, Toyota ran full-page ads in more than 20 newspapers across the United States telling consumers that it had initiated merely a “temporary pause” in sales and production of the recalled models. The company said it had taken “this unprecedented action” because “it’s the right thing to do for our customers.”

However, the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, told a Chicago radio station last week that Toyota had halted production “because we asked them to.”

Mr. Lentz disputed Monday that the government played a role in the stoppage. A spokesman, Mike Michels, said Toyota acted within a “reasonable” time in stopping production five days after announcing the recall.

“The decision to recall these vehicles, a voluntary decision, was Toyota’s,” Mr. Lentz said. “We had a legal and an ethical requirement” to stop selling the vehicles.






Answers to Questions About Toyota’s Repair Plans
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/business/02questions.html?th&emc=th

Toyota said on Monday that its dealers in the United States would begin repairing later this week 2.3 million vehicles e involved in a recall for accelerator pedals that could potentially stick. Here are some details about the situation.

Q. Which cars are involved?

A. The recall involves Toyota division vehicles, including all 2009-10 Matrixs, 2005-10 Avalons, 2007-10 Tundras and 2008-10 Sequoia vehicles. Some 2009-10 RAV4s and Corollas, 2007-10 Camrys and 2010 Highlanders models are involved.

No Lexus or Scion vehicles are involved, and the Prius, Tacoma, Sienna, Venza, Solaris, Yaris, 4Runner, FJ Cruiser, Land Cruiser, Highlander hybrid and the Camry hybrid are not involved. Also, Camry, RAV4, Corolla and Highlander vehicles with Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) that begin with “J,” meaning that they are built in Japan, are not affected by the accelerator pedal recall.

Q. What is the problem that could happen?

A. The accelerator pedal on the recalled models could become stuck in a partly depressed position, or it could be slow to return to idle.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in its advice to drivers of Toyota vehicles, said that “Owners of these vehicles should pay attention to the operation of their accelerator pedals. If their accelerator pedal is harder to depress than normal or slower to return, it may be a precursor to a stuck pedal. These vehicles should be parked and a dealer immediately notified.”

Q. What should I do if my accelerator sticks?

A. Toyota has step-by-step instructions here.

Briefly, if the accelerator sticks, Toyota says the vehicle can be controlled with a firm and steady application of the brakes. But it says drivers should not pump the brakes, because that could deplete the vacuum assist, meaning it will take more effort to stop the car.

Once the car is slowed, the company is telling drivers to put the transmission into neutral, and steer it off the road. It should be driven to the closest safe place. Then shut off the engine and call a dealer for assistance.

Q. Should I just shut off the engine while I’m driving?

A. In its advice to consumers, Toyota said that should be done only if a driver could not put the car into Neutral. If the engine is off, the power assistance to the brakes and steering wheel will be lost, but Toyota said the vehicles could still be steered and stopped.

Q. What kind of repair will Toyota make?

A. Toyota says it will install a stainless steel reinforcement bar, like a shim, into the pedal assembly. It is designed to keep the pedal from sticking and will assure that it returns into place. The company says drivers will not notice any different feel to the accelerator pedals.

Q. How do I know this will work?

A. The company’s engineers tested the remedy on pedals that were known to stick, and says it stopped them from sticking.

Q. Is my car safe to drive if it has been recalled?

A. The company says that it is. James Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said he was confident in allowing his family members and friends drive the cars.

Q. Which cars take priority, the ones with owners or the ones on showroom lots?

A. Owners take priority. Toyota said dealers would begin receiving the parts this week. In the case of owners whose vehicles were part of an earlier recall involving floor mats, Toyota said both repairs could be performed at once.

Q. What if I’m shopping for a car? Are the Toyotas at dealerships safe?

A. Toyota is not selling the models involved in the recall until they can be repaired. It has not said how long that will take, but it says that dealers will be repairing and releasing vehicles for sale as they are able to do so.

Q. I bought a Toyota right after it announced the recall, but before it announced it was stopping sales. What should I do?

A. Toyota said it would work with customers on a case-by-case basis. At the very least, the company will repair the vehicle if it is on the recall list.