Toyota Hit with Federal Grand Jury Subpoena to Submit Steering Wheel Flaw Records
Is this a sign that criminal charges against Toyota could soon be coming up? Last week, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena, ordering Toyota to provide information about steering rod defects in its vehicles linked to a 2005 Toyota recall.
According to the New York Times, Toyota received the subpoena on last Tuesday, regarding documents related to the steering rod defects. The news of the subpoena will not be a complete surprise to Toyota. Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation confirmed that it was investigating the 2005 Toyota recall for alleged steering rod defects. That recall involved a number of vehicles, and it came about a month after the company recalled vehicles for a similar problem in Japan.
The entire federal investigation centered on why Toyota took months to recall its defective vehicles in the US, when it was aware that there was a steering rod defect problem in its vehicles in Japan. In 2004, soon after the Japanese recall, Toyota told US authorities that there was no need to order a recall in the US, because the steering rod problem was isolated to Japanese cars and Japanese conditions. There had been no problems involving steering rod defects in American cars. However, that didn’t stop the company from recalling its vehicles for steering rod flaws in the US the very next year.
That grand jury subpoena comes during a particularly bad week for Toyota in which its public relations have been a complete disaster. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story citing certain “confidential sources” within the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the WSJ, the sources had said that many of the crashes blamed on unintended acceleration, were actually caused by driver error. The NHTSA was quick to distance itself from the WSJ piece. An agency representative in fact,squarely blamed Toyota for planting that story in the WSJ to take the heat off the automaker. Toyota has responded with an angry rebuttal, claiming that it never planted in the story.
To Houston Toyota recall lawyers, it seems like just another day at the office for Toyota.
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