Runaway Prius means more bad news for Toyota

By Mike Lee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 12:03 a.m.

Online: To hear James Sikes’ 911 phone call, go to uniontrib.com/prius911.

For a timeline of Toyota’s quality-control crisis, go to uniontrib.com/toyota-timeline.

The latest report of a runaway vehicle in San Diego County not only refocused international attention yesterday on the safety of vehicles made by Toyota, a giant automaker that once seemed to do no wrong, but also cast more doubt on its technological gem — the Prius.

Toyota is facing a new wave of scrutiny as more users of its products, including a Prius owner from Point Loma and a Lexus driver in San Diego, report problems and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chases more clues in an unfolding drama about cars that speed up abruptly.

The mounting questions stem from a Monday scare in which James Sikes of Jacumba struggled to control his 2008 Prius for about 30 miles, at speeds up to 94 mph, before bringing the hybrid to a stop on Interstate 8 in East County with help from the California Highway Patrol.

“It’s another high-profile incident of unintended acceleration that is going to continue to haunt Toyota’s efforts to downplay this situation,” said Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, an online automotive research company based in Santa Monica. “It’s going to work against their claims that their vehicles are completely safe.”

Monica Khoury of Point Loma doesn’t believe Toyota’s reassurances. Khoury said she traded in her 2007 Prius after the car accelerated out of control twice last summer. Khoury said she loved her sleek black machine until its gas pedal became stuck when she sped up to pass cars on Sea World Drive.

“I was scared to death,” Khoury said last night.

She took the floor mat out after the first incident, only to experience the trouble again.

Khoury said she took the car to a local Toyota dealer for an inspection.

“They said, ‘We checked the internal computer and the internal computer doesn’t indicate that this happened either time,’ ” she said.

Managers at the dealership couldn’t be reached after hours.

For several months, Khoury said, she feared losing control of her Prius whenever she stepped on the accelerator. So she got a different vehicle at the end of February.

“I finally decided that I would rather have us take on another car payment than die in a fiery crash,” Khoury said.

Also last night, the office of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, said the congressman had written to the federal highway agency to highlight another local case of sudden acceleration involving a Toyota brand. On Friday, a 2006 Lexus IS 350 owned by an employee of a San Diego dealership failed to slow down until the driver shifted the car into neutral, said Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella.

Based on a visual inspection, the driver doesn’t think the cause was pedal entrapment, Bardella said. The sedan has been impounded until next week, when Lexus is scheduled to inspect the vehicle.

A central question in the ongoing investigations of Toyota’s safety record is whether there are problems with electronic systems that run the vehicles.

“That is the nut that everyone is trying to crack: Is the car doing things without regard to the physical position of the throttle?” Brauer said.

Toyota repeatedly has denied any trouble with its computer systems and said it is doing everything possible to make sure its entire lineup is sound.

The company has been under pressure since California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor and three family members died in a crash in Santee in August. The Sheriff’s Department said a floor mat in the Lexus that Saylor was driving may have jammed the accelerator.

Since then, Toyota has recalled more than 5.5 million vehicles in the United States to fix accelerator pedals and deal with floor mats that can cause the pedals to stick.

By the end of last month, the federal highway agency reported receiving 43 complaints of fatal incidents that allegedly involved unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles since 2000.

Three-quarters of the cases have been submitted since October, the agency’s officials said. They are gathering information about each one.

In a separate development, Toyota owners claiming that massive safety recalls are causing the value of their vehicles to plummet have filed at least 89 class-action lawsuits nationwide that could cost the company $3 billion or more, according to an Associated Press review of cases, legal precedent and interviews with various experts.

That estimate doesn’t include potential payouts for wrongful death and injury lawsuits.

Grant Bevill, a mechanical engineer in Florida for a company that investigates auto accidents, said clues point to a software glitch as well as mechanical problems.

“The idea that there could be multiple things going wrong, I think might be responsible for the difficulty in resolving this issue,” Bevill said.

He sympathized with Sikes, who said he was returning home to Jacumba on Monday afternoon when the accelerator became stuck after he pressed it to pass a car. Sikes said he tried several ways to slow down the vehicle, including adjusting the floor mat, standing on the brake and trying to pull up the accelerator.

The California Highway Patrol yesterday released a 24-minute recording of Sikes’ 911 call. The audio was filled with road noise, occasional curses by Sikes and repeated suggestions by operator Leighann Parks for Sikes to put the car in neutral.

When she heard sirens over the phone, Parks knew that more help had arrived.

It was in the form of CHP Officer Todd Neibert, who was near Buckman Springs when he heard the call about the speeding Prius and chased down Sikes. From behind, Neibert said he could see the brake and hazard lights on the car.

“I could smell the brakes and I knew he had been trying to apply them because of that,” he said.

Neibert used his loudspeaker to tell Sikes to put the car in neutral and hit the emergency and floor brakes simultaneously. These actions, plus a slight incline, helped Sikes slow the Prius to about 50 mph.

At that point, he was traveling slowly enough to turn off the power.

“He was visibly shaken and seemed to be in shock,” said Neibert, who looked around the vehicle for clues about what went wrong. “The brakes were definitely down to hardly any material … and I noticed that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal appeared to be in their normal resting position and the floor mat was in its proper placement.”

In an interview yesterday afternoon, Sikes said he didn’t turn off the ignition or initially shift into neutral for fear of losing control of the car as it sped along.

“I was out of it during that call with 911. I couldn’t hold on to my phone and drive, so I could barely hear what the operator was saying,” Sikes said.

“What if I put the gear into reverse instead and lost control? I would have been comfortable doing those things on a straightaway. That finally happened when the CHP officer and I got on a straight stretch of road.”

Bevill, the engineer, said he understands how panicked drivers can become confused but that most cars have a safety mechanism preventing the driver from shifting into reverse at high speeds.

Toyota spokesman John Hanson said the company wouldn’t speculate about the incident before its specialists and federal investigators complete their work. The company has sent three technicians to inspect the Prius, and the highway agency has sent two.