Allstate Insurance Sues Toyota Over Unintended Acceleration Claims

Like a stalled car on a freeway, Toyota is being slammed from all sides in the controversy over unintended acceleration claims. The latest to pile on is Allstate Insurance Co., which has filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking to recover more than $3 million that the insurer says it paid in claims for accidents linked to sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles.

News of the latest legal action comes just a day after Toyota issued a statement saying it has examined more than 4,000 vehicles and found no evidence that its electronic throttle control is to blame for the cases of unintended acceleration repoprted by consumers. The company's findings are supported by government tests that have also uncovered no evidence of problems in Toyota's electronics.

But the Allstate suit claims that Toyota waited too long to respond to complaints about unintended acceleration and failed to install a brake override system that automatically releases the accelerator when the brake pedal is pressed.

Allstate charges Toyota "essentially hid the problem" instead of recalling the cars. "This has resulted in numerous claims of instances of property damage and injuries, including in some instances fatalities," the suit says. A Toyota spokesman said the suit's allegations "have no basis."

Toyota already faces several class-action complaints and numerous individual personal injury claims, and it's likely that other insurance companies will follow Allstate in seeking compensation from the Japanese automaker.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, a Toyota executive said the company "has not found a single case in which electronics would lead to sudden unintended acceleration." Steve St. Angelo said Toyota has reviewed 4,200 complaints so far.

Drivers, for years, have reported instances in which their car accelerated on its own and failed to stop, even when they applied brakes. In some cases, these reports of sudden acceleration resulted in crashes.

But for the better part of a year government safety investigators have probed the thousands of reports of sudden acceleration in some Toyota vehicles. In a preliminary report to Congress in August, they said they have uncovered no evidence of problems in the vehicles' electronics.

Toyota has insisted from the start that, whatever the reason for these anomalies, they weren't caused by hiccups in the vehicles' sophisticated electronics. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in its preliminary report, said it had reviewed 58 of the more than 3,000 submitted cases, and found no evidence of an electronics flaw.

Toyota yesterday said that complaints of sudden-acceleration incidents have dropped 80 percent since April.

The company also said it has added a "brake-override control" to 84 percent of the Toyota, Lexus and Scion vehicles now on sale in the U.S. and said it intends to be the first manufacturer to affer the safety technology in all of its models. The software is intended to ensure that, even if the accelerator sticks, pressing the brake will cause the accelerator to release.

"Toyota has made significant progress in recent months to help ensure that our customers can have complete confidence in the quality, safety and reliability of their vehicles, and our latest initiatives build on those accomplishments," said St. Angelo, Toyota's chief quality control officer for North America. "Toyota's continuous efforts to strengthen vehicle quality and safety, and to respond swiftly and thoroughly to our customers' concerns, are driven by our core values and will always be a fundamental part of our company. Our goal is to set new, even higher standards for quality assurance and customer responsiveness in both the factory and the market by continuing to put our customers first in everything that we do."

Since September 2009, Toyota has recalled about nine million vehicles to either replace floor mats or alter the design of accelerator pedals. The NHTSA report said investigators found only one case in which a floor mat trapped a gas pedal, pressing it to the floor, and no case in which the gas pedal became stuck.