The judge hearing the Toyota unintended acceleration litigation says that the case is unlikely to go to trial for another two years.
During a recent status conference, James Selna, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, told lawyers that he expected to hear the first cases during the first quarter of 2013. The first cases to actually end up in a trial part will be so-called “bellwether cases,” those that signal how the rest of the litigation will proceed.
Judge Selna is overseeing the massive number of lawsuits consolidated into a single proceeding last April.
Dragging on
His decision means that the fiasco will hang over Toyota’s head for the foreseeable future, not just in the courtroom but also on the airwaves and in the minds of consumers -- many of them potential car-buyers -- across the country.
The issue has already been haunting the company for over a year; reports of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles first surfaced in November 2009, with a recall following shortly thereafter. A second recall was initiated in January 2010.
For a long time, the news only seemed to get worse for Toyota. In May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that the issue may have caused as many as 89 deaths within the past decade, a higher number than originally thought.
Last February, Clarence Ditlow, with the Center for Auto Safety, told ConsumerAffairs.comthat Toyota would face an uphill climb in winning back consumers.
“For the next year they have to bat 1,000,” Ditlow said. “If they make a mistake they have to correct it almost overnight.”
Toyota challenges
In November, Toyota movedto dismiss the lawsuits, pointing out that most of the plaintiffs haven’t actually experienced any problem with their cars. In its motion, Toyota cited what it called “plaintiffs’ continued inability to point to an actual defect in the automobiles at issue.”
The company also took advantage of the fact that many of the lawsuits being heard by Judge Selna allege economic, rather than bodily, injury. The theory behind these suits is that the negative publicity surrounding the unintended acceleration issue has caused potentially defective cars to lose much of their resale value.
“The suggestion that at some undisclosed time in the future, when these plaintiffs might attempt to sell their vehicles, they will suffer some loss legally traceable to a defect that they have never experienced, is sheer speculation,” Toyota wrote in its motion.
Judge Selna ultimately rejected the bid, writing that Toyota was seeking “a level of specificity that is not required at the pleadings stage.”
“The defect is identified: plaintiffs’ cars suddenly and unexpectedly accelerate and do not stop upon proper application of the brake pedal,” Selna wrote.
In a statement last year, Toyota said it is “making an all-out effort to ensure our vehicles are safe and we remain committed to investigating reported incidents of unintended acceleration in our vehicles quickly.”
