E.U. Slow to React to Toyota Safety Problems

BRUSSELS — The first problems with sticking accelerators in some Toyota models surfaced more than a year ago in Britain and Ireland. But it was only Friday — long after a global recall began — that the European Commission issued its first alert.
As the Japanese company prepares to issue another recall, this time for its 2010 Prius hybrid, the system for monitoring car safety across the European Union also has appeared, like the company, opaque and slow to react.
The E.U. warning came as it emerged that Toyota planned to broaden its recalls to at least 311,000 of its 2010 Prius models after receiving a flurry of complaints about the brakes on its popular hybrid. The decision on the Prius is to be announced early this week, a person briefed on the decision said late Sunday. It follows Toyota’s global recall of about eight million cars over accelerator pedals that could stick or become caught on floor mats.
The automaker, which built its reputation on vehicle quality, has been stung by the size of the recalls and questions about sluggish response to safety concerns.
The commission’s warning, posted Friday to the Web site of the commission’s Rapid Alert System for Non-Food Products, said that some Toyota “products pose a risk of injuries because there is a possibility that the accelerator pedal mechanism may, in rare instances, mechanically stick in a partially depressed position or return slowly to the idle position.”
“The precise number of involved units is still under investigation, but may reach up to 1.8 million vehicles,” it said, noting that models including the Aygo, iQ, Yaris, Corolla, Avensis and RAV4 were involved. Also involved were Auris models and Verso models, which were manufactured as recently as Jan. 5, 2010. Toyota had taken “voluntary corrective actions,” the warning said.
A group of national experts from E.U. governments met Monday behind closed doors at European Commission headquarters in Brussels to discuss exchanging information on the problems experienced by Toyota.
The commission outlined to the experts how they could share information when car companies discover deficiencies, but no decisions were made to change the system, which allows car makers to decide when to notify national agencies of problems, said Ton van Lierop, a commission spokesman.
Other commission officials emphasized that safety alerts only were issued once companies, like Toyota, actually had taken some corrective measures. The notice was posted quietly Friday on a relatively obscure Web site.
But for some observers, the delay between Toyota’s discovery of the deficiencies and the commission’s posting of the warning illustrated a gap, even in rule-bound Europe.
Car companies in Europe are among the most important employers in countries like Germany, Italy and France, and exercise enormous influence in Brussels. The companies successfully reshaped legislation on climate change measures and have helped shape the rules on relationships between automobile manufacturers and dealers.
Stephen Russell, the secretary general of ANEC, a European consumer standards association, said the problems at Toyota were shaping up to be “a test” for safety regulation in the trade bloc.
Oversight of car safety was among “gray areas when it comes to the consumer interest and where we would welcome greater efforts in the areas of notification and enforcement between the European Commission and member states,” Mr. Russell said.
The European Consumers’ Organization, an umbrella group for national consumer groups, said Monday it was unable to comment on whether the trade bloc’s alert system for automobile safety was adequate. Car safety has “never been part of our agenda,” said Dave McCullough, a spokesman for the organization. “We can’t cover everything.”
The fact that Toyota knew about accelerator deficiencies as far back as December 2008 “raises serious questions about whether car manufacturers should be more forthcoming when they identify a problem, even before a recall,” said Robert Gifford, the executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, a nonprofit group that seeks to advise British legislators on air, rail and road safety issues. And the apparent lack of knowledge about the deficiencies among governments “also raises questions about whether agencies are as interventionist as they should be, so that they find out about such problems in the first place,” he said.
In Ireland, the National Consumer Agency, which seeks to protect consumer interests, did not respond by Monday night for information about when it first learned of problems with accelerators in Toyota cars. The Office of Fair Trading, the British consumer and competition authority, did not respond to a similar request by Monday night.
The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, a specialized agency in Britain dealing with aspects of auto regulation, said Toyota only informed it “of the issue with U.K.-affected vehicles at the same time as the concern was released” in the United States.
A similar agency in Ireland, the Road Safety Authority, said it was “not aware of any incidents in Ireland concerning the acceleration issue in Toyota vehicles.”
Toyota executives in Brussels said the company began detecting deficiencies in European models in December 2008. They said those incidents mostly concerned the Yaris and the Aygo models that were sold in right-hand drive countries like Britain and Ireland.
Some these problems probably were detected during routine check-ups of cars by dealers, said Etienne Plas, a spokesman for Toyota in Europe.
In other cases, problems may have been detected because “a customer noticed something strange with the pedal,” he said.
Regulators in the United States opened an investigation into the brakes of the 2010 Prius last week after complaints from drivers who said they had been briefly unable to stop their cars on uneven surfaces.