Toyota Motor Corp has up to 70,000 vehicles still stranded on U.S. dealer lots due to defective accelerator pedals that are the subject of a major safety recall, an executive said on Wednesday.
Toyota was forced to stop selling some of its best-selling vehicles in late January and launched a recall of 2.3 million cars and light trucks because of faulty gas pedals, a situation that has thrown the automaker into crisis.
The extraordinary stop-sale order affected about 60 percent of the 210,000 vehicles in dealer stock, or about 120,000 cars and light trucks, said Bob Carter, sales chief for the Toyota brand in the United States.
On Wednesday at the Chicago auto show, Carter estimated that 60,000 to 70,000 units in dealer inventory were still subject to the stop order because pedal repairs were not completed.
Toyota faces intense scrutiny from U.S. safety regulators and congressional hearings near the end of February following massive recalls due to the accelerator pedal problem and the possibility that floor mats could trap the accelerator and lead to deadly high-speed crashes.
A U.S. lawmaker on Wednesday invited Toyota President Akio Toyoda to meet members of Congress the week of February 22. The Nikkei newspaper reported that Toyoda's visit would be delayed to early March due to heavy snowfall in Washington.
After thousands of complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyota models with safety regulators, safety advocates also want to know whether the problems run beyond mechanical issues to the electronic throttle control system itself.
Toyota announced on Tuesday the recall of more than 400,000 of its 2010 model-year Prius hybrids globally to fix a problem with the regenerative braking, adding to the pressure on the automaker.
Toyota expects to have mailed out the recall notices for Prius owners by the end of the week, Carter said.
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