Toyota Motor Corp started shipping parts on Monday to U.S. dealers who were prepared to stay open late to fix vehicles that are affected by the most damaging recall in the automaker's history.
Toyota's U.S. sales chief Jim Lentz offered penance and apology in a series of television interviews on Monday as the carmaker sought to keep consumers confident in the brand long known for quality and reliability.
Most of the 2.3 million vehicles recalled for having accelerators that could stick, and another 120,000 on dealer lots will have a metal part installed that Toyota told dealers was a "shim" or "spacer."
"The beauty of the fix is that it doesn't take much time," spokesman Mike Michels said, adding that many of Toyota's 1,200 U.S. dealerships will stay open around-the-clock.
"A lot of our dealers are going to stay open 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week," Michels said. "They are proving quite creative in setting up something like an assembly line" to speed repairs.
The biggest U.S. dealer group in terms of Toyota sales, AutoNation Inc, said it was going to move to such a schedule at some of its dealerships.
The fix takes about 30 minutes, and will be paid for by Toyota under warranty payments to dealers.
However, vehicles that cannot be fixed will receive newly designed pedals made by CTS or another Toyota supplier, Denso, but most of the new pedals will go on new cars and trucks once production resumes, Toyota said.
Meanwhile, production of the eight models involved in the sticking accelerator safety recall was set to resume February 8, after a one-week shutdown.
Toyota can restart production of those recalled models, including the best-selling Camry and Corolla sedans, because it now has enough of the newly designed pedals as well as repair parts, the company told Reuters.
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