In re Toyota Motor Corp. Unintended Acceleration Litigation Lawsuit

In re Toyota Motor Corp. Unintended Acceleration Litigation

Product and manufacturer

The litigation concerned Toyota and Lexus passenger vehicles built by Toyota Motor Corporation, the Japanese automaker — including the Camry, Avalon, Corolla, Matrix, RAV4, Prius, Tacoma, Tundra, and related Lexus models sold in the United States in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. The vehicles used an electronic throttle control system, a drive-by-wire design in which the accelerator pedal sends an electronic signal to the engine control unit instead of moving a mechanical cable, together with accelerator pedal assemblies containing a friction device that gives the pedal a defined tactile feel.

Harm

Drivers and owners reported that the vehicles accelerated without the accelerator pedal being pressed. Several possible causes were identified and debated during the crisis. Driver's-side floor mats could shift into the footwell and trap the accelerator pedal; a friction device inside some pedal assemblies could wear so that the pedal became hard to depress, slow to return, or, in rare cases, stuck; and some plaintiffs alleged software or electromagnetic faults in the electronic throttle control itself. The reported episodes led to crashes with injuries and fatalities, and after the recalls were announced the volume of reported incidents rose sharply, with the causes of individual cases difficult to verify. In February 2011, a joint study by NHTSA and NASA concluded that no electronic defect had been found and that the incidents were attributable mainly to driver pedal misapplication and to the two mechanical problems — pedal entrapment and slow pedal return.

Litigation course

As reports mounted, consumers and their families brought product-liability, personal-injury, wrongful-death, and economic-loss claims against Toyota in federal courts. The cases were consolidated in In re Toyota Motor Corp. Unintended Acceleration Litigation, docket number 8:10-md-2151, in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, before Judge James V. Selna; the MDL was filed on February 4, 2010. In the consolidated proceeding, Judge Selna organized separate lead-counsel panels for the personal-injury and wrongful-death cases and for the economic-loss cases, set a discovery schedule, and designated early "bellwether" trials in the personal-injury track.

Outcome

The principal resolution of the underlying safety issue was a global recall campaign rather than a single trial outcome: a floor-mat recall beginning in November 2009, an accelerator-pedal recall beginning in January 2010, a software update for anti-lock braking on hybrid models, and further pedal-related recalls in 2011. The matter is recorded as resolved in 2011 through the recall remedy, while the claims in the consolidated cases were resolved over many years through a combination of bellwether trials and settlements. In the aftermath, Toyota installed brake-override systems across its vehicle lines and stood up a global quality committee to coordinate defect analysis.

The MDL remains formally open for residual matters.