Gas Prices outweigh Safety Concerns

Safety concerns surrounding Toyota have been thwarted by increasing gas prices.  Despite the bad press Toyota has received within the past year about sudden unintended acceleration, the Toyota Prius is in high demand.  Climbing gas prices have some drivers opting for more fuel efficient cars like the Prius.

Demand for the Prius is so high that it is now selling for higher than its list price in some areas.  And because of the earthquake in Japan, the Prius is hard to come by, with Japanese manufacturing at a minimum.

So does better fuel economy trump safety?

Toyota has sold more than one million Prius cars in the United States.  But since 2009, Toyota has had 13 million product recalls total, and hundreds of personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits have been filed against the automaker.

In 2010, more than 400,000 Prius cars worldwide were recalled because Toyota discovered a problem with the braking system.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched an investigation into the Toyota recalls and ultimately fined the company more than $16 million when it found that Toyota failed to send out a recall of the cars in a timely manner.  Although this may seem like a lot, this amounts to just $2 per car sold worldwide by Toyota in 2009 alone.

Complaints related to unintended acceleration of Toyota cars total nearly 37,900.  Toyota has reported a total of 6496 unintended acceleration incidents, which resulted in 2483 crashes, 1156 injuries, and 54 deaths.

Yet the Prius is more popular than ever.  With gas prices topping out in the United States at just over $4 per gallon, Americans are looking for fuel economy and are hoping that Toyota has fixed the problems with the Prius in its newer models. 

Can we trust that if something is wrong with these newer models Toyota will alert consumers to the problems and fix them as needed?  History cautions us against relying on Toyota, but litigation surrounding the defective vehicle parts and the millions of dollars in fines levied against the company should have taught Toyota a lesson that consumers hope the company will never forget--consumer safety comes first, and misleading the public or hiding a problem hurts a company's bottom-line.