In the past few blogs, I have been discussing the recent updates to the quality safety issue with a local Toyota plant. This plant has had a lot of publicity in the last couple of months concerning safety issues, and has had more than one issue in the past year with safety critical systems.
The manufacturer has been fined by the Federal government with the maximum penalty 16.4 million dollars. These fines are on top of the already mountain of cost of the recall, repair and of course the cost to their once exceptional reputation. According the Lexington Herald-leader, the Obama administration fined them a record $16.4 million, Toyota had delayed announcing a defective accelerator pedal in 2.3 million vehicles. After investigating, the NHTSA found evidence that Toyota did not notify U.S. officials of the defect but alerted European countries and Canada in Sept 2009, with instructions on how to handle customer complaints and how to fix the problem. Under federal law, they had 5 days to notify U.S. officials of a safety defect. According to the article, "NHTSA has proof they did not live up to its legal obligation".
Toyota does have two weeks to accept these fines or dispute them in a high profile court battle.
NHTSA opened three investigation in Feb, 2010 concerning how Toyota's handling of it's recalls. In theory, the agency could fine Toyota as much as $49 million if it found the company within information in all three cases.
://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/business/06toyota.o?bl
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