US auto sales figures for January are expected to show a sharp drop for Toyota after it pulled eight of its most popular models from showrooms last week following complaints over sticking accelerator pedals.
In the first public comment from an executive at Toyota's head office, the company's executive in charge of quality said he was expecting a sales hit from the recall.
"The sales forecast is something that we're extremely worried about," executive vice-president Shinichi Sasaki told a news conference. The company will report its third-quarter earnings on Thursday.
Shaken confidence
On top of a separate recall for slipping floormats, also linked to unintended acceleration, some 8.1 million Toyota vehicles are now being recalled, more than its total group sales last year.
Although Toyota says the occurrence of problems is rare, public confidence is being shaken by coverage of the saga, including the harrowing details of the crash of a Lexus, blamed on unexpected acceleration, which killed an off-duty California state-trooper and three members of his family last year.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, has not formally addressed the public or media on the recall problems. While in Davos, Switzerland last weekend, he appeared briefly on broadcaster NHK and apologised to consumers.
The company's US head, Jim Lentz, appeared on TV on Monday and also expressed his regret as part of a public relations blitz in Toyota's largest market.
Meanwhile, Europe's No. 2 carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen said it would discuss with Toyota in coming days how to proceed with its own recall of just under 97,000 Citroen C1s and Peugeot 107s, built on the same assembly lines as Toyota's Aygo at a joint plant in Czech Republic.
The spokesman confirmed PSA cars used the same pedal as Toyota and said two cases that could potentially be linked to a sticking accelerator pedal had been reported around the end of 2009 and the start of 2010, but the link was not confirmed.
"We haven't had any accidents reported in our network," the spokesman stressed. The spokesman said he could not say how much the recall campaign would cost, nor how long it would take.
"Decisions about recall campaigns are made jointly, so during this meeting with Toyota we'll decide on the details of the campaign, the type of repair that will be carried out and when the campaign can be launched," he told Reuters.
Toyota detailed its plans on Monday to fix the faulty pedals on at least 4.2 million vehicles in North America and Europe with a small metal spacer to prevent sticking.
Toyota said it would restart production on February 8 of the eight models including Camry, Corolla and Rav4 models after an unprecedented one-week shutdown at six plants in the US and Canada.
All clear
According to a Toyota Bahrain spokesman, the recall does not include cars in the rest of the Gulf. He said that Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are not affected mainly because the cars here were built in different factories.
— Habib ToumiBahrain Bureau Chief
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