Toyota dealers have 70,000 stranded vehicles

Toyota Motor Corp has up to 70,000 vehicles still stranded on US dealer lots due to defective accelerator pedals that are the subject of a major safety recall, an executive said on Wednesday.

Toyota was forced to stop selling some of its best-selling vehicles in late January and launched a recall of 2.3 million cars and light trucks because of faulty gas pedals, a situation that has thrown the automaker into crisis.

The extraordinary stop-sale order affected about 60 per cent of the 210,000 vehicles in dealer stock, or about 120,000 cars and light trucks, said Bob Carter, sales chief for the Toyota brand in the United States.

On Wednesday at the Chicago auto show, Carter estimated that 60,000 to 70,000 units in dealer inventory were still subject to the stop order because pedal repairs were not completed.

Toyota faces intense scrutiny from US safety regulators and congressional hearings near the end of February following massive recalls due to the accelerator pedal problem and the possibility that floor mats could trap the accelerator and lead to deadly high-speed crashes.

A US lawmaker on Wednesday invited Toyota President Akio Toyoda to meet members of Congress the week of February 22. The Nikkei newspaper reported that Toyoda's visit would be delayed to early March due to heavy snowfall in Washington.

After thousands of complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyota models with safety regulators, safety advocates also want to know whether the problems run beyond mechanical issues to the electronic throttle control system itself.

Toyota announced on Tuesday the recall of more than 400,000 of its 2010 model-year Prius hybrids globally to fix a problem with the regenerative braking, adding to the pressure on the automaker.

Toyota expects to have mailed out the recall notices for Prius owners by the end of the week, Carter said.

Carter said he was "very confident" of the fixes Toyota plans for the accelerator pedals.

Toyota has offered a repair for pedals on existing vehicles and a newly designed accelerator pedal for new production. The automaker halted production for a week to start February and all plants have received the newly designed pedal.

Carter said all Toyota dealers have the parts to repair the accelerator pedals and that the dealers were focused on repairing customer cars before the vehicles in inventory.

Toyota US dealers are repairing more than 52,000 accelerator pedals per day and have completed work on about 225,000 since they started late last week, Carter said.

"We are 24/7 working with the dealers to maximize the number of repairs," Carter said.

Analysts have said the automakers most likely to pick up sales at the expense of Toyota were Honda Motor Co Ltd, Hyundai Motor Co and Ford Motor Co, but executives at the auto show were wary of discussing profiting from Toyota's ills.

General Motors Co's North American president, Mark Reuss, acknowledged there may be an opportunity for the US automaker to garner consideration from new customers, but argued that sales gains made in January were not due to Toyota's recalls.

Mark Fields, Ford president of the Americas, agreed, refusing to call it an opportunity to steal Toyota customers. "We don't take a lot of joy in it. We've made our own opportunity over the last couple of years."