Defective Products

Ford Motor Co.'s 3.8-liter V-6 engine has been a modern-day workhorse, used in such popular vehicles as the Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable mid-size sedans, the Ford Windstar minivan and the Lincoln Continental luxury car. But many mechanical experts and consumer advocates say it is troubled by a major defect. Failure of the engine's head gasket is so common that many independent garages are doing a booming business replacing it.

Toyota will agree to pay a record $16.4-million fine for hiding safety defects related to sudden acceleration in 2.3 million vehicles but will stop short of accepting full legal responsibility for purposely withholding safety information, federal safety regulators said late Sunday. Toyota failed to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for at least four months after learning that the accelerator pedals in some of its vehicles could stick and cause unwanted acceleration, regulators say. Under federal law, automakers are required to disclose defects within five business days.

Toyota Motor Corp., plagued for years by claims that engines in some of its most popular vehicles were subject to damaging oil sludge buildup, has settled a class-action lawsuit over the issue. The agreement, approved Wednesday in a suit filed in 2001 in state court in Louisiana, covers about 3.5 million 1997-2002 model year Toyota and Lexus vehicles.

An executive for Toyota Motor Corp. in January urged colleagues in an e-mail to "not mention about the mechanical failures" of accelerator pedals in its vehicles, prompting a response from the company's top U.S. spokesman that said, "We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet," according to internal company documents reviewed by The Times. "The time to hide on this one is over," the e-mail from spokesman Irv Miller continued. "We need to come clean." The exchange, which occurred just days before a massive recall of Toyota vehicles to repair accelerator pedals, is the clearest indication so far that the Japanese carmaker was debating internally when to disclose that its accelerators pedals could become stuck and cause drivers to lose control of vehicles.

In an ominous new twist to the Pentium chip controversy, computer users in corporations around the world are rushing to establish whether a flaw in the Intel microprocessor may have resulted in miscalculations that could make them vulnerable to lawsuits or trouble from government agencies.

No business wants to make public its proprietary trade secrets. No business wants to encourage meritless lawsuits against itself. Legislation that promoted either would deserve to fail. But SB 711, which has been unfairly painted as anti-business, is actually pro-business and pro-consumer legislation that deserves support. The bill, authored by state Sen.

Pfizer Inc. said Tuesday that it reached agreements with 40% of the individuals who decided not to participate in a prior class-action settlement of a 6-year-old lawsuit stemming from a potentially defective heart valve manufactured by its Irvine-based Shiley Inc. unit.

Masue Kito, 60, died in her vegetable garden last September--crushed against a wall when she lost control of a rotary tiller as she put it in reverse to make a sharp turn. Hers was among the estimated 15 deaths a year from similar accidents involving the Mitsubishi machines. It was a television built by Japan's Sharp Corp. that apparently caused the death of 25-year-old Yoshiko Kaji one winter night in 1990.

Ford Motor Co. may face more losses in Explorer rollover suits because of statements its defense lawyer made to jurors during a trial in San Diego. Ford attorney Anthony Sonnett told jurors June 2 that company engineers were "sorry that they let the rest of the company down" and that Ford "knowingly put a defective product on the market" in selling the Explorer, according to the official court transcript.

Federal highway safety inspectors have released new details of a fatal car crash that triggered Toyota Motor Corp.'s largest recall, including a finding that the Lexus ES 350 sedan involved had a gas pedal design that could increase the risk of its being obstructed by a floor mat. Toyota has previously said that the floor mat was improperly installed and may have trapped the accelerator pedal, causing the vehicle to race down Highway 125 in...

On a summer day in 1911, Donald MacPherson was driving his Buick runabout to Sarasota Springs, N.Y., when the wooden spokes snapped on a rear wheel, flipping the open car and trapping him under the rear axle. MacPherson suffered a badly lacerated eye and a broken wrist so painful he couldn't grip the tools he needed to ply his craft as a stone cutter. He sued Buick Motor Co., alleging negligence in failing to ensure the wheel was roadworthy. In what would become a landmark ruling in product liability law, the New York Court of Appeals in 1916 awarded MacPherson $5,025 in compensation -- about $115,000 in today's dollars -- and established the automaker's "duty of care" to ensure customers are sold a safe product.

Federal regulators in 2007 asked Toyota Motor Corp. to consider installing software to prevent sudden acceleration in its vehicles after receiving complaints that vehicles could race out of control, company documents show. Yet the automaker began installing the safety feature, known as brake override, only this January after a widely publicized accident involving a runaway Lexus ES that killed four people near San Diego. Safety regulators acknowledged late last week that they pressured Toyota anew last fall to consider the override software in the wake of that crash, which set off a chain of events leading the company to issue nearly 10 million recall notices worldwide.

Federal inspection of the runaway Toyota Prius that took a wild ride on a San Diego County freeway was delayed several hours Wednesday when a California congressman insisted that someone from his office witness the examination. A team of inspectors from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was already at Toyota of El Cajon examining the car -- which reportedly had a stuck accelerator, causing it to speed for half an hour before the driver got it stopped -- when a staffer from the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista)

More than 60 drivers have complained of sudden acceleration incidents despite the fact that their cars were repaired by Toyota Motor Corp. in the current recalls, new data released Thursday show. The latest figure, released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, significantly increases the total number of complaints involving repaired vehicles, which was less than 10 on Tuesday. The new complaints allege several accidents and at least three injuries resulting from runaway unintended acceleration despite the vehicles' undergoing a series of modifications at Toyota dealerships designed to resolve the issue.

One car barreled through a stop sign, struck a tree and landed upside down in a Texas lake, drowning four people. Another tore across an Indiana street and crashed into a jewelry store. A third raced at an estimated 100 mph on a San Bernardino County street before striking a phone pole, killing the owner of a sushi restaurant. At least 56 people have died in U.S. traffic accidents in which sudden unintended acceleration of Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles has been alleged, according to a Times review of public records and interviews with authorities.

Apologizing for Toyota's missteps in dealing with defects blamed in dozens of fatalities, a contrite Akio Toyoda told members of Congress that his company's rapid growth had "confused" the priority it places on safety. "Quite frankly, I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick," the president of Toyota Motor Corp. said during more than three hours of testimony. "I regret that this has resulted in the safety issues described in the recalls we face today, and I am deeply sorry for any accidents that Toyota drivers have experienced."

Mimi Kim wasn't too worried when she noticed the roof of her Hermosa Beach home had a few broken and warped tiles. The FireFree roofing--one of the selling points of the four-bedroom house she bought last year--came with a 50-year warranty. But when she called a roofing company to make what she thought were minor repairs, she learned that problems with the tiles had resulted in a class-action lawsuit and settlement. "The biggest problem was hanging over our heads," Kim said.

A unit of GT Bicycles Inc. is recalling about 5,500 Tag-A-Long bicycle trailers because of a faulty universal joint that can cause the trailers to become separated from the bicycles, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said Thursday. Riteway Products, the parts and accessories unit of GT, makes the Cycle Design Tag-A-Long, a one-wheel bike that attaches to a larger bicycle. The model is popular with parents who have smaller children.

Toyota Motor Corp. officials took credit for saving hundreds of millions of dollars by persuading federal regulators to limit or avoid safety recalls and rules, a company document released Sunday shows. The document, an internal company presentation, depicts an automaker focused on getting what it termed "favorable recall outcomes" from regulators, with a goal of saving money even as the death toll climbed from accidents in which Toyota vehicles accelerated uncontrollably. The presentation by executives in the company's Washington, D.C., office was addressed to Yoshimi Inaba, Toyota's top U.S. executive, and dated July 6, 2009 -- months before the sudden-acceleration problem was widely known outside Toyota and the federal highway regulatory agency.