Toyota Motor Corp. president Akio Toyoda testified for more than three hours about the safety of his company’s cars before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 24.
The
Los Angeles Times
noted
that Toyoda, grandson of the company founder, hadn’t initially planned to appear before the congressional committee.
He changed his mind amid escalating investigations of Toyota’s handling of the sudden-acceleration problem, including probes by Congress, a federal grand jury in New York, the Transportation Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to the
LA Times
report, Toyoda said “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. 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.”
The
Wall Street Journal
called Toyoda’s testimony
“an iconic moment in U.S.-Japanese history.” The
Journal
article said that Toyoda
often fell back on Japanese clichés that executives and politicians use in such situations, saying he would work to ensure the mistakes “didn’t happen a second time” … He prayed for the souls of accident victims….
(Sources:
Los Angeles Times,
Feb. 25, 2010;
Wall Street Journal,
Feb. 25, 2010.)
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