WASHINGTON—Akio Toyoda, the head of Toyota Motor Corp., told Congress on Wednesday that “we never run away from our problems” and apologized for accidents in his company’s vehicles.
“Quite frankly I fear the pace at which we have grown was too quick,” Mr. Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the Japanese car maker’s founder, said in his much-awaited 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 accident that Toyota drivers have experienced.
“My name is on every car,” he added in brief opening remarks he read in English. He said Toyota would work to restore the trust in its vehicles.
Mr. Toyoda said he is “absolutely confident” that there is no problem with the design of the company’s electronic throttle systems.
Earlier, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told the committee that Toyota vehicles affected by recent recalls aren’t safe unless they receive needed repairs, and added that his agency can’t say conclusively whether or not electronic problems are at fault for sudden-acceleration incidents.
Mr. LaHood, appearing before Congress, was asked twice by lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee whether Toyota’s recalled vehicles were safe. When Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) pressed him, Mr. LaHood replied: “Let me answer you very directly, Mr. Cummings. Those are not safe…We’ve determined they’re not safe.”
Mr. LaHood also said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will conduct a deeper review of automotive electronics issues.
“There are people that believe there are electronics problems with Toyotas, and that’s the reason we are going to do a review,” he said. “We don’t have evidence to say conclusively that there are electronic problems.”
Mr. LaHood’s comments drew concern from Rep. Mark Souder (R., Ind.), who said car makers could be held up to an artificial standard that vehicles be “100% safe.” Can a vehicle be 100% safe, Mr. Souder asked Mr. LaHood. Mr. LaHood said, “our goal is to make vehicles 100% safe.”
Mr. LaHood added that his department is looking into whether to make mandation the black boxes that record crash data in vehicles. He also said the data stored in these electronic devides should be easily readable and the information more available to law enforcement and government investigators.
Unlike General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., Toyota doesn’t have a commercially available device to read its “event data recorders,” as the black boxes are known. Currently, Toyota only has one device that can read the crash data stored in the black box, and that is only a prototype model. At a separate congressional hearing Tuesday, Toyota’s president of U.S. sales, Jim Lentz, said the company would have 100 black-box readers in the U.S. by April.
In 2006, NHTSA set black-box standards and issued a rule that if a manufacturer equips a vehicle with a black box, it must also make available to car owners the tools to read the data. Auto makers have pushed back the implementation of the rule by one year to Sept. 1, 2012, the start of the 2013 model year.
Mr. LaHood also told the hearing that more needs to be done to prevent former government safety officials from lobbying NHTSA. His comment came in response to questions about two Toyota safety officials who formerly worked for NHTSA.
Separately, a former top U.S. executive of Toyota, Jim Press, blamed the safety crisis at the company on former executives too focused on profitability, and said the current president, Mr. Toyoda, is “the only person who can save Toyota.”
Mr. Toyoda is expected to testify before the committee Wednesday.
Mr. Press, who was the senior American executive at Toyota’s U.S. sales operations and later its North American unit, said in a statement emailed to The Wall Street Journal that the “the root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates. They didn’t have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does.
“Akio Toyoda is not only up for the job, but he is the only person who can save Toyota,” Mr. Press said in his email. Mr. Press left Toyota in 2007.
Toyota has recalled more than eight million cars and trucks globally to fix problems with sticky gas pedals, floor mats that can get trapped under accelerators, brake problems and other systems.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D., N.Y.), chairman of the oversight committee, issued a statement Wednesday blasting both the auto maker and federal vehicle safety regulators for failing to respond sooner to reports of sudden acceleration. Mr. Towns said NHTSA received reports of 900 such cases involving Toyota vehicles and “did very little about it.”
“NHTSA failed the taxpayers, and Toyota failed their customers. Thousands of complaints, multiple investigations and serial recalls are bad enough. But we now have 39 deaths attributed to sudden acceleration in Toyotas. To give that horrifying number some perspective, there were 27 deaths attributed to the famous Pinto exploding gas tank of the 1970s,” Mr. Towns said.
Mr. Towns, in his statement, said he remains skeptical that Toyota and regulators have found all the causes of sudden acceleration. Toyota’s U.S. sales chief said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that he couldn’t rule out causes for such incidents other than the two the company says it has fixed: floor mats that tangle with the accelerator and sticky gas pedal assemblies.
Some lawmakers and safety advocates have said Toyota hasn’t adequately addressed concerns that electronic-throttle systems could experience electrical or software problems that cause a surge in engine speed.
Scores of reporters from the U.S. and Japan, along with hundreds of members of the public, lined up hours in advance of the 11 a.m. hearing, one of three congressional sessions scheduled on Toyota’s recalls.
The Toyota hearings opened Tuesday, with a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing testimony from Toyota’s U.S. sales chief, James Lentz, who apologized for the safety problems, and a woman who said she feared for her life after her Lexus sped up to dangerous speeds beyond her control.
