At Toyota, our core values have always been to pursue the highest levels of safety and quality and to continuously improve. To conclude otherwise based on a few handpicked documents, including internal deliberations about quality improvements or descriptions of prototype system testing, is misleading and simply wrong.
Over the past three years, the safety of Toyota's Electronic Throttle Control System (ETCS) has been repeatedly confirmed by multiple independent evaluations, including by Exponent, which investigated the Space Shuttle disaster, and the comprehensive NHTSA–NASA studies, which found no electronic-based cause of high-speed acceleration in Toyota vehicles and were confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences.
Further, at no time has anyone ever put forth any reliable scientific evidence of an alleged electronic defect in our vehicles that could cause unintended acceleration (UA). In fact, despite more than two years of unprecedented discovery and full access to our proprietary source code, plaintiffs counsel in federal multidistrict litigation acknowledged that they were "unable to reproduce a UA in a subject vehicle under driving conditions."
Bottom line, no one has ever demonstrated a vehicle-based cause of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles equipped with ETCS outside of the known, mechanical causes remedied by Toyota through the recalls it has conducted since 2009.
We continue to stand fully behind our products, and millions of Toyota drivers continue to prove every day that they can depend upon their vehicles to provide safe, reliable transportation. We are gratified that Toyota vehicles are once again widely recognized as among the safest and most reliable on the road.
