Toyota Recall Class Action Lawsuits Can Proceed: Judge

A federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss Toyota class action lawsuits filed by people who claim that they suffered economic loss as a result of recalls issued due to the risk of sudden acceleration. 

Toyota Motor Corp. had asked U.S. District Judge James V. Selna to throw out the economic losses lawsuits, saying that the plaintiffs had failed to identify a specific defect in the vehicles.

The lawsuits are different in nature from cases where Toyota drivers were injured or killed in an automobile accident caused by the uncontrolled acceleration of their vehicles accelerated out of control.

The Toyota recall class action suits allege that the resale value of their vehicles was a large part of owning a Toyota or Lexus, and those values plummeted following a series of recalls issued by Toyota over the past 15 months. Plaintiffs claim that Toyota withheld information about the safety of the cars which would have affected their decisions to buy the vehicles.

Selna rejected the Japanese automakers arguments, saying that while plaintiffs could not give precise dollar amounts on their losses, “a safety consideration as fundamental as whether a car is able to stop when the brakes are applied is material to consumers.”

Toyota officials have said that the plaintiffs’ cases rest strongly on claims that the recalled vehicles have a defective electronic throttle control system which caused the acceleration problems. Many critics claim that Toyota knew about the problem and ignored it. However, Toyota maintains that there is no defective electronic throttle, and blames the acceleration incidents on overly thick and incorrectly installed floor mats which trapped accelerators, and defective gas pedals that got stuck in the open position.

Toyota recalls have been issued for about 11 million vehicles since September 2009, with 8.5 million recalled due to complaints that they may accelerate out of control. The recalls were issued in waves, starting with 4.2 million recalled for problems involving the floormats, and then later recalls indicated that there was a mechanical or electrical problem with the gas pedals.

In addition to class action lawsuits over the recalls, Toyota accidents due to uncontrolled acceleration have resulted in a number of individual lawsuits, including personal injury lawsuits and wrongful death lawsuits filed by family members of people allegedly killed when their vehicles accelerated out of control.

In April, all federal Toyota sudden acceleration lawsuits were consolidated and centralized before Judge Selna as part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL) for pretrial proceedings. There were about 228 federal lawsuits over recalled Toyota vehicles included in the MDL, and nearly 100 other lawsuits pending in state courts nationwide at the time.

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