Gojirra99

To comply with U.S. child safety rule, front passenger switch will be disabled, not replaced.

David Shepardson / Detroit News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Toyota Motor Corp. will spend millions to deactivate front-seat passenger air bag cut-off switches in nearly 160,000 Tundra pickups to avoid having to install a costlier child safety seat anchoring system.

The Japanese automaker is taking the action after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on June 28 rejected Toyota's petition to waive a federal safety regulation that requires most vehicles built after September 2002 and equipped with the cut-off switch to also have a child seat anchor system known as LATCH -- lower anchorages and tethers for children.

The regulation was meant to ensure that child seats stay in place in a crash, especially in vehicles with smaller rear seating, such as pickups.

At the time the regulation was adopted, 600 children under 5 were killed every year in auto crashes and another 70,000 were injured.

Children are at high risk of death or injury from airbags that deploy. That's why child seats aren't allowed in front seats that don't have an airbag cut-off switch, which activates the airbag only if it senses an adult is in the passenger seat.

Deactivating the switch means the air bag will always deploy, making it unsafe to ever put a child in the front seat.

Toyota will voluntarily recall the pickups, beginning in mid-September, after completing engineering of the parts to deactivate the air bag cut-off switch, spokesman Bill Kwong said Friday.

"We always recommend that child seats are used in the rear, as children are safest there," Kwong said.

Owners will get notice of the recall in September, he said.

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety said Toyota shouldn't be allowed to simply deactivate the switches.

Toyota's failure to provide the latches "is not merely an incidental statistical artifact but a clear and present danger to the children who ride in child restraints in the front passenger seats of those vehicles," said Henry Jasny, general counsel for the Washington-based group.

Kwong said there may have been some engineering issues that make it impractical to add the latches.

He said the exact cost of the recall isn't known -- only that the fix is expected to require two hours of labor.

At more than $100 for labor, it could cost more than $16 million if all vehicles are serviced, he said.

It isn't known what the parts will cost since they are still being designed, he said.

In its ruling, NHTSA took no position on whether Toyota could comply by simply deactivating the switches.

Kwong said beginning in the 2006 model year, Toyota deactivated its front passenger air bag cut-off switch to satisfy the regulations.

In June 2005, Toyota acknowledged that 156,555 Tundras from the 2003-05 model years didn't comply with the child seat anchor safety regulation.

The automaker asked the NHTSA to waive the regulation and spent more than a year trying to convince the agency it wasn't required to install child-seat anchoring systems.

Toyota noted that it hadn't received any customer complaints and that there were no injuries reported as a result of the lack of the anchoring system in the front seats of the trucks. Tundras have compliant child safety latches in rear seats.

"However, the fact does not render the absence of the anchorages in the front seats inconsequential," NHTSA chief Nicole Nason said in a June 28 notice.

Small children's safety "depends on proper installation of the child restraint systems in which they ride."

The NHTSA also noted that parents with vehicles built before 2002 who mistakenly believed their vehicles complied with the regulation have "used seat belt latch plates, drilled holes through the nylon webbing of the seat belt" in an effort to use the front seat.

mmarshall

I'm not sure that I see the sense in all of this. Why DE-activate the front-seat air-bag cutoff safety switch if you are going to place a child seat up front? This, IMO, supersedes even the question of whether the rear seats have LATCH mechanisms or not. With a child seat up front ( and you have no choice in a conventional pickup without a rear seat ) why ON EARTH would you want the air bag to fire? Disabling the cut-off switch is ridiculous.
IMO, this is a bad ruling on NHTSA's part. If they will not relax this order Toyota should either sue them in Federal Court or ask Congress to intervene. .

spwolf

yep, it is absurd. Completly.

Those things have nothing to do with each other at all. So if you want to have switchable airbags at front, in order to have kids in front, you have to have latch for back seats. Makes no sense at all.

GS69

Toyota's Totally Bizarre Recall
Toyota plans to retool 160,000 Tundra pick-ups to comply with safety regulations. But the "fix" will actually make them less safe.

By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; Posted: 1:01 p.m. EDT (17:01 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- This fall, Toyota will voluntarily recall nearly 160,000 Toyota Tundra pickups so that they can be made less safe for children riding in the front seat.

No, that's not a mistake - at least not on our part.

The recall, announced Monday, is meant to make Tundras comply with a set of safety regulations. The rules say that vehicles built after 2002 must have a child-seat anchor system known as LATCH in the front seat if they also have a front-seat airbag shut-off switch.

The Tundras in question were built with an airbag shut-off switch but not the LATCH system.

Toyota's solution? Spend lots of money and inconvenience customers...to remove the airbag shut-off switch.

The move not only doesn't enhance the safety of these vehicles, it actually makes the vehicles unsafe for small children riding in the front seat.

Those shut-off switches exist because airbags can injure and even kill small children even in otherwise minor crashes.

Meanwhile, even without a LATCH system (which stands for lower anchorages and tethers for children), parents can still install safety seats using seatbelts.

Toyota originally discovered the compliance issue and, in a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in July 2005, the company asked regulators to let them to ignore it as "inconsequential to safety."

NHTSA denied that petition. So Toyota asked NHTSA to reconsider, arguing that the solution would be worse than the problem.

"[We] believe that the agency should understand that the likely remedy is to remove the airbag cut-off switches," Toyota lawyers wrote to NHTSA in October of 2005.

Toyota has no other choice, Chris Tinto, Toyota's vice president for regulatory affairs, told CNNMoney.com. Placing the LATCH system in the trucks' front seats would have been far too expensive.

"We still think it's better with the cut-off switches in," said Tinto said. But rules are rules, so it's out with the switches.

What's more, to comply with the rule, Toyota is currently building new Tundra trucks without the switches, Tinto said.

Of course, regardless of LATCH systems or airbag cut-off switches, children are always safest in a back seat if at all possible. The Tundra trucks being recalled do have back seats, albeit small ones. But people sometimes put small children in the front seats of cars and trucks for various reasons. For example, according to NHTSA, the Tundra's back seats are too small to fit rear-facing seats, the kind that infants ride in.

In its final decision. published on June 28, 2006, NHTSA pointed out that the method a manufacturer might choose to remedy a compliance issue is not a determining factor when deciding that it must be fixed, so Toyota's warning made no difference.

Any issue NHTSA might have with Toyota's solution to the problem will have to wait for another round of memos.

"We are closely reviewing Toyota's remedy," said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for NHTSA.