TOKYO – Toyota will offer the same fix for stability control programming it has announced for the Lexus GX 460 in North America to vehicles in other regions, affecting 34,000 vehicles worldwide, the Japanese automaker said Tuesday.

Toyota Motor Corp. will update the stability-control software program to reduce the risk of vehicles sliding in some Land Cruiser Prado vehicles, as well as the Lexus GX 460, sold in other regions, The Associated Press reported.

The move to expand the measures to other regions follows Toyota’s recall in North America and its agreement Monday to a record $16.4 million fine in the U.S., levied for a slow response in earlier recalls.

Toyota has been fighting to regain its once-sterling reputation amid a spate of recalls, which have ballooned to more than 8 million vehicles worldwide, needing fixes for faulty gas pedals, defective floor mats and braking software problems.

Toyota has also been trying to be quicker. The latest global fix comes less than a week after Consumer Reports, an influential U.S. magazine, issued a warning about the Lexus GX 460 sport utility vehicle, saying it may be prone to rollovers.

The automaker said it will carry out similar fixes in Europe and the Middle East to what is involved in the North American recall.

The vehicles requiring the update are 13,000 GX 460 vehicles — 9,400 of them in the U.S., 1,000 in Russia and 1,000 in Oman.

Also affected are some types of left-hand-drive Land Cruiser Prado models. Those models total 21,000 globally, including 4,400 in Oman, 4,000 in Russia and 1,500 in the United Arab Emirates, according to Toyota.

Toyota said the vehicles could slide sideways when turning sharply at high speeds, partly because the fuel tank and the presence of the driver may make the left side of a vehicle heavier.

Toyota Motor Corp. “knowingly hid a dangerous defect” that caused its vehicles to accelerate unexpectedly, the U.S. said, for the first time accusing the world’s largest automaker of breaking the law, Bloomberg reported.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood proposed a record civil penalty of $16.4 million, the most the government can impose. The fine recommended yesterday escalates the confrontation between Toyota and LaHood, who initially praised the carmaker for its handling of recalls the company attributed to faulty accelerator pedals.

The fine was announced the week after Toyota reported U.S. sales rose 41 percent in March, signaling the company may be recovering from global recalls of more than 8 million vehicles. Toyota waited at least four months before telling U.S. regulators that gas pedals might stick, LaHood said in a statement yesterday. Companies have five business days to report safety defects, the Transportation Department said.

The department’s action showed “safety matters and they’re going to be tough as nails,” Joan Claybrook, a former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in an interview. “That’s very appropriate. They caught Toyota red- handed.”

The Toyota City, Japan-based carmaker’s American depositary receipts, each equal to two ordinary shares, fell 42 cents to $80.84 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have declined 3.9 percent this year.

“We now have proof that Toyota failed to live up to its legal obligations,” LaHood said in the statement. “Worse yet, they knowingly hid a dangerous defect for months from U.S. officials and did not take action to protect millions of drivers and their families.”

The U.S. investigation and review of documents provided by Toyota is continuing and may discover additional safety violations that lead to more penalties, LaHood said today at a news conference at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

“This is the first thing that we have found,” he said of the delayed disclosure about sticky pedals. “It may not be the last thing.”

Toyota received a letter from NHTSA yesterday asking for the fine, Mieko Iwasaki, a Tokyo-based spokeswoman for the carmaker, said by phone today.

“We are considering how to respond to it,” Iwasaki said. “Toyota is working toward making safe, reliable and high- quality cars to satisfy our customers and responding sincerely to customers’ comments.”

More than 60 owners have complained of unintended acceleration in their Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles after dealer repairs under the automaker’s recalls, Bloomberg reported.

“We are determined to get to the bottom of this,” David Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in e-mailed statement yesterday. NHTSA had reported 10 such complaints a day earlier.

The agency questioned whether Toyota has fixed the defects that caused unintended acceleration. The Toyota City, Japan- based automaker, the world’s largest, has recalled about 8 million vehicles worldwide to reshape and replace gas pedals.

“If it appears that a remedy provided by Toyota is not addressing the problem it was intended to fix, NHTSA has the authority to order Toyota to provide a different solution,” the agency said in its e-mailed statement.

Toyota started interviewing vehicle owners soon after receiving the complaints on repaired cars from NHTSA, the carmaker said in an e-mailed statement.

“Although most of these reports have yet to be verified, Toyota has been and remains committed to investigating all reported incidents of sudden acceleration in its vehicles quickly,” the company said.

Lawmakers asked Toyota to provide more information about tests it commissioned on whether the defect stemmed from an electronics glitch. Toyota has said a study found that the electronic throttle-control systems performed as designed.

LOS ANGELES – Relatives of a California state trooper and three family members whose fatal car wreck helped spark Toyota’s wide-ranging safety recall have sued the automaker for defects they say caused the vehicle to speed out of control and crash, Reuters reported.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court, was the latest in a wave of product-liability cases and other legal action brought against Toyota Motor Corp. over complaints of sudden, unintended acceleration in its vehicles.

But the Aug. 28 crash near San Diego of a Lexus ES 350 sedan driven by off-duty California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor drew intense media attention and renewed government scrutiny of safety problems that led to the recall of some 8.5 million Toyota vehicles worldwide.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder, extended his condolences to the Saylor family in an apology he delivered to a congressional hearing last week.

Saylor was driving his wife, their 13-year-old daughter, and his brother-in-law on a family outing when their car “began to accelerate on its own” and sped out of control despite Saylor’s attempts “to apply the brakes and otherwise do everything possible to stop” the car, the lawsuit says.

The car reached speeds of up to 120 miles per hour before it struck another vehicle, plowed through a fence, hit a berm and flew through the air, then rolled several times into a field and burst into flames.

The family’s final moments before impact were captured in the recording of a frantic 911-emergency cell phone call placed by Saylor’s brother-in-law, Christopher Lastrella, in which he is heard telling the dispatcher, “Our accelerator is stuck … We’re in trouble … there is no brakes.”

Others in the car are heard saying, “hold on” and “pray” as the call ended, the lawsuit said.

The suit names Toyota, its U.S. division and other corporate entities as defendants, along with the Lexus dealership where Saylor was given the doomed car as a “loaner vehicle” while his own Lexus was being serviced.

Although the suit makes no specific allegations as to the root cause of the unintended acceleration, it says the car in question “was defective when it left the control of each defendant” and that “adequate warnings of the danger were not given.” The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages on behalf of the parents of Saylor and his wife.

Toyota officials have said they do not comment on pending litigation.

San Diego County Sheriff’s investigators concluded the crash likely was caused by the gas pedal becoming stuck in an all-weather rubber floor mat designed for a larger vehicle but placed by the Lexus dealership in the sedan loaned to Saylor.

But the accident report said “other avenues of unintended acceleration could not be explored,” mechanical or electrical, due to catastrophic damage to the vehicle.

The report also revealed that another driver who had been loaned the same car a few days earlier told investigators the vehicle raced out of control on him when the gas pedal jammed in the floor mat, which he managed to free after placing the gear shift into neutral.

He complained to a dealership receptionist when he returned the car, the receptionist told investigators she alerted the detail specialist on duty, but the detailer claimed never to have received such a complaint, the report said.

At least 15 Toyota drivers have complained to U.S. safety officials that their cars sped up by themselves even after being fixed under recalls for sticky gas pedals or floor mat problems, according to an Associated Press analysis.

The development raises questions about whether Toyota’s repairs will bring an end to the cases of wild, uncontrolled acceleration or if there may be electronic causes behind the complaints that have dogged the automaker.

Although the allegations were unverified by the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday it was contacting people who have complained about acceleration problems even after repairs were done under two large recalls. The agency wants to hear from others who have had similar troubles, it said.

“If Toyota owners are still experiencing sudden acceleration incidents after taking their cars to the dealership, we want to know about it,” agency administrator David Strickland said in a statement.

The new complaints raised eyebrows in Congress, which has held three hearings on the recalls in the past week and is investigating Toyota’s safety problems.

“I am deeply concerned that NHTSA has received this many reports of possible sudden unanticipated acceleration even after these vehicles have received Toyota’s recommended fix,” said Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, who serves on one of the committees investigating Toyota.

“It’s critical that we get to the bottom of this problem as quickly as possible.”

Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said Wednesday the company was investigating the complaints, though it remains confident in its recall fixes. Teams of engineers are being mobilized to check into the complaints, he said.

WASHINGTON – A congressional panel that posted documents Friday from a corporate whistleblower that appeared deeply critical of Toyota Motor Corp. removed them Monday from its Web site, The Detroit News reported.

The documents, subpoenaed from a former Toyota lawyer now suing the automaker, suggested that “Toyota deliberately withheld records that it was legally required to produce in response to discovery orders in litigation,” Rep. Ed Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Friday.

A spokeswoman for Towns, Jenny Rosenberg, said the committee had taken down the online documents and was trying to verify whether they came from Toyota.

Toyota spokeswoman Martha Voss said the automaker’s outside legal counsel, Ted Hester of King & Spalding in Washington, D.C., requested the removal of the documents, which he said were subject to Toyota’s attorney-client privilege, from the site.

The committee’s decision to remove the documents comes as Toyota officials prepared for the third hearing in two weeks into the company’s and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s handling of two major Toyota vehicle recalls.

David Strickland, the new head of NHTSA, considered too green a week ago to testify before Congress, will appear today before the Senate Commerce Committee probing the same topic. The session starts at 10 a.m.

Toyota has recalled 8.5 million vehicles worldwide in the past three months, including some 6 million in the U.S., mostly to prevent uncontrolled acceleration of Toyota and Lexus vehicles linked to 2,600 accidents since 2001.

For Toyota, even more damaging than the size of the recalls are allegations that the Japanese automaker was slow to acknowledge defects, or possibly concealed them. Towns asked Toyota on Friday to respond to the charges in the documents obtained from former Toyota lawyer Dimitrios Biller that Towns called troubling.

Toyota said in a statement last week that it “strives to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards in its legal and regulatory practices. It is not uncommon, however, for companies to object to certain demands for documents made in litigation.”

A Texas court had blocked Biller from releasing the documents, but the congressional subpoena superseded that ruling.