NAGOYA, Japan – Toyota Motor Corp., reeling from massive recalls on three continents, may have trouble meeting its 2010 sales target because of quality problems, a top executive told Automotive News Europe.

Shinichi Sasaki, vice president in charge of quality, said it was still unclear what the financial impact of the recalls would be. But sales will likely take a hit.

Since last fall, Toyota has recalled some 7.7 million vehicles in the United States, Canada, Europe and China to fix problems that could trigger unintended acceleration in its cars. The number recalled falls just short of the 7.8 million cars Toyota sold worldwide last year.

“The sales forecast is a concern for us,” Sasaki said today at the company’s first press conference in Japan to address the rash of quality problems. In the past, Toyota has experienced a 20 percent fall off in sales in the month immediate following recalls, he said, and this time the impact is expected to be bigger.

Last month, Toyota forecast global sales to climb roughly 6 percent to 8.27 million vehicles. The figure includes sales of its truck subsidiary Hino and its small car affiliate Daihatsu.

Toyota will announce its third-quarter earnings on Thursday. All eyes will be on whether the world’s biggest automaker changes its earnings or sales outlook.

The company’s current forecast calls for a second straight year of red ink. But some analysts have been predicting a slim operating profit on the back of deep cost cutting measures.

Sasaki downplayed criticism that quality control suffered because of Toyota’s rapid overseas expansion in recent years. He also backed the performance of the U.S.-based company that supplied the faulty pedal mechanism triggering January’s recall of 4.45 million vehicles.

“I don’t think the expansion overseas affected quality whatsoever,” Sasaki said.

LOS ANGELES – Toyota Motor Corp., spurred by criticism that previous recalls failed to prompt enough owners to seek fixes, hopes to distribute mailings this week to the 2.3 million owners targeted in a January recall, reported Automotive News.

Toyota says it will be vigilant in reaching each of the affected customers and hopes to have all repairs done within 90 days.

The goal was outlined as the automaker detailed its strategy for eliminating the possibility of unintended acceleration in the eight Toyota-brand models that were the focus of a Jan. 21 recall.

One allegation in a lawsuit filed against Toyota last June in Los Angeles over broken steering rods was that Toyota was lax in notifying nearly 1 million owners targeted in an October 2005 recall. By Dec. 31, 2006, fewer than a third of 977,839 recalled vehicles had been inspected and repaired, according to documents from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reviewed by Automotive News.

Plaintiffs claim the defect caused at least four deaths and several injuries.

“When you do these mailings, some customers react and some don’t,” said Bob Waltz, vice president of product, quality and service support for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. He said the company won’t stop at one mailing.

“We will do multiple mailings,” he said in a conference call today with reporters. “In this campaign we will aim for as high a complete rate as we can. We will aim for 100 percent.”

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is satisfied with a plan by Toyota Motor Corp. to address a massive recall by fixing or replacing defective accelerator pedals, according to a statement from the U.S. Transportation Department reported by Automotive News.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reviewed the automaker’s plan to install new parts in existing accelerator systems or replace them entirely.

Owners who opt for a repair now at dealers may later receive a new pedal when it is available, NHTSA said in a consumer advisory.

NHTSA is not required to approve Toyota’s approach but can object if it does not believe the solution is adequate.

“Toyota has announced its remedy and based on its current knowledge, NHTSA has no reason to challenge this remedy,” the agency said in a statement.

No deaths or injuries are suspected in cases of sticking pedals, the government said.

NHTSA has launched a separate investigation of CTS Corp., the supplier of the faulty pedal assemblies to Toyota, to determine if “proper and timely notice” has been given to its customers.

Regulators also want to see if additional defect notices and possible recalls are required by other manufacturers who may have installed defective CTS accelerator pedals, NHTSA said.

TOKYO – Long before the high-profile deaths, the lawsuits, the record recalls and the government reprimands, engineers at Toyota Motor Corp. began noticing red flags, reported Automotive News.

What they were on to eventually would explode into the company’s worst-ever quality crisis.

It was March 2007, and engineers were getting strange reports about the pedals in Toyota Tundra pickups. Sometimes, the accelerator was slow to return to the idle position after being depressed.

They decided excess moisture caused swelling of the friction lever, a mechanism that controls the pedal’s movement. Engineers changed the material and moved on.

In late 2008, more complaints came in — this time from Europe.

Drivers of the Aygo and Yaris small cars, by then equipped with the new friction lever, said their pedals were sticking, too. Toyota lengthened the lever and changed material again.

In each case, Toyota wrote off the problem as a rare one-off or a driveability, not safety, glitch.

But that assessment changed last fall, when more cases popped up in the United States and Canada. It took from October 2009 to Jan. 21 — nearly four months — for the world’s biggest automaker to pinpoint the same problem and recall 2.3 million possibly defective vehicles.

As chronicled in Toyota’s Jan. 21 Defect Information Report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the buildup to the pedal recall was years in the making.

Safety experts say Toyota had ample opportunity to act sooner.

“They let this thing go way out of control and didn’t deal with it early like they could have,” Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies Inc., a consumer advocacy group and auto safety consultancy in Rehoboth, Mass., told Automotive News.

In many cases, it will be a jury deciding whether Toyota failed to act.

The company is besieged by lawsuits brought by people saying they were injured — or had relatives killed — in a runaway Toyota Motor vehicle. Key to the cases will be what Toyota knew and when.

One case was filed Jan. 22 by Los Angeles attorney Michael Kelly. He accuses Toyota of trotting out floor mat and pedal recalls to cover up deeper problems with its electronic throttle control system.

“First they said aftermarket carpets were causing the pedal to stick. Then they said it could occur with Toyota carpets. Now they’re saying they want to change the gas pedal,” Kelly told Automotive News. “The bottom line is when you step on the brake, it should stop.”

TOKYO – Toyota Motor Corp. is fine-tuning a dealer remedy for faulty accelerator pedals in 2.3 million recalled vehicles and aims to announce the fix as early as next week, a person familiar with the matter told Automotive News.

The procedure involves inserting a metal shim into a gap in the friction lever of the pedal. Doing so will reduce friction and prevent the pedal from sticking, the person said.

Among the last-minute tweaks are testing for durability and ensuring that the remedy is something that dealers can easily employ.

Toyota spokeswoman Ririko Takeuchi said the automaker hasn’t yet decided on a final dealer remedy and is still unclear on a timeline for rolling it out.

Toyota is taking a two-pronged approach. It has to develop a remedy for the cars already on the road that the dealers can implement. It also has to develop a new part that can go into cars on the assembly line. The solution is likely to be different for each set of vehicles.

WASHINGTON – A House committee has begun investigating whether Toyota Motor Corp. and its top executives, as well as the Obama and Bush administrations, responded adequately to customer complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles, reported Automotive News.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a Feb. 4 hearing titled “Toyota Gas Pedals: Is the Public at Risk?” to better understand the government’s response to the recall of 2.3 million vehicles due to reports of malfunctioning gas pedals.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration defended its actions in a statement Friday, reported The Detroit News.

“NHTSA wants to assure owners of Toyota vehicles that it has taken, and will continue to take, all steps necessary to ensure that Toyota appropriately addresses problems related to unintended acceleration in its vehicles,” it said.

“NHTSA takes every allegation of safety problems seriously and that is why we read every consumer complaint within one business day of receipt. In recent years, NHTSA has conducted several investigations into possible causes of unwanted acceleration incidents experienced by owners of various Toyota models.”