For the fourth time, Toyota has agreed to pay a fine to settle allegations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the automaker delayed a safety recall.
In a news release Tuesday morning, the safety agency said Toyota would pay $17.35 million, the maximum allowed by law.
Toyota did not admit any wrongdoing and said it was paying the fine to avoid a continued dispute with the safety agency. The automaker said the same thing when agreeing to pay the three previous fines, which totaled $48.8 million.
The recall the safety agency said was delayed occurred last June and covered 154,036 sport utility vehicles — the 2010 Lexus RX 350 and RX 450h — to fix a problem that might allow the floor mat to become snagged on the gas pedal.
The safety agency contends that those vehicles should have been included in an October 2009 recall of 3.8 million vehicles for the same issue.
But the agency says it was not until early this year — after it contacted Toyota about consumer complaints of floor-mat problems on the two 2010 Lexus models — that the automaker agreed the recall should be expanded.
In a statement, Toyota said it was “dedicated to the safety of our customers and we continue to strengthen our data collection and evaluation process to ensure we are prepared to take swift action to meet customers’ needs.”
The safety agency described the $17.35 million fine as a record. That is the maximum currently allowed by law; the amount is periodically increased to reflect inflation.
Some consumer safety advocates, like Clarence M. Ditlow, the executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, have long argued that such amounts are no more than a “rounding error” for automakers and that to make companies take their responsibility more seriously, auto executives should face criminal penalties.
The previous fines occurred in April 2010 and twice in December 2010.
Toyota routinely describes its recalls as “voluntary,” but under federal regulations once a manufacturer is aware of a safety problem it has five business days to inform the agency of its plan for a recall.