A Toyota-related accident that may have been related to sudden acceleration. (ABC-TV photo)

Three weeks ago, I purchased a 2005 Toyota Corolla. On March 24, 2005, while pulling into a bank parking lot on North Broadway in Nassau County, New York, my car suddenly accelerated, knocking over a chain-link fence and landing in the middle of a six-lane busy road. It is almost unheard of that there were no cars in my path and no one was hurt…Has this ever happened to anyone else with a Toyota?? Let me know.

That report is five years old, but I’ve been following this story for The Daily Green, and I’ve fielded many more recent ones. A woman in New England with a 2005 Tacoma said that she and her husband had both “experienced the truck surge in RPMs while sitting at a stop light. The truck feels like it wants to take off on its own.”

Toyota has been ineffectual in trying to contain the sudden acceleration problem with a recall of 4.2 million vehicles that blamed the problem on “pedal entrapment.” The fix involved shortening the pedal and lowering the carpet pad, but the reports kept coming. And so yesterday Toyota announced a second massive recall, this one of 2.3 million cars and trucks. (Some 1.7 million vehicles are covered by both of them.)

This time, according to Toyota spokesman John Hanson, the problem is a worn and sticking accelerator pedal. “In a few rare cases,” he said, “people have said they pushed down the spring-loaded pedal and moved only slowly back to its original position. In a few rare cases, it didn’t return but stayed where it was.”

Jeffrey Pepski of Plymouth, Minnesota was driving home from work in his 2007 Lexus ES350 early last year. “I experienced a sudden uncontrollable surge in acceleration causing my speed to increase from about 60 mph to 80+ mph,” he said. “Immediately I began to brake hard as I was rapidly approaching traffic just ahead of me….There were clouds of smoke around the vehicle and the smell of burning materials from the overheating brakes.”

Pepski finally shifted into neutral but that caused the engine to race above the redline, and he thought the car would “blow up.” The sudden acceleration episode ended as mysteriously as it began.

Source:Toyota's Sudden Acceleration Nightmare May Not Be Limited to That Automaker