He also pledged that the Japanese automaker would soon announce steps to address brake problems on the 2010 Prius.
Akio Toyoda, grandson of Toyota’s founder, spoke in his first formal remarks since the uproar enveloping his company, the world’s largest automaker, and took personal responsibility for the problems.
“I deeply regret that I caused concern among so many people,” Mr. Toyoda said. “We will do our utmost to regain the trust of our customers.”
Asked whether Toyota had underestimated the situation, Mr. Toyoda said, “I believe what is happening now is a very big problem. We are in a crisis.”
Mr. Toyoda also apologized to shareholders for the fall in the company’s share price. The company’s stock has dropped about 20 percent in the last two weeks.
Mr. Toyoda said a committee would be set up to look at quality issues. With his comments, he became the second successive Toyota president to apologize for defects on the company’s cars — and the second to assemble a committee to address them.
In 2006, his predecessor, Katsuaki Watanabe, shocked onlookers by bowing low at a news conference and vowing Toyota would improve its quality. But many cars involved in the two recent recalls, one for sticking accelerator pedals, the other for floor mats that could become entangled in the pedals, went on sale after that effort.
One car now in question is the 2010 Prius, the newest version of Toyota’s most important car. The automaker said it was working on a solution to fix issues with the car’s anti-lock brakes, which were redesigned for the 2010 model. Toyota has sold just over 300,000 of the new Priuses in Japan, the United States and Europe since it was introduced.
Company executives also are looking at two other hybrids with the same brake system, the Lexus HS250h and the Sai, a small hybrid sold only in Japan.
Mr. Toyoda is among the industry’s best-known executives, but he has been conspicuously absent in recent weeks, even as his company struggled on three continents to contain the fallout of problems that have shaken its long-held reputation for quality.
Until Friday, Mr. Toyoda’s only public comments came in a brief interview with a Japanese broadcaster on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Toyota’s slowness in addressing its problems has been criticized by regulators in the United States and Japan. Earlier this week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spoke with Mr. Toyoda, after sending officials from Washington to Japan in December.
“Users are noticing defects and there have been accidents,” Japan’s transport minister, Seiji Maehara, said Friday ahead of Mr. Toyoda’s briefing. “This leads me to believe Toyota has not put consumers first.”
Mr. Toyoda, who spoke in Japanese and English during the news conference, said that was not the case. “I came out here today because I would not want our customers to spend the weekend wondering whether their cars are safe,” he said.
He would not answer a question about whether the company has ever withheld information related to safety concerns. “Toyota is committed to safety,” he said.
He added in broken English: “The people who drive Toyota, who cares about Toyota, I’m a little bit worried while they are driving, they feel little bit cautious. But believe me, Toyota’s car is safety but we will try to increase our product better.”
The Japanese government has ordered the company to investigate the brakes on the Prius, as has the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Safety regulators in Washington said Thursday that they would open an investigation into the car’s brakes. Toyota said it would “fully cooperate” with the investigation.
Under ordinary circumstances, the Prius braking problem would probably not be serious enough to prompt a recall, said David Champion, director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports magazine.
But given the amount of negative attention surrounding Toyota, and with two committees of the House of Representatives scheduling hearings this month, the carmaker needs to show that it is doing everything it can to ease fears about its vehicles, Mr. Champion said.
“Toyota’s taking a huge hit at the moment in terms of their brand image,” Mr. Champion said. “Their brand image has been built on the safety and reliability of their cars.”
Asked why he was not attending Congressional hearings, Mr. Toyoda said. “Whoever attends from Toyota, we speak with one voice.”
At his briefing, Mr. Toyoda appeared very nervous, but seemed cognizant of the long road ahead. “Toyota remains in a storm, but I believe we have charted our course,” he said. “I hope to return Toyota to profit and contribute to the revitalization of Japan.”
He added that he takes “the situation we are in very seriously.” Toyota, he vowed, would “put restoring trust before profit.”
After about 30 minutes, Mr. Toyoda signaled he was ready to leave but reporters implored him to stay. One reporter told him that journalists did not trek all the way down to Nagoya from Tokyo, a distance of about 200 miles, on a few hours’ notice for a half-hour news conference.
In opening the investigation into the Prius, the American safety agency said it had received 124 complaints about the brakes on the 2010 Prius.
By Thursday afternoon, its database listed about 300 complaints. Eight of them involved crashes — mostly into the rear of another car at a low speed — and two of the drivers said they had injured their necks.
“It corrects itself almost immediately, but there is that second when it feels like it isn’t going to stop,” one driver wrote.
“It is terrifying and needs to be looked into,” another wrote.
Toyota’s quality control chief, Shinichi Sasaki, said the company had been studying all complaints it has received about the Prius brakes and had not found a single case where the car failed to stop.
“In every case, the car could be controlled,” Mr. Sasaki said. “We are not concealing anything. We have been very open in this matter.”
Meanwhile, Ford Motor said Thursday that there was a problem with the brakes of the hybrid version of the Ford Fusion. Ford said customers could receive a free software update, but it did not begin a formal recall.
Ford said the problem in its Fusion was caused by the car’s unnecessarily switching between its conventional brakes and the regenerative brakes, which absorb energy while braking to charge the battery. The Prius also uses regenerative braking.
“While the vehicles maintain full braking capability, customers may initially perceive the condition as loss of brakes,” Ford said in a statement. The government’s complaint database lists one report, from May 2009, of brake failure in a hybrid Fusion. Ford announced the software upgrade Thursday after a Consumer Reports test driver experienced the problem and notified the company.
Toyota said the problem it found in the Prius was unrelated to the recall in January of eight other models, totaling about 4.5 million vehicles, for accelerator pedals that could stick, and the recall in November of 5.5 million vehicles with accelerator pedals that could become trapped by the floor mat. Priuses from the 2004 through 2009 model years are included in the floor mat recall, and some Toyota models are covered by both recalls.
Mr. Sasaki said that Toyota issued the American recalls for the problems with the gas pedals before it had made complete preparations for retrofitting vehicles, and the company was not used to doing that. But the company decided to go ahead at the urging of Mr. LaHood.
“But now we believe that if we had delayed further, regaining the trust of our customers could have taken longer,” he said. “Mr. La Hood’s advice seemed very tough at the time, but now we are thankful to have received it.”
Repairs for the sticky accelerator pedal recall began Thursday at many dealerships in the United States after they received shipments of the necessary parts.
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