PSA Peugeot Citroen Recalls Autos Made With Toyota

Toyota will announce plans next week for repairing 2.3 million vehicles under recall for accelerator pedals that could stick, but the timeframe for completing the repairs has yet to be finalized, the company said Friday.

Photo: PSA Peugeot Citroen Recalls Autos Made With Toyota

Toyota's European operations said Friday its recall for the same problem would cover up to 1.8 million vehicles, but the automaker did not plan to stop production of the affected models as it had in North America.

The six plants where the models are built in the United States and Canada halt production for at least one week starting Monday, Detroit Free Press reports.

Sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles has been linked to 19 deaths in the past decade, according to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. His panel is planning a hearing Feb. 25 on the company’s response to the problem.

Toyota dealers are on the front lines handling the recall fiasco. Liberty Toyota Scion in Burlington added temporary workers this week to handle the high number of customer phone calls, according to Richard Mee, general manager of the dealership.

"Some people are more concerned than others," said Mee, whose dealership has been in business since the 1970s. "A lot of our customers have been with Toyota for so long that they are confident this will be fixed."

Toyota dealers could lose up to $2.5 billion in monthly sales as a result of the sales halt, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association, The Star-Ledger reports.

According to Bloomberg, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe’s second-largest automaker, will recall more than 90,000 cars from among two models because they may share a gas-pedal flaw that prompted Toyota Motor Corp. to recall millions of vehicles.

The action affects about 10 percent of Peugeot 107 and Citroen C1 models, or fewer than 100,000 vehicles, Jean-Marc Sarret, a spokesman for the Paris-based carmaker, said today in a telephone interview. The accelerator-pedal defect can cause crashes.

The vehicles were made at a plant in the Czech Republic where Toyota and Peugeot Citroen jointly manufacture small cars. The factory is managed by Toyota and produces about 330,000 cars a year, split between the 107, C1 and Toyota Aygo models.