Toyota's Steering Rod Recall: A Preventable Tragedy

On September 15, 2007, Michael "Levi" Stewart was driving his 1991 Toyota pickup at night about a mile outside of Fairfield, Idaho. Levi had three passengers with him that night - friends he was dropping off at their homes. Levi was headed down a straight dirt road in a rural part of Camas County when he suddenly lost steering control of the pickup. The truck veered off the road, struck a ditch and overturned. Levi's friend suffered a severe brain injury and Levi died as a result of the accident.

As it turned out, Toyota issued a recall of the defective relay rod in September, 2005. However, according to the sixth quarterly report submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Toyota said it had only reached 32% of the 977,839 vehicles affected by the product defect in the United States.

More alarmingly, an investigation into Toyota's defective steering relay rod recall has uncovered that Toyota not only had a recall of the same part in Japan a year before they initiated the American recall but that Toyota had been notified by truck owners as early as 1988 about accidents involving a fracturing of the defective part. Unfortunately for families like the Stewarts, Toyota neglected to act on this information.

In February 2009, the Stewarts and the other injured passengers in Levi's truck filed a complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court against Toyota. They have recently been joined by three other plaintiffs involved in similar accidents around the country. In June 2009, the court deemed the cases provisionally related.