On January 16, 2010, as Toyota executives debated how to handle the question of sticking gas pedals. As the executives debated the situation, then Irv Miller urged his colleagues to make the information public.

“We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean.” Miller added, “We better just hope that they can get NHTSA to work with us in coming with a workable solution that does not put us out of business.”

As other executives argued that the problem should be kept quiet until a solution could be found, Miller expressed his concerns that the accelerator problem was a safety issue and that Toyota needed to act quickly in announcing that.

Miller was group vice president for environment and public affairs at the time. His February 1 retirement was announced on December 16. His e-mails are a part of the 70,000 pages of documents that the government has received from Toyota as part of its investigation of the automaker’s handling of its recall issues.

Toyota issued a statement saying that it, “does not comment on internal company communications and cannot comment on Mr. Miller’s email.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 4:41 am and is filed under Community, Financial, Hybrid, Recalls, Rumors, Safety, Sales, Toyoland, Toyota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.