Dealers kick off repair marathon

Last Monday morning, Toyota officials declared publicly that they had the fix for the worst safety recall in the company's history.

By Wednesday afternoon, some vehicle owners already were receiving repairs and being sent on their way.

Over the coming month, 2.3 million worried Toyota owners will squeeze through the funnel of 1,235 dealership service departments.

"Every person will receive a formal letter. We will stagger the mailing to be able to control the throughput," said Bob Carter, Toyota Division vice president. "How many consumers will show up at our dealerships before we get the formal notification to them? That's something we're still trying to quantify."

At Group 1 Automotive Inc., one of the nation's largest owners of Toyota dealerships, general managers were told to begin fixing vehicles without official factory notification. Group 1's biggest Toyota dealership, Sterling McCall Toyota in Houston, began repairing cars immediately after receiving its first shipment of parts.

The repair consists primarily of a postage-stamp-size piece of reinforcement metal that a service technician inserts into the accelerator pedal module to prevent incorrect sensor pressure that could cause unintended acceleration. Toyota says the procedure takes about 30 minutes.

But 30 minutes each for 2.3 million vehicles translates into more than 1 million man-hours -- on top of normal service business volume for the Toyota dealer body.

"Many of our dealers are already extending their service hours, with some remaining open 24 hours a day to get this done," Carter said. Some dealerships have received permission from local governments to stay open 24 hours a day.

Group 1 instructed its dealerships to "be prepared to extend their hours," says Pete DeLongchamps, the group's vice president of manufacturer relations. "But I can't tell you that we're actually extending our hours. We can't stay open if we don't have the parts to do the work."

In the first 24 hours after receiving parts, service technicians at Pat Lobb Toyota of McKinney, near Dallas, fixed 115 cars for customers who had asked for it. Owner Pat Lobb set up an assembly line of four service employees to handle the traffic and gave customers coupons for a free breakfast nearby or for lunch at the Mexican restaurant next door.

He also pulled a recalled accelerator pedal out of one of his loaner cars to create a display board showing customers the problem and its solution.

"We have a chance to do this right," Lobb says. "When the smoke clears on all this, it could actually be a defining moment for Toyota."

Independent wholesaler Southeast Toyota Distributors Inc. shipped the parts overnight to its 173 dealers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. As many as 370,000 affected vehicles could be in Southeast Toyota's region.

"We have asked our people to come in on Saturday," Feb. 6, to handle the shipments, said Craig Pollock, Southeast Toyota group vice president, "so that our dealers will have them in hand on Monday morning," Feb. 8.

The distributor has canceled its normal schedule of dealer service training classes so it can divert all training resources to support the recall.

Toyota and its dealers don't know how quickly dealerships will be able to repair unsold vehicles. Toyota has halted the sale of eight key models in the pedal recall, including the Camry, Corolla and RAV4. The factory also has ordered that existing owners receive first priority for the incoming repair parts.

Toyota said last week that dealers can begin repairing their unsold inventories even before every existing owner is taken care of. If a dealer has enough parts to fix 100 cars but only 50 recall appointments with existing owners, the dealer could use some of the remaining parts to repair cars on the sales lot.

Adam Simms, president of Toyota Sunnyvale in northern California, is doing just that. "We've made the upgrades on the eight models that were recalled. And we had a lot of those pre-sold," he said late last week. "We're calling the customers in now to deliver them."