Toyota has repair for Grand Highlander, Lexus TX after lengthy stop-sale

It was the type of monthly sales result that might embarrass any automaker, especially the world's largest, with a vaunted reputation for quality.

In August, Toyota Motor North America reported a pair of negative sales numbers for its new large three-row crossovers — a -6 for the Toyota Grand Highlander and -5 for the Lexus TX. The negative integers mean U.S. dealers sold none of the two giant crossovers, and actually purchased back nearly a dozen from consumers.

The two large crossovers are the subject of what has been a costly stop-sale for the automaker and its dealers after it failed a random NHTSA audit in May involving the vehicles' side-curtain shield airbags. Toyota now has a plan to fix consumers' vehicles and restart their idled production in Indiana by the end of October, Kent Rice, group vice president of Toyota Motor North America's quality division, told Automotive News.

Toyota has redesigned the lengthy curtain shield airbags on the driver and passenger sides, beginning with consumer-owned vehicles and those in dealer stock. Rice said consumers should begin receiving notifications in October to schedule their repair appointments. With production paused, there are about 158,000 of the three-row vehicles that will need to be repaired, including about 4,000 in dealer inventories, Toyota said.

"We make mistakes, right? It's a difficult, complex business. But one thing I'm proud of is, despite the fact that this has been painful, that we have customers who are anxious and dealers who can't sell vehicles because of the airbags, there's never been any discussion or question of cost," Rice said.

"It's only about what do we need to do to get this right for the customer. This is our opportunity to put our values into action."In May, NHTSA conducted a random compliance audit of the Grand Highlander to determine whether it met Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. "We failed," Rice said.

With the driver's side window rolled down, the curtain shield airbag — which deploys from under the headliner along the length of the vehicle to protect passenger heads from striking the windows — failed to fully stay inside the cabin, with one front corner outside, and thus was out of compliance.

The result "was not expected. We started to realize that the result was not what we had seen during development. There were some variations that stacked up in the manufacturing process that we hadn't considered," Rice said.

Toyota's engineers initially attempted to re-create what had happened in the government test and got the same result. The automaker issued the initial recall notice and stop-sale June 20 and went to work to find a remedy.

"Once we understood the phenomena, we had to determine what path of countermeasure we were going to take," said Rice, a mechanical engineer by training who joined Toyota as a quality engineer in 1991.

With support from what Rice called "a number of key suppliers," Toyota engineers modified the airbags' anchoring systems, called the tether.

In testing, the modified airbag worked as anticipated and will bring the Grand Highlander and Lexus TX back into compliance.

Having a plan in place that will soon bring the large three-row crossovers back into the lineup is music to the ears of dealers, who recently met in Las Vegas.

Through the first half of the year, Toyota was averaging about 9,200 Grand Highlander sales each month, while Lexus dealers in the U.S. were selling an average of about 3,500 TXs.

The Grand Highlander has proven so popular that Toyota plans to convert the smaller Highlander three-row into an EV in 2026 because the larger vehicle has cannibalized the Highlander's volume. Through June, Highlander sales fell 47 percent in the U.S. to 113,264.

"Obviously, the Grand Highlander is a stone-cold home run, but we need to be able to sell them," said Mark Montenero, chairman of the Toyota National Dealer Advisory Council. "Right now, we have a vehicle line that we can't sell that's one of the hottest in the industry. But they'll fix it, and they'll do it right. That's what Toyota does."