Toyota fined $32.4m more for lethal recall practices

Earlier this year, Toyota was handed a $16.4 million dollar fine for the initial investigation into their slow reporting of safety recalls and the issues requiring those recalls. The new fine amount of $32.4 million stems from two more related investigations – one into the reporting of the “unintended acceleration” recalls and the other for a long delay on reporting a steering issue in their trucks – bringing the automakers total fine amount for 2010 to a whopping $48.8 million dollars.

Toyota is quickly agreeing to these fines with the hope of putting this ongoing issue to bed but with more recent deaths from unintended acceleration and a continual stream of new recalls, it could be a long 2011 for the Japanese automaker. Though the company has agreed to these massive fines, Toyota still admits no wrongdoing in this whole fiasco even after recent legal cases have found that the automaker actually did have representatives who experienced unintended acceleration first hand – something that the company insisted never happened.

The bad news for Toyota is that there are still more government investigations pending which will very likely result in additional fines and once the company is done facing the government, they will then have to deal with the individual lawsuits stemming from the deaths and injuries caused by their negligent recall practices.

In light of all of these new-found quality issues with Toyota products, the automaker has seen sales dip dramatically over the past year - having been one of the few automakers to show negative year over year growth these past few months.

Other Toyota news:
Toyota recalls 94,000 2011 Sienna minivans for brake risk
NHTSA confirms recall of 2011 Toyota Sienna
Toyota's Reputation On The Decline According To Recent Study