Tampa Bay area Toyota dealership deals with flood of recall repairs

In less than a week, Sun Toyota shop foreman John DePew, flashlight and ratchet wrench in hand, has jabbed his head under the dashboards of about 50 Camrys, Matrixes, Avalons and other models.

An inch of excess plastic, a hunk of molded foam worth a few pennies and a postage stamp-sized nib of steel on the recalled gas pedals are making life miserable for Toyota.

As he finished up another one Monday afternoon, a service department receptionist at the New Port Richey dealer charged across the shop floor: "John, this lady's freaking out on me. Are you done?"

"We try to tell customers it's a two-hour wait," he says. "But they get impatient."

Sun Toyota expects to be repeating the procedure for months to come. DePew and his men worked Sunday, their day off, to finish 38 recall repairs. Many dealers are extending hours — one in Fort Wayne, Ind., is staying open 24 hours — and hiring extra mechanics. They are using up the parts as fast as the manufacturer can ship them.

"If we did 50 repairs a day, just on the cars we've sold here, it would take us a year to finish," Sun Toyota service manager Manny Oliveira said.

The dealerships are actually contending with two major recalls — with possibly a third on the way depending on what happens with the Prius and its balky brake system.

The first was a gas pedal design flaw that caused it to snag on floormats. The second and most recent was an internal glitch leading to unwanted acceleration when the pedal stuck. Toyota rates the likelihood of either occurring as rare, though it has recalled more than 5 million cars in the United States and Canada. The recalls could cost the company more than $2 billion, according to analysts.

About 2 p.m. Monday among Sun Toyota's service bays at U.S. 19 and State Road 54, six of 16 automobiles are recall cases. The 30-minute fix is decidedly low tech. If it weren't for the diagnostic laptop computer, a high school shop class could probably manage.

DePew starts by prying loose the driver's side carpet and unfastening the two bolts that hold the accelerator pedal to the car.

Using a pneumatic hand saw that looks like an electric carving knife, he trims away about an inch of plastic from the end of the pedal. The manufacturer provided a metal template that slips over the pedal to ensure a correct cut.

The shorter the pedal, the less likely it will snag on the mat.

DePew continues by sliding a thin steel "shim," no bigger than an inch, inside the pedal. It will reinforce the spring-like mechanism so it won't stick.

Then he polishes up the pedal's cut edge nice and pretty, no small concern since many of the cars he's repairing are newly sold Camrys from the lot.

As a redundancy measure, Toyota makes mechanics remove a piece of molded foam from under the gas pedal and switch it with a slightly thinner piece of foam. That provides extra clearance for the floor mat.

DePew reattaches the carpet. He takes the final reading on the computer: perfect. Then he hops in the car to drive it around to the front.

DePew makes sure the accelerators are "idiot proof," even if it means fixing problems more related to user error than the actual recalls. That means completing a repair so that even the guy who brought in his car with a floormat curled around the gas pedal couldn't mess up.

"Look at that. The mat's behind the pedal and on top of the pedal," DePew says, showing off a cell phone photo he snapped of the offending car. "I don't even know how the customer drove it here."

The pedal repairs are free to customers. Toyota is reimbursing the dealerships for the work. It could cost the world's leading automaker billions of dollars in repairs and lost sales.

Nick Moldovan, picking through a waiting room newspaper as his gas pedal got a shave and a haircut, wasn't sweating the recall. Why panic? His Camry is only 6 months old. He has driven it only 1,500 miles.

"I wouldn't have even brought it in if I wasn't getting a six-month oil change," Moldovan said. "I barely put any miles on it. It's going to last forever."

As for DePew, the afternoon was only half over, and he was finishing his second gas pedal fixer upper since lunch.

"It's good to go," he said as he folded up the laptop and climbed out of the driver's seat. "As long as they don't use 16 floor mats."