Toyota Brags It Saved $100M with Cheap Accelerator Fix

If there were a book on how to poorly manage a disastrous situation, then it may as well have been called "Toyota Recall"... In the latest piece of news pushing Toyota even more towards the bottom of both the stock exchange and public perception, a document which was made public on Sunday and apparently belongs to Toyota says the Japanese carmaker saved some $100 million by convincing US regulators to put an end to the 2007 accelerator investigation and agree to a cheap fix for the problem.

The document, dated 2009, was turned over to lawmakers as part of the documents belonging to Dimitrios Biller and subpoenaed by a House panel last week. The document highlights "Toyota's slow response to the safety problems" as the US Department of Transportation told Reuters.

According to the source, the document shows how Toyota's Washington staff was bragging about what they achieved by convincing authorities to go for a cheap fix.

"You can feel that the staff were thinking more about company profits than customers," Mamoru Kato, an analyst at Tokai-Tokyo Securities told ABC News. "It's unfavorable for Toyota ahead of the hearings."

"This is any executive's worst nightmare — a damning document comes out and exposes your company as having basically gone slow and tried to delay addressing significant safety problems with their product," Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan added.

According to analysts, this latest development will only add to the pressure to which Akio Toyoda will be subjected to on February 23.