Near Revelstoke, B.C., on a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that threads a lake and a cliff, retired college instructor John James says he suddenly couldn't find a way to make his 2009 Toyota Corrolla slow down.
Driving with his wife, Susan, last July, Mr. James said at first he thought it was a cruise-control problem. He tried changing gears and turning off the ignition, but his brakes didn't seem to work and the car kept speeding up. Minutes later, boxed in by other traffic, they slammed into the back of a pickup truck at 125 kilometres an hour. No one was injured.
"He popped up in the air," Mr. James, 65, said of the pickup, adding that his car felt as though it were being controlled by the fictional supercomputer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey . "You think Hal's running the car."
After a repeated back and forth with Toyota, which insisted there was nothing wrong with his car, he said his dealer bought his car back and Mr. James bought a new Honda Civic, taking a $12,000 loss.
Now, Mr. James is among those calling lawyers to join a class action lawsuit against Toyota for its recall and sales suspension of 2.6 million North American vehicles due to accelerator pedals in some models that are slow to respond or even can jam. Even as the car giant begins fixing millions of its cars by installing steel bars on its pedals, lawyers in the United States and Canada are churning out statements of claim. The size of the case makes it inevitable.
Yesterday, Toyota once again apologized to consumers and stressed it has not sacrificed its commitment to safety and quality. The auto maker declined this week to comment on the lawsuits.
Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada International, said the company is shipping new pedal components to dealers and expects to resume suspended sales this weekend.
On the surface, this case - with at least 270,000 affected Toyota owners in Canada alone - is potentially big enough to rank as the top consumer product liability class action in history, lawyers say, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. But some veteran class action lawyers say they aren't so sure the case will produce such a massive payoff.
Mr. James is part of what appears to be the first Canadian class action launched against Toyota over its sticky gas pedal problem. His lawyer, Joel Rochon of Toronto-based Rochon Genova LLP, filed a statement of claim on Friday.
Regina-based Tony Merchant of Merchant Law Group LLP filed claims dated Feb. 1 in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Others are following suit. Toyota already faces several class actions in the U.S., as well as lawsuits over deaths linked to accelerator pedals that allegedly got stuck under the floor mats of Lexus or Toyota vehicles.
Mr. Rochon said he has found people across Canada who have had their Toyotas accelerate suddenly, in some cases causing crashes. But his representative plaintiff is a Toronto man named Steven Hamilton, who suffered no such close call. He is upset that he spent $40,000 on a Toyota RAV4 in December that he now feels is worthless. This loss of value, Mr. Rochon says, is a big part of the class action.
"One e-mail I got says, 'I'm driving a death trap now." So that's got to be worth something," Mr. Rochon said in an interview.
His statement of claim, which blames the company's electronic throttling system, also accuses Toyota of a "civil conspiracy" to hide the problem, accusing the company of "unjust enrichment."
"You don't like to think that Ford Pinto kind of scenarios are reproducing themselves. But they've known about this exact same problem here for years," Mr. Rochon said.
In interviews, both Mr. Rochon and Mr. Merchant ballpark a potential figure of $1,000 for every affected Toyota on Canada's roads. With 270,000 cars - both lawyer see that figure as potentially higher - the bill comes to at least $270-million.
Mr. Merchant, a long-time class action lawyer, calls it a "staggering figure" and compares it to the case against drug maker Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller, which was linked to heart attacks and ended in a $4.85-billion (U.S.) settlement in the United States. (Class actions against Merck unit Merck Frosst Canada Inc. are still in the courts.)
However, Paul Pape, a Toronto litigator who specializes in class actions, has his doubts this kind of money is realistic. Figuring out how much a Toyota will have depreciated once the cars are fixed will be difficult, he said, and previous cases suggest that $1,000 a car would be too much to pay for those who have not suffered any injuries or other losses.
Much will depend on what Toyota does. It may set up its own compensation program, offering coupons to aggrieved customers, possibly circumventing the class actions.
But Mr. Pape said it was still important for this and other class actions to go ahead, to keep corporations honest.
"When Toyota deals with this, they know their behaviour is going to be carefully scrutinized… That can only be a good thing."