Michael Debono Ltd, representatives of Toyota Malta, will start repairing cars affected by a worldwide accelerator pedal recall soon after the company receives the necessary parts at the end of February, managing director Jeffrey Debono said this afternoon.

Mr Debono apologised for the situation and expressed regret at the inconvenience the recall was causing clients who had an effected vehicle.

The problem, he said, could be felt when the acceleration pedal was released and this stuck further down than it was supposed to.

This did not happen all of a sudden but after the driver would have felt a stiff pedal which took longer to return to its original position.

While this rarely happened, it was more probable in a cold and very wet climate.

He said that one did not need to stop using his car unless this problem was experienced.

Michael Debono Ltd received a list of chassis numbers of affected cars, new and not, which were sold in Europe and communicated the list with Transport Malta to establish who the owners were.

Toyota Malta expected to receive the parts at the end of Feb and would start fixing them the cars as soon as possible. Tranport Malta would be sending a letter to those with affected cars telling them where to phone for an appointment.

Mr Debono said he was expecting the total figure of affected cars to be available early next week. However, more than 1,000 were likely to have been imported by Michael Debono Ltd. Cars imported from Japan were not affected.

Any affected cars which were still in stock would be fixed before they were sold, he said, adding that the company would be fixing all affected cars even if they were not imported by the company.

Toyota had two pedal supplies with the problematic one being some of those made by Canadian company CTS.

Company representative Michael Mallia said that because of data protection issues, Transport Malta could not give the company the names of owners.

He asked whether this could have an effect on the people’s perception of Toyota, Mr Mallia hoped the way Toyota was responding to the problem would show how well the company treated its clients.