Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, that is a very important question, and it goes to the heart of when do you discover there is a defect? When a customer brings a vehicle to one of our dealerships they register a complaint with the dealership to say, “All right, I have experienced something. Please review the vehicle and understand what is happening.” If the service technician is not able to identify the problem or to fix it, a report is sent to Toyota Canada.
We put our own field technicians in place to try to investigate and understand what is happening. Our first case of a sticky pedal was in late October. At the time we didn't know what it was. What we were able to do was to very quickly not only work through our own internal investigation but to send that information to Toyota Motor Corporation for its review. In this process we investigate complaints. Some we determine are not product issues. Some ultimately lead to a vehicle recall.
Between the time of late October and January 21 we had five complaints. We took action to investigate the first time we had a problem, and as the complaints came in that led us to the conclusion based on our engineering studies that there was a problem, and we issued a recall.