public personally that not just apologize but assure them these vehicles are going to be made safe. there s still a very big nagging question about whether or not toyota has been totally transparent about this and whether or not this is an electronic issue and not just a floor mat issue. most people don t believe that it s just the floor mat. joan claybrook, we definitely look forward to your testimony and always appreciate your candid testimony with us. thanks, joan. okay, thank you. rob marciano tracking that big snowstorm about to pound parts of our country. yeah, getting a little appetizer across parts of new england and upstate new york. this is snow left over from the system that came through yesterday. rain south of the massachusetts-connecticut border and all snow up through bennington, burlington, albany seeing some snow as well as manchester. so this will begin to wind down later on today but we ve got another system hot on its heels
respect? reporter: it s a great question. i can bet that lawmakers will be hammering home on this one, asking the toyota president today all about it. but let s go back to a recall that we all know about, the ford firestone recall. it was the tread on the tires, they separated and caused explosions, rollovers, more than 100 deaths are linked. here s the timeline on that one. bridgestone-firestone started getting a number of complaints back in 1996. that s according to nhtsa. the investigation wasn t opened until may of 2000. in august of that year, bridgestone-firestone recalled 14.4 million of their tires. the next year, 2001, you saw ford recall 13 million of their vehicles. that s what happened. a four-year divide there, from the first complaint to the recall. let s take a look at toyota because it s a different story here. compared to toyota, the first reports of unintended acceleration, as you know, you have to go all the way back to 2003. after that nhtsa conducted seven invest
you can t say there s no problem but you re trying to find a way to override something that s not a problem. let s bring in our congressional correspondent, brianna kheiler. she s up on capitol hill. brianna. bottom line, are the lawmakers buying toyota s explanation? what they seem not to be buying is the assertion these problems are mechanical and that they re not having to do with the electronics in the vehicles, wolf. this is a big concern for lawmakers. a lot of experts say they fear this has to do with more than just the floormats, more than the gas pedals. they fear it has to do with the actual computers in the car. they re worried it runs deeper than what they heard today. what is toyota doing to try to fix this? they say they re doing a number of things. during the hearing today, they were talking about this fix where it would be rebooting the computer system. even though they haven t really
difficult, uncomfortable relationship between the two countries. reporter: mnow mr. toyoda s n the building. we expect if he does make his way i ll show you the hallway he may be coming through. there have been some accommodations made for him can be kyra. look down this way, down the hallway. if he does come in this way, the front entrance to the hearing room, it is going to be a little different than what we saw yesterday with the head of toyota u.s., mr. toyoda is actually going to be, i guess you could say, protected from us members of the media. there are tons of us here today. there is sort of unlike any hearing i ve ever seen, so much interest from the japanese media. all of us will be sort of penned in so that if he s walking through the hallway here we re not going to be able to get as close to him to shout a question at him as we normally do. and he would be also have a buffer of capitol hill police around him. judging yesterday by how there was such a scrum of reporters
there are 1,133 for toyota over the halftime five years. that also includes after the recall so a lot more people will file those complaints, we should be clear. ford is the next one on the list. it is far fewer in terms of complaints at 387. it goes down from there. nissan is at the bottom. so that gives you some perspective. but kyra, it s also important to note overall how safe are toyotas, so we looked again at nhtsa s information and this is what we have. toyota out of 20 competitors, 20 automakers, it ranked 17th in terms of complaints, meaning it got far fewer complaints in overall safety than a number of its competitors. chrysler and ford were seventh and tenth respectively, so that s important. many more unintended acceleration complaints for toyota. overall the complaints for toyota far less than its competitors. but here s the biggest complaint right now is whether toyota actually reported these problems soon enough. how does toyota s recall stack up against others in that