YORK TOWNSHIP -- Toyota Motor Corp.'s U.S. sales chief said credit is not to blame for the decline in Toyota's sales and that the U.S. is headed for a recession if the current crisis is not resolved quickly.

"The vast majority of our customers are able to get approved for loans," Jim Lentz told reporters after the ribbon was cut on the company's new research-and-development center south of Saline Thursday. "In our case, credit is not the biggest challenge. Our biggest challenge is consumer confidence."

Lentz said a record number of consumers are postponing new car purchases.

Many mistakenly believe they can no longer get car loans because of the dramatic reports from Wall Street that suggest even those with excellent credit are being turned away by lenders.

Earlier this week, the head of the National Automobile Dealers Association, Annette Sykora, said in Detroit that "credit is the lifeblood" of the retail car business and that some of her group's members say they can no longer get loans for customers with good credit.

But Toyota is not alone in calling concerns about car credit overblown.

Many domestic dealers also say it is the lack of consumer confidence -- not the lack of consumer credit -- that is primarily responsible for last month's 26.6 percent drop in auto sales. Toyota's sales were down 32.3 percent in September and are down 10.4 percent so far this year.

"There's no issue at all with above-average credit," said Alan Helfman, owner of River Oaks Chrysler Jeep in Houston, adding that he is also still doing deals for customers with bad credit, albeit fewer than he was a year ago. "Hurricane Ike was a bigger problem for us than the credit crisis."

In Boston, dealer Chris Lemley said he has been amazed by the number of customers coming into his Ford, Lincoln Mercury and Mazda dealerships "just to look" because they do not think they can get a loan in today's market.

"Many of them can," he said. "It's more psychological than anything. Once consumer sentiment turns negative, it's hard to turn it back."

Toyota recently began offering zero-percent financing on most of its cars and trucks to convince consumers that they can get a loan. Japan's largest automaker has offered similar deals before, but Lentz said it has never advertised them as aggressively as it is now.

Though he said "it's a bit too early to tell" how much difference those ads are making, Toyota is encouraged.

"We have seen some increase in overall traffic at some of our dealerships, especially in southern California and Arizona that have been hardest hit," Lentz said.

Toyota still expects full-year auto sales in the United States to be about 14 million vehicles for the industry as a whole, but Lentz said that could drop to around 13.8 million if sales continue at their current pace for the rest of the year. He expects next year to be flat.

A combination of high fuel prices, a collapsing housing market and the broader financial crisis have combined to make life harder for dealers than it has been since the early 1990s, he said.