I put my foot on the brake and I felt the car push forward," she wrote in her complaint to NHTSA. "I put my other foot on the brake as well.

TORRANCE, Calif., March 4, 2010 – Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc., has received verifiable information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about some vehicles whose owners have reported unintended acceleration after receiving the accelerator pedal recall remedies. As soon as Toyota received the vehicle owner information from NHTSA, it moved quickly to evaluate the vehicles and interview the owners.

Although most of these reports have yet to be verified, Toyota has been and remains committed to investigating all reported incidents of sudden acceleration in its vehicles quickly. Toyota wants to hear directly from its customers about any problems they are experiencing with their vehicles.

The results of the evaluations have been submitted to NHTSA for review. Though these reports involve a tiny fraction of the more than one million vehicles dealers have repaired to date, Toyota takes them extremely seriously.

As NHTSA is now reviewing the results of our evaluations, it is inappropriate for Toyota to provide specific information about the company’s conclusions. However, the evaluations have found no evidence of a failure of the vehicle electronic throttle control system, the recent recall remedies or the brake override feature.

It is important to note that many complaints submitted to NHTSA either are unverifiable or lack the vehicle owner information required to facilitate follow-up. Nonetheless, Toyota is quickly investigating verifiable complaints of unintended acceleration and doing everything it can to ensure that our customers are confident in their vehicles and the remedies.

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Toyota is confident that the rigorously tested accelerator pedal remedies and the brake override feature are effective and firmly believes that, with these remedies, its vehicles are among the safest on the road today.

public squabble has broken out between the chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Congressional panel investigating safety problems in Toyota vehicles over the contents of internal documents produced by a former Toyota attorney.

U.S. Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter on Feb. 26 to Yoshimi Inaba, president and chief executive officer of Toyota Motor North America Inc., saying that the documents provided "evidence that Toyota deliberately withheld relevant electronic records that it was legally required to produce" in lawsuits.

The documents "shed some light on Toyota's handling of the sudden unintended acceleration problem" and "indicate a systematic disregard for the law," Towns wrote.

U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., responded with a letter of his own on March 2. He wrote that Towns' conclusions were based on "conjecture and altered quotations" and that Towns' letter "frequently misquotes and mischaracterizes" the documents.

The dispute involved claims by Dimitrios Biller, a former in-house lawyer at Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., who asserted in a wrongful termination lawsuit that his superiors regularly ordered him to hide and destroy evidence in rollover cases.

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By contrast, Issa wrote that his staff spent 60 hours reviewing the Biller documents and found information that refuted some of Towns' conclusions.

In particular, Issa said, the documents indicate that Toyota made considerable efforts to improve its production of electronic documents while Biller was there and that one of the lawsuits that Towns suggested involved sudden unintended acceleration actually involved problems with the transmission and lack of acceleration in the vehicle.

Issa cited Dallas plaintiffs attorney Todd Tracy, who reopened 17 personal injury cases based on Biller's claims but voluntarily dismissed them after reviewing the documents. Tracy said that they failed to reveal any "concealment, destruction, or pattern of discovery abuse," Issa wrote.

In a telephone interview on Thursday, Tracy told The National Law Journal that Issa's characterization was correct. One box contained 15 copies of the same deposition, Tracy said. Another contained research about bringing a wrongful termination suit. Tracey found 50 copies of Biller's resume and e-mails that Biller wrote to colleagues, but no replies.

"These were supposed to be the hottest documents in the history of jurisprudence, the way they were portrayed," Tracy said. "The material was published material. Give me a break."

In many years of litigating against Toyota, Tracy said, he never had any trouble securing discovery material. "I never had any trouble getting it at all," Tracy said.