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Toyota Could Have Been Fined $13.8 Billion–NHTSA

The government cap on fines that the NHTSA division of The Transportation Department can levy on any one car company for a single violation of the agency’s rules is $16.735 million. That is the fine the NHTSA will force the Japanese car company to…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published April 11, 2010, 7:31am ET · 1 min read

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The government cap on fines that the NHTSA division of The Transportation Department can levy on any one car company for a single violation of the agency’s rules is $16.735 million. That is the fine the NHTSA will force the Japanese car company to pay for failing to disclose timely information accelerator problems on 2.4 million of its cars which were eventually recalled. NHTSA says it may add another fine because the accelerator flaw was based on two mechanical issues and not one.

NHTSA said that it would have charged Toyota $13.8 billion, or $6,000 for each defective vehicle but caps prevented that. The difference between that number and the current fine of $16.735 is ridiculous and should lead Congress to change the system under which DOT can fine car companies which have egregiously violated  federal laws.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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