Toyota agrees compensation to Chinese car owners
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Toyota on Monday promised to compensate Chinese car owners for the latest recall, the first of its kind in the country.
A delegation of Toyota agreed after talking with authorities of east China's Zhejiang Province Monday to compensate customers of its RAV4 vehicles, accelerate the recall, offer substitute vehicles and return purchase deposit according to Zhejiang's regulations on consumer rights protection.
But it did not reveal the amount of compensation or clearly verify whether the solution applies only to Zhejiang customers or those from other Chinese regions.
The company said it will make active and serious feedbacks to consumers' demands and cooperate with the mediation of Zhejiang's consumer protection authority.
A delegation of the FAW Toyota Motor Sales Co. Ltd., a Sino-Japanese joint venture, held the first closed-door talks with officials of Zhejiang Provincial Administration for Industry and Commerce on March 22.
Headed by Hideki Nagae, vice general manager of the joint venture,Toyota delegates Monday held the second round of talks with the administration, which yielded the solution package.
The administration was China's first local bureau to require Toyota to improve its after-sales service since the recall.
Zhejiang is the only province in China that has clear legislation that companies should compensate customers for car recalls.
However, the regulation, which took effect in 2000, only rules that companies must offer a call-out service or send their products to customers, or they should cover customers' expenses incurred in product transportation, inability to work and customer travel.
Local experts assumed that if Toyota calculated the compensation standards fully according to the rules, the payment would not be very high.
Toyota announced in January that it would recall more than 75,000 RAV4 vehicles in China due to an accelerator pedal problem, and almost 10 percent of the vehicles recalled were in Zhejiang.
