Toyota agrees recall compensation to Chinese car owners

HANGZHOU, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Toyota on Monday promised to compensate car owners in east China's Zhejiang Province for the latest recall in the first such compensation package of its kind in China.

A delegation of Toyota agreed after talking with authorities of east China's Zhejiang Province Monday to compensate local customers of its RAV4 vehicles, complete the recall and repair by the end of April, offer substitute vehicles and return purchase deposits for undelivered cars according to Zhejiang's regulations on consumer rights protection.

The agreement did not reveal the amount of compensation, leaving Toyota's maintenance stations across the province to negotiate with consumers according to individual situations.

The company said it would actively and seriously communicate with consumers about their demands and abide by the mediation of Zhejiang's consumer protection authority if the negotiations failed.

Detailed solutions concerning the compensation standards were expected to be made public soon, said Xu Jianmin, secretary general with Zhejiang Provincial Committee of Consumer Rights Protection.

The compensation package only applied to Zhejiang car owners. Consumers in other parts of China could ask their local organizations to contact Toyota about the recall, he said.

Representatives of consumer authorities outside Zhejiang had called or visited to discuss the situation, said Xu.

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 Hidehisa Nagae, vice general manager of the joint venture,Toyota delegates on Monday held the second round of talks with the administration, which yielded the 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 requires companies to offer a call-out service or send their products to customers, or to 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.