Toyota completes repairs on all five Duke Zipcars

All five Zipcars at Duke are back in service after Toyota completed repairs on the two Prius vehicles and the three Matrix vehicles.

The vehicles were returned to the Duke Zipcar fleet as of Feb. 17, according to a press release from Parking and Transportation Services. Duke recently requested a hybrid Honda Civic to add to the fleet, according to the release. An earlier press release stated that the new vehicle would replace one of the two Toyota Prius vehicles currently in the fleet.

The three Toyota Matrix vehicles based at Duke by the car-sharing company were recalled in early February due to a defect that could cause the accelerator pedal to stick and the car to speed up rapidly. The two Prius vehicles were recalled due to a brake pedal problem, according to a Zipcar press release. Toyota has recently recalled about 6 million vehicles in the United States for similar repairs and about 2 million more overseas.

Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, will testify before Congress Wednesday about the problems with his company’s vehicles, the New York Times reported last week. He will likely face questions about whether Toyota recalled the vehicles as quickly as it could have.

—from staff reports