Toyota, under the advisory of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will soon launch a safety campaign on specific Toyota and Lexus vehicles over the driver’s-side floor mats. Toyota says the mat can get stuck on the gas pedal and cause unintended and sudden acceleration.

Personally I couldn’t be happier when I heard this new and it is a long time coming for me. Why you might ask? Because believe it or not, I was almost one of the “victims” due to this problem…

It was about 2 and half years ago (early 2007) when I was still in Florida, it was a Saturday morning, I remember that I brought my IS to the dealer for the 15,000-mile service and the dealer provided me with an ES350 as loaner. My friend and I then decided to take it to Orlando because I had to get a haircut and we also wanted to do some grocery shopping. On the way there near the exit of the Universal Studio I had to overtake a tractor trailer so floored the gas pedal, boy, was that a wrong decision or what…

All of the sudden I felt like the the pedal was stuck and I couldn’t get it back, with the speed climbing fast and the car in front of me approaching (lucky for me that I had A LOT of distance between me and the car in front) it was second nature for me to slam the brake. However, with the pedal fully “to the metal” the brake really didn’t do me much good, the acceleration slowed down for a while but went back up pretty quickly. At that exactly moment I seriously thought that I was going to die and my friend was looking at me like WHAT THE f*** IS GOING ON… after couple seconds I finally gathered my thoughts so I put on the emergency brake, shifted the gear to neuture and gradually moved towards the shoulder. Once I was completely stopped at the shoulder I then got under the steering wheel and found that the gas pedal was stuck behind the floor mat.

When I returned the car to the dealer I told my service rep about what happened he was so shocked, it took him couple seconds to react and ask me if I was all right (he was probably thinking that a law suit is coming…). I told him I was ok and let him know that they should take this seriously because it might fully well happen to another customer.

Given what has happened to me personally I am just glad that Toyota finally noticed the problem and decide to solve it once for all. What I can’t understand is what took them so long?