NHTSA Complaint #11536313 — 2023 TOYOTA RAV4 PRIME

Driver was parking the car in a parking lot at a very slow speed. The car suddenly shot forward at a very high rate of speed, requiring evasive steering from trees and a fence, until the car crashed head-on into another vehicle. The driver is very certain the brakes only were applied during the entire time the car shot forward. Airbags were not deployed. Bystanders were within six feet of the car at one point during the acceleration, prior to the crash. There were no injuries. Earlier, on the day of the crash, the car had a sudden, strong, yet brief acceleration of the vehicle during normal braking while approaching a rotary, unlike normal ABS. ABS itself seemed unneeded (the approach to the rotary was well within the speed limit, on dry condition roads). This issue occurred twice in the two months prior to the accident. There were no known warning messages in the car or the phone app for the car in any of these cases or at the time of the crash. The manufacturer has been notified of the crash, a product liability case has been opened, and an engineer was sent to look at the car. A data download from the airbag event data recorder (Bosch CDR) was done, a report was generated, and the report was provided to the car owner. No data in the formatted report is provided regarding Vehicle Speed, Accelerator Pedal, Cruise Control Status, Brake Torque, etc. Unformatted hexadecimal data is included in the report, without a data schema to decipher the data. It is not known if any other analysis or information about the car was reported by the engineer, beyond the Bosch CDR report. The owner is not aware that the problem has been reproduced or confirmed by anyone involved, or of any other inspections than the one described here. Manufacturer has not yet provided the owner with a report response. The car is currently at an auto repair shop and no repairs have begun. The shop is awaiting an appraisal by the insurance company before doing the repairs.