Toyota does not have to fix the wrong tire size printed on 3,981 C-HR door placards, and the petition that got it out of the recall has been sitting at NHTSA since February 2021

Three thousand nine hundred and eighty one cars carry a label that names the wrong tires, and none of them will be recalled for it.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration filed a notice for public inspection on Wednesday granting Toyota Motor North America a decision that the error is inconsequential to motor vehicle safety. The vehicles are model year 2020 and 2021 Toyota C-HRs built between 16 September 2019 and 30 November 2020. The tire and loading information placard on each one gives the size as 225/50R18. The cars left the plant on 215/60R17 tires fitted to steel wheels.

Toyota traced it to a parts list. An internal audit found that the part number for the placard used on C-HRs with 18 inch tires had been specified for certain cars built with the 17 inch combination.

The standard, and the exemption

Paragraph S4.3(d) of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 110 requires the placard to show the tire size designation for the tires fitted at first sale. Toyota reported the noncompliance on 3 February 2021 and petitioned three weeks later, on 26 February 2021, for a finding that it did not matter. NHTSA published notice of the petition on 23 April 2021 and opened a 30 day comment period. Nobody commented.

The decision arrived this week, five and a half years after the petition was filed. The document gives no account of the delay.

NHTSA's own framing of what Toyota had to clear is worth quoting: "The burden of establishing the inconsequentiality of a failure to comply with a performance requirement in an FMVSS is substantial and difficult to meet." The agency adds that it does not treat prior determinations as binding precedent, which matters here because Toyota's petition leaned on five of them, including a 2019 grant to BMW over a placard that named 18 inch tires on cars fitted with 17 inch ones.

Why the agency said yes

Two reasons carry the analysis, and neither rests on the absence of complaints, which NHTSA says it does not weigh.

The first is that the error is self-correcting in the shop. An 18 inch tire will not mount on a 17 inch rim, so anyone following the placard finds out immediately, and the right size is printed on the sidewall and in the manual. The second is a load figure. At 230 kPa the 17 inch tire fitted to these cars carries 20 kg more than the 18 inch tire named on the label, so the misprint does not understate capacity. The cold inflation pressure on the placard is correct for the tires actually fitted.

Toyota is now exempted from the duty at 49 U.S.C. 30118 to notify owners, purchasers and dealers, and from the duty at 49 U.S.C. 30120 to remedy. The grant reaches only those two duties. Any dealer or distributor still holding one of these cars after Toyota told them about the noncompliance remains barred from selling it.