A newspaper is reporting investigators probing a runaway Toyota Prius found its brakes didn't show the wear expected when a driver exerts sustained pressure like the driver said he did during a dramatic incident on a San Diego highway.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that people familiar with the probe said it didn't show the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds for a long period but instead probably were applied intermittently.

James Sikes called 911 Monday reporting his gas pedal was stuck and he could not slow down,

In two calls that spanned 23 minutes, the dispatcher repeatedly told him to throw the car into neutral and turn it off.

Sikes later said he was afraid the car would flip.

Patty Sikes says her husband stands by his story, that his Toyota Prius raced out of control, the gas pedal stuck to the floor, as he stepped on the brake.

But according to a memo drafted for a congressional panel, investigators concluded that it just doesn't seem possible.

They said every time they floored the gas pedal and the brake, the engine shut down as it's supposed to.

At the same time, Connecticut's attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York both pressed the Japanese automaker to investigate cases of more recent accidents where vehicles reportedly accelerated out of control.

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas filed a lawsuit in California court on Friday, seeking damages from Toyota for violations of the state's unfair business practices act. The suit claims that Toyota "knowingly" sold hundreds of thousands of vehicles at risk for unintended acceleration while taking "steps to hide and mislead the public about the defects."

"Against this backdrop of fraud and concealment, Toyota has for decades touted its reputation for safety and reliability and knew that people bought its vehicles because of that reputation, and yet purposefully chose to conceal and suppress the existence and nature of defects," the suit said.

Toyota had no immediate comment on the lawsuit, which joins a growing list of legal claims against the automaker.

In addition to pending class-action lawsuits, Toyota also faces a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors.

The latest legal challenge comes at a crucial time for Toyota, which has been working to win back consumers and demonstrate that it has taken steps to address mistakes the automaker has acknowledged compromised vehicle quality.

Separately on Friday, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he was pushing Toyota to investigate three accidents involving Camrys in the state in the past week.

"I will vigorously and aggressively investigate to assure that Toyota is addressing and correcting potentially fatal defects in its vehicles," Blumenthal said.

In New York, Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, said he wanted to see the automaker move to probe the cause of an accident in his state involving a Prius with a potentially stuck accelerator pedal.

Toyota said it has dispatched investigators to look into that accident in Harrison, New York.

A string of highly publicized incidents this month involving Toyotas has threatened to overshadow a campaign by the automaker to win back car shoppers after it briefly shut down sales of popular models in late January.

In the most prominent example, a San Diego-area man claimed that his Prius surged out of control for some 20 minutes on Monday while police dispatched a patrol to help him stop.

Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are investigating that case, which came just hours after Toyota called a news conference to demonstrate why it believed there was no evidence of a flaw with the electronic systems used to control acceleration in its cars.

TOYOTA SAYS SALES UP

Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles globally to address the risk that accelerator pedals on a range of its vehicles could become stuck because of a loose floor mat or a mechanical glitch in the pedal assembly.

Unintended acceleration in the company's Toyota and Lexus vehicles has been linked to at least five U.S. crash deaths since 2007. Authorities are investigating reports alleging 47 other fatalities over the past decade.

Orange County is just north of San Diego County, where a California Highway Patrol trooper and three members of his family were killed in a crash last August involving a Toyota vehicle.

That crash, which Toyota has said appears to have been caused by a loose floor mat, prompted the first in a series of accelerator-related recalls by Toyota and drew new scrutiny to a rising trend of consumer complaints about unintended acceleration from U.S. safety regulators.

Toyota has its U.S. sales headquarters in nearby Torrance, California.

Toyota executives have been visiting dealers across the United States this week in a bid to focus attention on a campaign of aggressive discounts credited with sending sales sharply higher in March.

Toyota Senior Vice President for U.S. sales, Don Esmond, told Reuters on Friday that the automaker's U.S. sales were up 40 percent from a year earlier through the first 10 days of March.

He said the automaker had not decided whether to extend unprecedented incentives, including rebates and dealer incentives of up to $4,000 and zero-percent financing into April, a move analysts say could stoke sales at the expense of profit margins.

"We'll continue to keep the dealers competitive in the marketplace. I think we will have to take a look at results and reevaluate, but the promise I made to dealers was that we will continue to make them competitive," Esmond said.

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