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RICHARD MAROSI and NATHAN OLIVAREZ-GILES Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — James Sikes bought his Toyota Prius in 2008 and 53,000 miles later, the car was driving fine. But on Monday afternoon when he accelerated to pass another vehicle on Interstate 8 east of San Diego, the car kept going.

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James Sikes talks about his experiences in his Toyota Prius during a news conference held at Toyota of El Cajon, in California on Tuesday. He described a terrifying ordeal of hurtling down the highway when his car would not stop.

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"The gas pedal stuck open all the way," said Sikes, 61, a Realtor from San Diego.

For 30 miles, Sikes said, he swerved in and out of traffic, narrowly missing a big rig and trying desperately to slow the vehicle down, at one point reaching down with his hand to pull back on the gas pedal. The brakes were useless.

"I was laying on the brakes," Sikes said, "but it wasn’t slowing down."

The "nerve-wracking" experience, he said, ended when a CHP officer, responding to his 911 call, instructed him through a loudspeaker to apply his emergency brake in tandem with the brake pedal. Sikes pressed down, hard. "My bottom wasn’t even on the seat," he said.

When the Prius, which had reached 90 miles per hour, dropped to about 50 mph, Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a stop. There was nothing he could have done to stop the car, Sikes said.

"If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone."

Sikes recounted his ordeal during a news conference held in front of a Toyota dealer Tuesday as a federal safety agency said it was sending two investigators to San Diego County to probe the incident.

"They’re special crash investigators and they’re going to gather the details from the car and find out what the potential causes of any problems are," said Karen Aldana, a spokeswoman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Sudden unintended acceleration has allegedly been the cause of 56 fatal accidents involving Toyotas in the United States, going back as far as 2004. Sikes’ Prius was one of more than 4 million Toyota vehicles recalled in November because of reported acceleration problems.

Sikes on Tuesday said he received a recall notice, but when he brought his Prius in for service about three weeks later, the dealer in El Cajon said his car wasn’t part of the recall. Sikes, who said he didn’t read the letter from Toyota, couldn’t specify what problem the recall was addressing.

Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, said Monday it would send a field technical specialist to investigate what happened. By Tuesday morning, Sikes said he had yet to hear from the manufacturer, and that his calls to Toyota’s toll-free number turned up a busy signal.

At the Toyota dealer in El Cajon, where he went to pick up a loaner car, Sikes said he was still a little shaken by the incident. A longtime owner of Toyota cars, he said the car had just received a maintenance check and everything appeared to be fine.