Do you remember a few months back, when the U.S. media was busily burying Toyota’s reputation as the be-all and end-all of automotive quality? To me, the media’s myth-busting paroxysms came off more like a witch-hunt than investigative journalism. Now that their fear-mongering Toyota-bashing is no longer in the headlines comes this from NHTSA, who have been carefully investigating Toyota unintended acceleration reports.
“The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.”
And,
“In spite of our investigations, we have not actually been able yet to find a defect” in electronic throttle-control systems, Mr. Smith told the scientific panel, which is looking into potential causes of sudden acceleration.
In the wake of the great Toyota panic of 2010, Toyota’s senior managers have tearfully apologized in public and Toyota’s engineers have created numerous fixes for problems still not found. As of February of 2010, Toyota estimated that their cost for recalls and lost sales at about two billion dollars.
In past posts on this blog I have expressed my feeling that there was a hidden agenda designed to play on the xenophobic tendencies of a declining nation that has squandered its edge in quality manufacturing and is now trying to claw its way back, not by rededicating itself to creating great products, but by denigrating its competition.
As I have said before, Toyota is just another automaker in business to make a profit. Their products are far from prefect, but have thus far been much better than anything produced by U. S. automakers. To begin to understand why this is the case we need only study Toyota’s corporate response to the media witch-hunt. Rather than dig their heels in with denials and blame-shifting (see BP oil spill), they bowed, apologized, bent with the wind and went on about the business of improving their products. Their response reflected what has come to be known as “The Toyota Way”. Meanwhile GM, having learned nothing, is giving lip services to digging itself out of the grave it dug itself into with a taxpayer funded sham product called the Volt (see NYT “G.M.’s Electric Lemon“)
No design is perfect and the imperfect design of Toyota vehicles certainly contributed to crashes. After all, if the operator of a vehicle can accidentally apply the gas rather than the brake, the gas-pedal next to the brake-pedal design could stand improvement. But the two billion dollar rush to judgement in the media was most certainly fueled by a desire to take the number-one automaker in the world (not made in America) down a few notches rather than a legitimate concern for product safety.
This is the same con as the one being used by the Republican Party in the U.S. Rather than earn the respect and loyalty of customer-audiences by creating great product and improving it continuously, the Republican party spends all their effort attacking the other party’s products. This method has the benefits of being cheap, requiring no thought, and by creating nothing, immunizing it perpetrators from responsibility for their (not) products.
But there’s a downside to this technique as well, and I am not defending Toyota. I am attacking the con-artistry of U.S. business interests and media lackeys and more importantly, the gullibility of American audiences who mistake creating nothing for doing something. People who are lost in the funhouse had better wake up soon. These con-artists are shoveling dirt into our grave faster than we can dig ourselves out!
Hi Marc,
I figured out, back in 1984, that Toyota was a much better product than American made cars. My father had his ford’s and chevy’s in the garage all the time, very poorly made. I owned a 65 Volkswagen I couldn’t keep on the road because of all the problems. I blew two VW engines on that one car. I drove a tercell like a race car and it lasted for years and years. I now own 3 Toyotas, one is a 1988 Corolla. I also own a 2001 Camry, and a 2006 Prius. I love them all. I have never had any problems with any of the cars, never been stranded by one.
I had very similar experiences with automobiles. It was part and parcel of a protracted and painful awakening to the idea that the “American Way” of doing things was deeply flawed.
The worship of profits produced more than crappy cars. It enshrined a culture of lies and deceits that guaranteed incompetent political leadership, endless wars of adventure, poverty amidst abundance, gluttony, spiritual bankruptcy, and produced a wasteland of amoral, self-absorbed hubris.
Forgive me if I sound a bit over-the-top, but the scale of the disillusionments that followed on the heels of being reared as a true believer in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” cannot be overstated.