After an unsurpassed run as the gold standard of quality, Toyota has had a terrible month or so with the recent "sticky gas pedal" recall.
Yesterday, they suffered more bad news when Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued an unusually strong statement:
LaHood says don't drive recalled Toyotas til fixed
LaHood’s warning came Wednesday in testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on transportation. LaHood says his advice to owners is to “stop driving it. Take it to a Toyota dealer because they believe they have a fix for it.”
(as an aside, Ray LaHood, far from being a "token Republican" put on the Cabinet purely as a show of bipartisanship, seems to be doing a kick-ass job; good for him and for Pres. Obama!)
And it looks like it's about to get even worse; from today's Detroit Free Press:
U.S. launches probe into 2010 Prius brake issues
WASHINGTON -- U.S. auto safety regulators have launched a formal probe into braking complaints on 37,000 Toyota Prius hybrids, just after the Japanese automaker admitted that it had made changes to the brake software in models in production.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said today that it had opened a preliminary evaluation of the problems, which it said had generated 124 complaints to its hot line, including reports of four crashes. Many of the complaints from owners say their 2010 Prius lurches over bumps or potholes and the brakes are ineffective for a few seconds.
Now, not being any sort of an expert on such things, I can't comment on the seriousness of the problem. However, this situation strikes me as falling into one of two categories: Either it's gonna blow up into a legitimate, massive scandal that causes irreparable damage to the company (along the lines of the 2000 Firestone Tire Recall; Ford has recovered from that but Firestone never did, eventually being sold off to Bridgestone*), or it's gonna turn out to be along the lines of the infamous early-80's Audi 5000 "sudden acceleration" brouhaha, which turned out to be bullshit:
For those too young to remember, here's a summary:
On November 23, 1986, 60 Minutes aired a segment greenlit by Don Hewitt, concerning the Audi 5000 automobile, a popular German luxury car. The story covered a supposed problem of "unintended acceleration" when the brake pedal was pushed, with emotional interviews with six people who sued Audi (unsuccessfully) after they crashed their cars, including one woman who had killed her six year old boy. Footage was shown of a Audi 5000 with the accelerator moving down on its own, accelerating the car, after an expert witness employed by one of the plaintiffs modified it with a concealed device to cause it to do so. Independent investigators concluded that this was most likely due to driver incompetence, where the driver let their foot slip off the brake and onto the accelerator. Tests by Audi and independent journalists showed that even with the throttle wide open, the car would simply stall if the brakes were actually being used. Some claims were made that this was in part due to a slightly closer placing of the pedals than in many American cars, which allows smoother driving for greater fuel efficiency and more control in an emergency situation.
The incident devastated Audi sales in the United States, which did not reach the same level for another fifteen years. The initial incidents which prompted the report were found by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Transport Canada to have been attributable to operator error, where car owners had depressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. CBS issued a partial retraction, without acknowledging the test results of involved government agencies.
P.J. O'Rourke (he may be a conservative but he does hit the nail on the head now and again) had a more blunt way of summarizing the findings, in Parliment of Whores:
"Audi had the bad luck to be the lowest-priced German luxury car during the great German luxury car fad. And Audi had the worse luck to be designed with its brake and accelerator pedals close together (where, for the sake of quick stopping, they belong) instead of in separate counties, as they are on typical American luxury cars. Thus Audi got a large number of plush-bottom yoohoos suffering from daytime-television brain buying the 5000. These people had never driven a European car before and were too busy attaching Garfield the Cat suction-cup toys to the rear window to watch what their feet were doing."
In other words, it's either a legitimate case of shoddy quality control at Toyota--which would explain how numerous different types of problems would all start appearing at around the same time--or it's a case of people jumping on the bandwagon and suddenly seeing imaginary hobgoblins every time they look at something with the Toyota label on it.
If these reported problems turn out to be legitimate, Toyota should do everything possible to address them and deserves the flack they're receiving.
If, however, it turns out to be garbage--or, more likely, an extremely rare occurrence blown way, way out of proportion by a scandal-hungry media and showboat-hungry politicians--then they don't deserve the torches & pitchforks that are currently building.
*(Correction: thanks to RenMin for calling my attention to this: Firestone was sold to Bridgestone much earlier, back in 1988, but continued to operate under its' own name)
Update: Hoo-boy. This story is going absolutely hog wild now:
Toyota recall spills over to France's Peugeot, Citroen
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says his Prius has acceleration 'software glitch'
Oddly enough, at this point I'm actually hoping it is a real problem, because I'd hate to think that all of this is being caused by sheer mob mentality hysteria at the expense of a company that values its reputation above all else.
However, whether legitimate or not, there is NOTHING in this story that should bring anyone joy. Yes, it'll probably lead to GM, Ford and Chrysler increasing their sales, but Toyota employs a LOT of U.S. workers as well, not to mention being on the U.S. stock exchange, paying U.S. taxes. My guess is that it's a zero-sum game in terms of impact on the U.S. economy and U.S. job market.