Page 125 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

After the Saylor accident showed the very real possibility of
floor mats ending up in the wrong vehicles, the announced recall
and safety advisory related to floor mats had been, from this per-
spective, a decision to go above and beyond any legal culpability
to protect customers.
During the course of November and December, the media
leapt on any reports of a Toyota with acceleration issues. The Los
Angeles Times pursued the story with exceptional vigor, publish-
ing several more articles accusing Toyota of hiding data and ig-
noring customer complaints, still without doing any digging into
the forensics of any particular accident or finding any evidence of
a defect in Toyota’s electronics.
All of these factors—the unfounded speculation about ve-
hicle electronics, the public doubt over the floor mat recalls, the
NHTSA reprimand of Toyota, and the insulation of key decision
makers in Japan from the realities of consumer sentiment in the
United States—created a powder keg, needing only a spark to
explode and ravage Toyota’s hard-won reputation for quality and
safety. That spark came in the form of sticky pedals.
Toyota certainly bears some culpability for what happened
next. While there were some technical issues, which we’ll explore
in detail, the primary problems weren’t technical. They were, first
and foremost, in how Toyota communicated, both internally and
with customers, the public in general, the media, and the NHTSA.
The root cause of these errors, Toyota later concluded, was the
way in which it had historically handled safety and quality con-
cerns, which was overly centralized in a quality department in
Japan and focused on an engineering perspective, while the com-
pany had lost direct touch with customer perspectives and con-
cerns (more on this in Chapter 4).

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