Page 134 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

involving only all-weather floor mats, rather than asking for a
larger recall that would affect more vehicles or a resolution of
the problem that involved changes to vehicles rather than re-
placing the floor mats. After the tragic death of the Saylor family,
this presentation seemed to show Toyota boasting about put-
ting savings above customer safety.
In both cases, context matters. The documents look quite
different when you know a few of the background details.
The e-mail debate between Koganei and Miller wasn’t
related to sharing information about sticky pedals with the
NHTSA. That process had begun back in November 2009 (when
Toyota reported the sticking pedals found in the United States
to the NHTSA through technical field reports) and was ongoing.
Miller and Koganei were discussing the details of Toyota’s pub-
lic statement about the issues.
While discussions between Toyota and the NHTSA were tak-
ing place, communications professionals at TMS, like Irv Miller,
who had been the public spokespeople fighting the SUA alle-
gations, were not informed about any of this until mid-January.
When they learned of the sticky pedal issue, the TMS communi-
cations executives wanted to issue a public release immediately,
but the external affairs professionals in Japan wanted to wait
until there had been a complete analysis of the problem, a solu-
tion had been found, and a plan for fixing the problem was in
place. Koganei had moved to California just a few weeks earlier
in his new assignment as a liaison between TMS and Toyota Mo-
tor Corporation (TMC) in Japan (similar positions exist through-
out Toyota’s international operations). In the e-mail exchange,

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