Page 142 - Toyota Under Fire

THE RECALL CRISIS

than a million reinforcement bars had been made. The next best
alternative to Grand Rapids Spring that Toyota could find would
have needed two more weeks lead time, an unimaginable eternity
given the mass hysteria around the recall.
But the reinforcement bars still needed to get out to the deal-
ers. TEMA set up a special warehouse that Sunday to begin pack-
ing boxes for overnight delivery to dealers on Monday morning.
Meanwhile, TMS personnel were busy creating training modules
for dealers’ service personnel to teach them how to install the re-
inforcement bar correctly. Additionally, letters had to go out to
all current owners of the models involved in the recall beginning
the repair scheduling process.
While all this frantic activity was happening in the back-
ground to deal with the sticky pedal issue, another set of blows
landed. Toyota had announced the steel reinforcement bar fix on
February 1, telling customers that dealers would begin receiving
the parts by the end of the week and that repairs would be sched-
uled shortly thereafter. On February 3, however, Ray LaHood,
the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, having just endured a grill-
ing before a congressional committee about supposed shortcom-
ings at the NHTSA, responded to a question from a reporter
about what owners of Toyotas should do now that the fix had
been announced by saying, “My advice is, if anyone owns one of
these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to a Toyota dealer.” Much
of the careful work done by Toyota, and approved by the NHTSA,
to prepare the logistics for an orderly repair of all customer ve-
hicles as quickly as possible was almost undone by this careless
statement.
Carnegie Mellon professor Paul Fischbeck noted the folly
of this recommendation by calculating the relative risk of walk-
ing versus driving a Toyota, assuming that all of the 19 deaths at

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