Page 151 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

believe any statements made by the company’s president. He also
knew that the company was facing a multitude of lawsuits and
that anything he said could be used against the company later.
In his testimony, he did not present the kind of counterevi-
dence to the claims against Toyota that we laid out in this chap-
ter. He did not provide any detail on how Toyota rigorously tests
for EMI and designs against it. Nor did he point out some obvi-
ous inconsistencies in the testimony of Rhonda Smith or the fact
that Kane and Gilbert were both on the payroll of lawyers who
were suing Toyota.
While his strategy of apologizing, not blaming others, and
taking responsibility has worked in the long term, it didn’t do
much to change the hostile headlines at the time. Many people
in the media and in Congress continued to believe that Toyota
had major quality problems, that it was hiding material informa-
tion, and that it was not taking electronic defects seriously. For
instance, after the hearings, Representative Bruce Braley said:

If you are going to deal with the problem you have to
first admit you have a problem. Toyota’s focus through-
out this recall has been on the mechanical solution in-
volving floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals, but the
testimony we heard from the Smith family from Tennes-
see and from a host of other people, who had problems
with sudden unintended acceleration in their Toyota ve-
hicles led many people . . . to question whether Toyota
was devoting the necessary time and resources to analyz-
ing and ruling out a potential electronic problem.

An analysis of Toyota-related stories in the Los Angeles Times,
New York Times, and Detroit News, conducted by a colleague,

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