Page 186 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

would dictate one set of steps. On the other hand, if the problem
was losing touch with customers and failing to build and defend
trust in the company, that would require an entirely different set
of steps. Let’s take a look at the evidence.

A Breakdown of Quality and Safety?
A careful look at the data shows that the widely held belief that
Toyota’s quality suddenly took a nosedive during the late 2000s
as a result of poor manufacturing and engineering is simply not
true. Let’s first consider recalls.
In Figure 4.1, we show the number of recalls and the number
of vehicles recalled by the top six automakers (in U.S. sales) over
the last five years. Note that there is a time lag, so a recall made
in 2005 was probably the result of a design decision or a manu-
facturing error made several years earlier. The only clear patterns
for Toyota are that there were an awful lot of vehicles recalled in
2009 and 2010 and that by far the largest number of individual
recalls were issued in 2010, when Toyota began taking a much
more aggressive stance toward recalls. Take out 2010 and there is
certainly no evidence of a general trend toward a greater number
of recalls between 2005 and 2009.
The number of vehicles recalled is not an indicator of the
number of errors made in design or engineering; it is simply a mea-
sure of the size of the manufacturer. That’s because, increasingly,
design, engineering, and parts are shared by many vehicles—even
vehicles made by different manufacturers. Several of Toyota’s recalls
in 2010 were for parts that were essentially identical in design to
parts used by other manufacturers.
A much better measure of design or engineering errors is the
number of separate recall events. In 2005 and 2006, Toyota had

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