Page 189 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

owners should not place them on top of existing floor mats.* As
of February 2011, there has not been a recall of Ford vehicles re-
lated to floor mats.
Many of the other recalls announced in 2010 involved issues
that were not defects but customer satisfaction issues, recalls that
would have been handled by a technical service bulletin in the
past (e.g., the Prius braking issue), or extra precautionary mea-
sures (the recall of leaking brake master cylinders resulting from
using the wrong brake fluid).†
We do not mean to imply that errors are okay. Mistakes were
made, and Toyota’s goal is clear—zero defects. We are saying that
the conclusion by some that there were serious declines in the
quality and safety of Toyota vehicles as the decade progressed is
simply not borne out by the data. The number of defects and
errors didn’t materially increase in 2009 and 2010. Looking at
broader measures of quality and reliability from J.D. Power and
Consumer Reports in 2009 (just prior to the recall crisis and nega-
tive publicity) shows that Toyota’s performance on industry rank-
ings met or exceeded its performance in the early 2000s. While
it’s certainly true that Toyota’s competitors had closed some of
the quality gap that had existed in the 1990s, Toyota’s leadership
position in quality hadn’t been compromised except in the news
media. Consider just a few examples of independent ratings of

* Cammy Corrigan, “NHTSA Goes to the Mat with Ford,” The Truth about Cars,
June 2, 2010; http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/06/nhtsa-goes-to-the
-mat-with-ford.
† The recall, announced in October 2010, covered brake systems that could develop
leaks if the driver had used the wrong brake fluid. Even in this situation, the brake
warning light would come on, and braking performance would suffer materially only
if the driver ignored the warning light and did not refill the brake fluid reservoir. More
details available here: http://www.toyota.com/recall/avalon-highlander.html.

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