Page 191 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

brand every quarter from 2006 until the fall of 2009.
Lexus was the top luxury brand by a significant margin
over BMW and Mercedes until the fall of 2009.

None of these rankings indicate a downward trend in the
quality and reliability of Toyota vehicles over the decade leading
up to the crisis. The small number of defects identified that drove
the recall crisis didn’t happen suddenly during Toyota’s rapid
growth. They were made over a long period of time, not just in
the last few years, and in different parts of the organization. Toy-
ota Motor Sales had designed the all-weather floor mats that were
recalled in 2007 back in 2004. It’s unclear that an underlying de-
fect like the technical issue that caused the sticky pedal could have
been caught by conventional testing, as finding it would have re-
quired extensive life-cycle testing under conditions of high
humidity—certainly Toyota wasn’t the only manufacturer to
miss it and use the CTS pedals. For example, Chrysler recalled
CTS pedals in its Dodge Caliber vehicles in July 2010, after
reports of sticking. Ford stopped producing (while it made a
change in the pedals) a Transit van sold only in China because it
used a similarly designed CTS pedal.* Discrete errors in different
parts of the organization in different years over the decade do not
reflect a general decline in quality and safety.
Judging quality by the number of recalls or the number of ve-
hicles recalled is also problematic because there are other factors
involved. Ultimately, the decision to issue a recall is a judgment
call, sometimes made by the manufacturer and sometimes by the

* “Accelerator Pedal Supplier in Toyota’s Recall Has Many Customers,” Wheels
Blog, New York Times, January 28, 2010; http://wheels blogs.nytimes.com/2010/
01/28/accelerator-pedal-supplier-in-toyotas-recall-has-many-customers/.

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