Page 21 - Toyota Under Fire

PREF ACE

it still made Toyota the number one automaker in retail sales in
the United States.
I was also impressed, given the lost sales and the high cost of
the recalls, that in the fiscal year ending March 30, 2010, Toyota
reported a global profit of $2.2 billion and has been profitable
for each quarter since. An indicator of the strength of the Toyota
brand was demonstrated in a Rice University automotive con-
sumer survey in February 2010, at the worst of the recall crisis,
that found that Toyota owners in the United States overwhelm-
ingly supported the company, thought that it was handling the
recalls properly, and would buy another Toyota. And by Novem-
ber 2010, Consumer Reports ranked 17 Toyota vehicles among
“the most reliable” on the road, the most of any automaker. Per-
haps more important, CR stated: “We believe that Toyota has ad-
equately addressed the problem of unintended acceleration and
that its new vehicles on sale now are fundamentally safe.”
Yet, as we will see later in the book, some long-term damage
was done, and Toyota realized that it still had a great deal of work
to do if it was to regain its pristine image for quality and wanted to
get even better than it had been before these crises. While Toyota
was struggling to get through the crisis, it was becoming increas-
ingly evident that its chief competitors in the United States, no-
tably Ford and Hyundai, had been getting much stronger. Simply
recovering is never enough in the Toyota Way. The goal is always
to come out stronger and more competitive.
The reader will, of course, notice that while this book is about
a global company, it has a predominantly U.S. bias. While the bad
news spread throughout the world, the United States was the epi-
center, particularly of the recall crisis. In fact, most of the U.S. me-
dia wrote articles about Toyota as if it were only a U.S. company
and only the U.S. market for automobiles existed. Sales figures

xx