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Toyota: From Reputation to Recall
Toyota is mainly an automotive and robotic manufacturer that is headquartered in Japan. Toyota was founded in 1937, followed by being broken up in 1950. In 1982, what survived of Toyota regained what it had lost some thirty years ago to form the current Toyota Motor Corporation, which belongs to its current parent company, Toyota Group. The Japanese cars popularity, as well as sales, boosted dramatically during the 1970s. During this time period, Toyota began to earn a reputation for being of the highest quality automobiles. As of January 2009, Toyota even claimed the title of the world’s largest automaker, a crown that has been worn by General Motors for almost seven decades. However, not all has been so great recently. Massive recalls that effects almost every model in their fleet have begun to make people doubt the reputation that Toyota struggled to attain. Moreover, the cover-ups and lies behind the recalls is what is the most shocking.
John Rosevear of the Motley Fool, an investing consultant website, puts it best by saying, “Toyota has been on the hot seat for months over safety defects with a number of different vehicle models. The problem, as you'll recall, isn't so much the safety issues (though they're bad and they need fixing) as it is the company's longtime pattern of responding to problems with a
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mix of denial and foot-shuffling.” The 8.5 million vehicle recall mainly addresses two problems: unintended acceleration and brake system failures. Unintended acceleration and brake system failures can occur a number of ways, due to electronic and mechanical reasons. “Toyota is mounting a public campaign to reassure its drivers about their safety and defending itself against critics who question the fix for 8 million recalled cars and trucks. Regulators have linked 52 deaths to crashes allegedly caused by the accelerator problems.” (Thomas, “Toyota… Critic”). Toyota has stood their ground by saying that the problems causing these issues are mechanical and not electronic. However, Dr. David Gilbert, an automotive professor at the University of Southern Illinois, has recreated the event of unintended acceleration. However, Toyota has tried to discredit the critic by hiring their own automotive experts to silence him. “Toyota's assembled experts said the professor's experiments could not be recreated on the actual road.” (Thomas, “Toyota… Critic”). However, not only is the lead professor’s salary funded by Toyota, but the consulting firm for the study (Exponent, Inc.) has published outrageous reports that doesn’t hold much ground in the scientific community; for example, one of the firm’s reports stated that secondhand smoke isn’t cancerous.
“Toyota's Washington office hired former regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the car-safety arm of the Department of Transportation, and put them to work talking NHTSA out of forcing Toyota to recall cars. It'd be easy to say, "Eh, that's business nowadays, they all do it," except that they don't: Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, and Honda all say they have exactly zero ex-NHTSA people employed to deal with the agency on defects. The recalls, by themselves, aren't Toyota's big issue. The issue is what have they been hiding? And more to the point, can we trust their products?” (Rosevear, “…Getting Worse”).
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Works Cited
Thomas, Ken and Stephen Manning. “Toyota goes on offensive to discredit critic.” Associated Press. MSNBC. 8 March 2010. Web. 15 March 2010.
Rosevear, John. “Toyota: it’s getting even worse.” The Motley Fool. Fool. 17 February 2010. Web. 15 March 2010.












Notes
- Toyota received government money (Bailout) in 1950. The government bank tore the company apart, feeling it was in its best interest in order to survive.
- Toyota doesn’t pay billions of dollars worth of tax money that domestic companies have to pay, due to Toyota being a foreign company.
- Toyota boasted about saving $100 Million by negotiating a limited recall for Toyota Camry and Lexus ES cars over a problem that could cause unintended acceleration. Among other "wins" listed were "Avoided investigation on Tacoma rust" and helping win delays in various new federal safety regulations.
- Having said that. Let’s not forget how much assistance the Japanese government has given its automakers when times were good. Subsidies for the development of new technologies1 and currency manipulation to help profitability and sales. So, the latest reports may sound as if Japan is the party pooper as far as bailing out automakers is concerned, but truth is they already did it.
- And what the Japanese government did in the past caused a whole lot of trade issues. And with other countries around the world now helping their automakers, these same trade issues are again coming to the forefront. The question is unfair trade practices. Providing assistance to your automakers at the detriment of the other automakers around the world. Countries are now warning each other that if they find that other countries’ assistance programs are providing unfair disadvantages, then they will file complaints with trading organizations.
- 1: Hybrid Technology found in the Prius.
- There have been around 60 reports of unintended acceleration still happening after the fixes of the recalls have been put in place.
- Japan’s automotive market consists of only 3% of foreign competition, compared to the United States to where 50% of the competition is foreign.

I covered a lot more than what's in that. And I only cited the sources I used in the actual paper, not the speech.