The Persecution of Toyota

I'm starting to feel sorry for the huge Japanese car maker. Every day there seems to be a new revelation about one or another models of their famously reliable cars. It's almost as though they're being targeted by someone who's trying to save GM and Chrysler by beating up their number one competitor.

Do they deserve this treatment? A little perspective from Popular Mechanics:

To judge by press accounts and statements from government officials, those innocuous-looking Toyota sedans and SUVs in millions of American driveways are somehow kin to the homicidal '58 Plymouth Fury in the Stephen King novel "Christine"—haunted by technological poltergeists and prone to fits of mechanical mayhem. In the midst of three major recalls, Toyota has been hammered by daily newspaper and TV pieces suggesting it has been slow to address safety problems. U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood announced that anyone who owns one of the recalled vehicles should "stop driving it." (He quickly backpedaled on that pronouncement, but warned, "We're not finished with Toyota.") Displaying a previously undisclosed concern for the safety of American owners of foreign-badged automobiles, the UAW quickly piled on. And now, Toyota's North American president Yoshi Inaba must submit to ritual humiliation at the hands of the U.S. Congress in a hearing on Wednesday.

Does Toyota—or any car company—deserve this? Well, if they are knowingly selling an unsafe car, yes. But is that what's going on here? Not so fast. There's no question that unintended acceleration is a serious problem that needs to be fixed. But a little perspective is in order. As Popular Mechanics automotive editor Larry Webster has pointed out, every major carmaker receives occasional reports of sudden unintended acceleration (SUA). In the last decade, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency logged some 24,000 SUA complaints. Less than 50 of these red flags were investigated. Why so few? The main reason is the nebulous nature of SUA. Often the problem occurs once, never to happen again. It's tough to fix a defect that can't be replicated. And then there's the driver variable. As awful as this is to think about, it's been shown that sometimes drivers simply mix up which pedal they're pushing. In the late 1980s, the Audi 5000 was the target of a barrage of SUA allegations, lawsuits and press reports (including a notorious "60 Minutes" episode that was later discredited). Then, as now, there were accusations that mysterious electronic gremlins somehow took over the car. In the end, NHTSA concluded that driver error was the only likely explanation for the incidents.

But many safety concerns do have validity, and every carmaker has conducted numerous recalls involving critical safety features of their vehicles—brakes, steering, airbags, seat belts, and more. Still, the fact that some safety problems don't emerge until cars have been on the road for months or years is not a sign that automakers are criminally cavalier about safety. Quite the opposite. The safety issues that lead to recalls generally occur in very small numbers, often barely rising above statistical noise. Toyota's unintended acceleration problem, for instance, involved a handful of cases in literally billions of miles of driving.

There's a lot more at the link.

Having driven a 2003 Toyota Camry for more than 130,000 miles with little more than oil changes and new tires along the way my experience was that they build a very good car. I'm guessing that's also the experience of the vast majority of Toyota owners. However, with all the negative news going on now every owner is probably hearing more noises and feeling more odd sensations in their cars that they never would have noticed before. The psychological effect of all this news could be just as devastating to Toyota as any actual problems the cars might have.

Meanwhile, Honda has recalled 950,000 cars for airbag problems. Which foreign automaker will be next?

Or perhaps they need to knock Ford down first.