When Catherine Block took her Toyota Aygo to her local dealer after a terrifying drive between Folkestone and Canterbury, she told mechanics: “It was a good job my brakes worked. Otherwise I would be dead.” They laughed, she recalls. “They probably thought I was being melodramatic.” This was hardly the case: during the 35-minute drive, she was able to drive up a steep hill at full pelt without pressing on the pedal once because the accelerator had stuck fast.
Block, a 28-year-old student, had already taken her car into the Toyota dealership at least three times last autumn because of the sticky accelerator. On her first visit, mechanics said the problem was caused by the floor mat, then they wondered if the specialist radio equipment she had installed was the cause. Eventually, at the beginning of December, the mechanics replaced the pedal and the problem seems to have been solved. The dealership said hers was an isolated case.
It has since emerged that Toyota had known about customers complaining about such “sticky” accelerator pedals in the UK since late 2008. Toyota admits that 26 of the cases it encountered in Europe had been reported as “customer satisfaction issues” at the time.
The company now admits that between November and January — the fault appears to surface during cold weather — 20 more vehicles were affected in the UK alone.
Car companies are obliged to alert the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa), which registers recalls on faulty cars, of any safety issue that may merit a recall. Toyota UK only went public following pressure from British government safety officials who were alerted by their US counterparts handling a deluge of complaints about stuck accelerators. The carmaker gave detailed information to Vosa on 22 January, leading to the recall of 180 000 cars in the UK last week.
Toyota’s failure to tell its dealers about the fault is what angers Block most. “The dealer did not have all the information available. This was a one-off as far as I was concerned.”
Since the fault is partly caused by wear and tear, as well as cold weather, she cannot be certain that the accelerator will not stick again. Toyota’s public relations efforts, which accompanied its first public announcement in the UK about the faults late last month, have hardly reassured her.
“I’m left in the dark — no one has bothered to contact me to check that the repair has worked. When I did ring the Toyota helpline, they said ring your dealer, who told me: ‘It sounds like you know more about it than we do.’ ”
When it finally came, Akio Toyoda’s apology fell some way short of the dramatic mea culpa some had demanded from the Toyota president.
“I apologise from the bottom of my heart for all the concern that we have given to so many customers,” he said, having emerged to address a global safety recall that threatens to inflict almost irreparable damage to his firm’s brand.
Spot the difference: Apology or admission of culpability?
But there were no tears, no lingering semi-prostration or pleas for forgiveness. The only bows of the evening were made in greeting, not contrition. Toyoda’s performance was a case study in the subtle difference between an apology and an admission of culpability.
Still, his appearance on Friday came as a surprise. The 53-year-old, who was made president last June as the firm looked to its founding family to revive flagging sales, had for two weeks resisted calls to speak publicly about the biggest crisis in Toyota’s 73-year history.
All the media had managed to cajole out of him before Friday was a rushed apology on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Appalled consumers, particularly in the US, made it clear that it was not the bold statement of reassurance that they were seeking.
By this weekend events had turned the pressure into an irresistible force: a $2-billion global recall of more than eight million cars affected by a faulty accelerator; threats of civil action and new lawsuits in the US; and now, another potential recall of the car that was supposed to define Toyota’s future.
While Toyoda’s comments did little to reassure car owners, it underlined the extent of the public relations nightmare the company has created for itself.
Much was written last week about the Japanese aversion to shame that informs the haphazard way executives publicly address safety concerns, from HIV-infected blood products for haemophiliacs to lethal kerosene heaters and tainted food and drink.
Toyota’s inept PR performance has done little to dispel the notion that it behaved in precisely the way we have come to expect of the most powerful members of corporate Japan.
To be fair, Toyota is partly a victim of circumstance. Having found itself plunged into the cultural quicksand of crisis management in a globalised economy, it had little idea of where to turn for help.
Yet that has done nothing to dispel the perception that in its pursuit of profit Toyota has lost sight of the principles on which it built its success: quality, reliability and, yes, safety.
It is easy to forget, amid the current crisis, that before the bottom fell out of the global car market Toyota was celebrating record profits on its way to ending General Motors’ 77-year reign as the world’s biggest carmaker.
Its headquarters in the eponymously renamed city once known as Koromo are at the heart of an operation that now employs 300 000 people around the world, making and selling cars in 150 countries. Toyota simply had so far to fall, and in such a short time, that it has been in a state of denial, although that does not excuse the public relations shipwreck of the past fortnight, say industry watchers.
Shock and schadenfreude
At home Toyota has fared rather better at playing down the crisis. The consensus in Japan appears to view the recall as a blip rather than an incubator for a long-term crisis. Some news channels relegated Toyoda to the second item behind the retirement of a scandal-hit sumo wrestler.
But in America the woes of Toyota have been met with a mixture of shock and schadenfreude. In a country that has an intimate cultural relationship with cars, the huge Japanese carmaker has long been seen as an interloper, even though it makes many of its cars in America and Americans have shown no reservations about buying them.
Perhaps that might have explained the first reaction of the US Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, who confirmed early last week that the US government was considering imposing fines of more than $16-million on the giant car firm. “We’re not finished with Toyota. We’re going to keep the pressure on,” he said.
He then followed that up with a statement at a hearing in Congress in the middle of the week by telling lawmakers that he had simple advice to any Toyota owners: “If anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it and take it to a Toyota dealer.”
Not surprisingly, those comments triggered a rush among the owners of Toyota’s 2,3-million recalled cars, who flooded dealerships with panicked phone calls. Toyota’s stock price also slumped dramatically.
However, Shinichi Sasaki, who is in charge of Toyota’s quality control, said it would have become “even harder to win back the trust of customers, and the damage to the Toyota brand would have been greater” had the US government not applied such pressure to recall the faulty cars. “It was hard, but in hindsight I am grateful to Mr LaHood.”
Some have speculated that Toyota’s problems could provide a much-needed boost to US carmakers. In California the state legislature even passed a rule adopting a “Buy American” policy for future government vehicles in its fleet.
The subject has quickly become a topic for comedians. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on television did an impression last week of the likely reaction of bosses at the Big Three, Chrysler, General Motors and Ford, to the Toyota recall news. “Boys, we’re back in the game! All we had to do was have the leading competition become a deathtrap,” he quipped.
Jobs threat
But beneath the sound and fury and the wisecracks, the massive vehicle recall has had a sobering impact upon American consumers. Despite its foreign ownership, Toyota operates many car-making plants in America that have been praised for creating thousands of jobs, especially in the south, where it has been credited with reviving the fortunes of several struggling cities and towns. Any threat to Toyota will threaten those jobs.
Toyota brands have also become a staple part of the American consumer landscape.
The biggest risk for Toyota lies in how it is handling the crisis. If it were proved that executives had actively tried to cover up the problem, the consequences could be huge. Eighteen months ago the former chairperson of truck-maker Mitsubishi was found guilty of professional negligence and received a two-year jail sentence after a truck made by the company crashed because of a defect, killing its driver.
There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone at Toyota. But the class actions which are already starting to stack up on behalf of aggrieved owners will no doubt challenge those running the company about what they knew about the fault and when, and what they did about it.
Toyota aficionados have been quick to defend the company, accusing the media of whipping up a frenzy and exaggerating the danger of the fault.
Denial
Edmund King, president of the Automobile Association, said: “To some extent there is a sense of a positive backlash in support of Toyota. Toyota has a fight to get its reputation back. But I don’t think it’s insurmountable.
“People are overstating the long-term effect. It will have a short-term effect on sales.”
Paul Newton, automotive analyst from IHS Global Insight, said the company had been far too slow to respond to the problem in the UK, as it had in most countries where it operates. “PR-wise Toyota has handled the issue dreadfully. They have been somewhat in denial,” he said. “People are now looking at the company and asking what else is it hiding. Unless a customer has a wider knowledge of a problem, it’s up to the manufacturer to hold their hands up and say they have an issue.”
Toyota UK has also been giving conflicting information, and appears to be reacting to events. On Monday, Toyota said that it would take at least three weeks to obtain from the licensing agency, the DVLA, the names and addresses of the owners of the models it intended to recall in the UK.
Clearly this would have prolonged the anxiety of worried owners not knowing if their car had a potentially life-threatening fault. By Friday, as the furore mounted, Toyota had said it could get the details within two days and would write to those affected this week.
The attempt at speedy, decisive management of the whole affair is not helped by Toyota’s huge and unwieldy size. It is now the biggest carmaker in the world, with subsidiaries in most countries that are unable to handle the fault independent of the headquarters in Tokyo.
King said: “Toyota being such a large globalised organisation will have slowed decision-making and communication. If it was up to Toyota UK, they probably would have acted more quickly.
“The first rule of crisis management is to identify and isolate the problem and be open about it. Last week Toyota executives were on the radio in the UK, but maybe they should have been doing that at the beginning.”
The company president, Toyoda, has announced that he would lead a new division that will draw on outside expert help to improve quality control, an admission of powerlessness unthinkable only months ago.
He promised that the “frequency of communications with authorities around the world will be improved”. A simple step, and long overdue.
For millions of motorists who expected much more from Toyota, it is at least a start.
But Japan’s sense of immunity will almost certainly be short-lived, with new reports of potentially serious brake problems on new models of the Prius, Toyota’s flagship hybrid. A Prius recall could affect more than 300 000 cars worldwide, about half of them in Japan.
Dragging the name of the Prius through the mud could prove an ignominy too far for Toyota; the petrol-electric vehicle is the best-selling hybrid in the world, held up by its makers as the ultimate in fuel-efficient technology. – guardian.co.uk