Imagine driving down the road and taking your foot off the gas only to watch your speedometer post continually higher speeds, or driving on a bumpy road and going to hit your brakes, but nothing happens. These are the fears of the legion of Toyota drivers around the world.
The world’s No. 1 car manufacturer has become synonymous with “buyer beware” since the announcement of its recall in January, and Toyota still hasn’t apologized.
According to ABC News, Toyota Motor Corp. stocks have dropped in recent weeks, they’ve recalled more than 7 million cars due to technical failures. Dealers have stopped accepting trade-ins, and the resale values of late models have plummeted.
The first problem in question stems from an accelerator that sometimes sticks for no reason (at first it was blamed on the floor mats) with complaints dating back to 1999 and an incident rate of 1 in 10,000, according to The Japan Times. The second issue is that the brakes may stop working intermittently in the late-model Prius, the blame for which is placed squarely on a computer chip.
Things are definitely looking grim for the Japan-based company which seems to have fallen into the rapid expansion and over-confident trap that once plagued the Big Three automotive companies in Detroit while they were still on top: A memorable example includes the Ford Pinto; its gas tank tended to explode upon rear impact.
Their PR response to these issues — found lacking by many Americans ­— was merely an admission to the problem, without any apology or public reassurance.
What is impossible for me to understand is why it took Toyota so long to admit there was an accelerator problem and then to do anything about it. The problem has led to at least 19 deaths and 243 injuries according to the lawsuit filed and catalogued at aboutlawsuits.com.
Luckily, the company learned its lesson and the Prius recall is suspected to be soon, according to the Straits Times. Recalls are not uncommon in this day and age; according to The Japan Times, Ford Motors Inc. is in the process of its largest recall in U.S. history (14 million vehicles) due to a cruise control chip that can start fires (yet Ford finally returned to profitability this year). Last year, GM recalled 1.5 million sedans because of the possibility of engine fires. Toyota just needs to show a little reassurance and then make it better like everyone else.
Automobile manufacturers, more than any other industry, have an obligation of safety to their consumers. When something goes wrong at 65 mph, the potential for injury and loss of human life is exponentially higher than a poorly written operating system, or a smart phone with a battery recharging problem. The message from Toyota headquarters seems out of place in the face of the hasty, almost-concessionary, accelerator recall that will do more damage to their future sales than if they had just accepted the problem and corrected it from the start. Consumer confidence is everything.
In a day and age when computers can tell you more about what’s wrong with your car than you can, fears begin to arise as people’s lack of faith in their personal computers is translated to their new vehicles. While everyone knows the fallacies of a “crash-proof” operating system or a piece of hardware that never fails, the reliance on this technology requires an extreme level of infallibility. It is unfair to compare a microchip in a car to that of a microchip in a personal computer.
The idea of creating a chip, such as one that controls the brakes of your vehicle, without an appropriate amount of safety testing is most ludicrous to my mind. If your code in a video game fails, people stop buying future products. If your code is poor in an automobile, people may die. While this is not a wholly new concept and computer chips have been in cars for going on three decades now, they are held to the same manufacturing standards as the rest of the car. What this essentially means is that you can’t rush programmers; all code must be vetted before it is written to ROM and extensively exhaustive testing must be performed after that. There’s no excuse to put a poorly-programmed chip in a moving vehicle, and even less excuse for something as old and tested as the accelerator pedal getting stuck on such a large amount of vehicles.
Toyota will bounce back however long it takes; it climbed its way up in 2008, beating out GM for the top spot through a reputation for reliability and longevity. A reputation that it needs to uphold by coupling it with humility, and in the future, if there is a problem in their vehicles, they need to be recalled post-haste. Admitting you’re wrong is better than pretending you’re right and having people get hurt.

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