So, Toyota has had to undergo probably one of the most massive recalls in the history of their company. The digs on it are here, but I will give a summary with my own snarky twist:
A staggering majority of the cars they have been selling for the past few years, and are still selling, had a fancy Throttle By Wire system which means that instead of the gas pedal being hooked to a throttle cable, the gas pedal is a fancy, more durable, foot operated joystick controller. Unfortunately, the people who made these pedals for Toyota, made a crappy one that tends to wear out after a few years and is more likely than it should be to get stuck in position other than “idle”.
To make the problem worse/scarier… Toyota didn’t program their carputers to go “Huh, the gas pedal is being floored, but the brakes are being applied, I’ll assume the driver is trying to stop, ignore the throttle input, and idle the engine.” Mercedes and several other manufacturers did just that. The other problem is that many of these cars have the fancy Push-Button-Start that has come into vogue over the last couple of years… so a person’s instinct to go “ack, runaway car, turn it off!” jab at the power button repeatedly with no effect (The driver has to hold the button down for 3 seconds to actually kill the engine. Also, drivers that do this are dumb, their first instinct should be to put the car in neutral so they can keep power steering/boosted-brakes).
At first, Toyota thought the problem was a gas-pedal/floormat interaction problem. So they issued a minor recall to shave down the bottom of the gas pedal so it wouldn’t get jammed behind the floormat. Then, they found out the gas pedal was sticking All On It’s Own, and issued a massive recall, including stopping sales of new Toyotas until the gas pedals were shimmed or replaced.
This is a big problem that has actually killed people in spectacular “the car ran into the guardrail going 97 MPH” fashion, and scared the living bejeezus out of even more (nobody wants to have a “what’s stronger, my powertrain or my brakes?” contest in the middle of their morning commute.)
And all the while, most of the people I’ve overheard discussing it are acting like it’s not a big deal, and that Toyota’s are still reliable and wonderful and safe and probably going to be high on the list of possibilities for their next car.
My issue is that people are giving Toyota a rather generous pass on this one, which isn’t too bad, but they are giving them a pass when they would probably refuse to give an even more minor pass to other car manufacturers.
Remember back around the turn of the century, when Ford Explorers (and their cousins, Mercury Mountaineers and Mazda Navajos) were fitted with Firestone tires that had a nasty tendency to have tread separate during a rollover? Ford was blamed by the public for making tippy cars with shitty tires… despite numerous tests by car magazines showing that if an Explorer was rolling along at 80 MPH and a tire blew out, it wouldn’t “just tip”. The problem was that panicked people were doing really dangerous maneuvers (jerking the explorer hard to one side at high speed, then jerking it the other way when the car started sliding, which is pretty much the perfect way to get ANY vehicle to flip over, especially SUVs) and in the process, the tire tread separated, probably when the car was going 54 MPH sliding on one and a half wheels, and many a class action lawsuit was thrown around… Fords and Firestone ended a very long relationship after screaming at each other… and Ford spent buckets of money putting Good Years and Michelins on their Explorers, which people still managed to occasionally flip over (but at least the tread was staying on the tire).
I feel a lot of the people who were complaining about how Ford was a crappy/evil car company and gosh aren’t they glad they got something other than an Explorer, are the same people now acting like sticking gas pedals from Toyota are a minor ‘whoops’ and they can’t believe it’s occurring with the ‘most reliable car company on the planet’.
And as a final irony… the whole “sudden unintended acceleration” issue almost killed Audi in the US back in the 80′s. So many people were sure that Audi built crappy cars, when really it was that the gas and the brake pedals were close together and people were hitting the wrong pedal while doing slow maneuvering and then trying to get Audi to pay for their new garage.
The fact of the matter is, Toyota is now huge. I have pretty much started calling Toyota “The Next GM”… because while Toyota don’t suffer some of the issues that GM had during their big blowup (horrid corporate politics, union problems, redundant brands selling clones, several PR fiascoes, and an inability to make a non-crappy small car) they are now suffering two of the primary ones: They are HUMONGOUS, and they are outsourcing a lot of their parts to suppliers.
- Being big means all of your problems are big too.
When you make 100,000 Camrys, your 0.09% serious defect rate means that you have 90 cars that spontaneously burst into flames on the highway (0r something equally dramatic that results from a serious defect) When you are making 5,000,000, then suddenly you have 4500 Camrys bursting into flames. That’s 4500 more people with friends and relatives going “Oh my friend/relative got one of them and it burst into flames on the highway…”
Being huge also means you are no longer nimble, and your ability to respond to market pressures goes way down. If everyone decides NiMH batteries suck for hybrids, Toyota’s already spent tons of money on making sure there will be NiMH batteries for the next four years for the bajillion Priuses and hybrid versions of their other cars. They’ve already ramped up all the production capacity to put the hybrids together… so they’ll have to roll with the stigma of being ‘old school’ for those years trying to downplay the other car companies advertisements of using fancier Lithium-Ion technologies with a pudgy Luke Wilson. And that’ll be right around the time they discover that NiMH (Or Luke Wilson) releases angry carcinogenic gas when exposed to cellphone radiation, or something similarly disastrous.
- Outsourcing to suppliers means you inherit their problems
So, the supplier who gave Toyota their accelerator pedals is more at fault for a crappy design than Toyota is… But Toyota is responsible for checking such things to make sure they don’t get stiff despite people stomping on them repeatedly with crud-covered shoes and boots. Right now Toyota’s being recalled are merely having their gas pedals shimmed and all the revised pedals are going to manufacturing plants. Millions of cars are affected and this supplier was the only one really specializing in making accelerator pedals for a multitude of Toyotas. This sort of problem has affected all the car manufacturers and the bigger you get and the more cars you sell the cheaper it becomes to outsource. This also doesn’t excuse Toyota for programming the carputers to keep the engine straining even if it knows the brakes are being mashed (Shouldn’t that be an essential part of the stability control they tout on so many of their cars?)
Does this mean Toyota’s totally suck now? No. Should you scream “OH MY GOD MY GAS PEDAL IS STUCK SOMEBODY HELP MEEEE!” at every Toyota and Lexus commercial that comes on TV like I do? Well, that’s up to you and how silly you feel when the commercial comes on. Does it mean you should probably drop the whole “cars made by [company] are simply more reliable/valuable than cars made by [other company]” shtick? I think so.
This whole fiasco has shown that even reliability juggernaut Toyota is fallible. I’m also going to come right out and say that Honda’s might actually catch fire. It is possible that the people saving a couple of thousand by buying a domestic vehicle might not actually be that dumb or foolhardy. Thus, it is always a good idea to think that ANY car might go a bit crazy, and it is probably prudent to test a few competitors before getting the car you think you want. It’s also advisable to take a defensive driving course (to know standard car limits in case of things like stuck gas pedals or blowing tires) and stay more aware of your surroundings when your driving.
Granted, I did not follow my own advice: When I got my Mazda3, it was the first car I looked at and drove, and I was out the door with it so fast and excited with my first new car I didn’t even realize I had bought one without a safety package (which brings Side Air Bags and ABS). To be fair, I was researching all the “hatch-butts that are not Volkswagen” for months before I got the Mazda3 and knew it was the front runner. Meanwhile, the Toyota Matrix XRs seemed a bit too pricey. As for the lack of safety equipment, I’d like to think I am more likely to check blind intersections and not tailgate.