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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterestKITMAN_RUBRIC.gif\n\n **\n\n On Corvairs, Kobe, and Toyota's damaged brand psychography**\n\nWonder what effect all the recall madness is having on Toyota's once spotless name? Quoth The New York Times this Sunday, on the unrelated subject of The Last Train from Hiroshima, a newly-released account of the 1945 nuking of the Japanese city, whose author Charles Pellegrino has just been forced to admit he was duped by a serviceman who claimed to be on the fateful B-29 mission but apparently wasn't:\n\n\"'This book is a Toyota,' said Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and the author of Racing for the Bomb. 'The publisher should recall it, issue an apology and fix the parts that endanger the historical record. '\" \n\nWhile it's unlikely \"Toyota\" has already replaced \"Edsel\" as the country's automotive synonym of choice for failure, it must be said that we don't hear the E-word as much as we used to, so the Japanese firm better watch out: there could be a job opening in the national vocabulary. The Edsel, for those too young to know, is the late 50s Ford sub-brand that arrived on an aircraft carrier of hype and Henry Ford's cash--only to bomb.\n\nThis four-wheeled loser was seen for decades as the ultimate retort to the newfangled science of market research, which told Ford to build the Edsel just the way it did. Of course, market research lives on, whereas the Edsel died, ignominiously, in 1960, to live on only as the butt of jokes and as a reliable stand-in for junk. Perhaps in the future \"Toyota\" can stand as the preferred sobriquet for a problem you were aware of but did everything to hide--including possibly ginning the regulatory system--then scrambled like mad to correct, while variously denying you knew anything was wrong prior to the day before yesterday or refusing to concede anything is wrong, after all.\n\nEdsel was easy for Ford to shut down. Toyota, on the other hand, isn't going away and its reputation will likely recover. But in a cosmic sense the company's predicament goes a step further than the Edsel's did. It hits a trifecta of corporate screw-ups: a product failure, a marketing disaster, and a perversion of the regulatory system, thus one-upping the Edsel and the kind of egregious quality and safety screw-ups that put to rest 70s small-car nameplates like Ford's Pinto (which exploded when struck from behind, while also sucking generally) and Chevrolet's Vega (which rusted to beat the band and blew up engines faster than Saturn V rockets while also fairly sucking.) Before them, of course, there was the Chevrolet Corvair.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIt's often said that Ralph Nader's attack on the air-cooled, rear-engined small car in his book Unsafe at Any Speed led to the demise of that infamous machine. But in fact, Nader's criticism of the Corvair was limited to its Mark I (1960-1965) edition. In its successor, the Mark II, tamed the earlier model's handling ills, sold well enough and is latterly recognized as a technically interesting, efficient and surprisingly sporty number.\n\nWhat actually killed the Corvair, in the end, was the much more prosaic fact that its relatively sophisticated design was an aberration, easily the most radical thing GM had done since the catastrophic failure of its research director Charles \"Boss\" Kettering's obsession, the air-cooled Chevrolet of 1923. The Corvair's advanced mechanicals and comparatively sophisticated engineering brief led to a relatively high cost of manufacture. In the penny-pinching way that was its past, present and future, GM decided, by 1969, to shift Corvair customers to more conventional, cheaper-to-build vehicles that bored the nation's drivers silly--many of them straight into Toyota dealerships.\n\nIn a previous post, we posited that Toyota was starting to seem like the Tiger Woods of the automobile world. For its part, the company is probably now wishing it was the Kobe Bryant of the car business. He was able to buy his old lady a $4 million ring, three days after being charged in 2004 with sexual assault in Colorado (criminal charges ultimately dismissed, civil suit settled in 2005) and somehow managed to walk away with his scene\u2014still married and #10 on the 2009 Forbes Celebrity 100, after Brad Pitt and just ahead of Will Smith\u2014largely intact.\n\nAs blogger Steve Sailer has written, \"In LA, the only thing bad you ever read about Kobe these days is that he used to squabble with Shaq. \"\n\nInstead, Toyota is starting to seem more like late period Mike Tyson, in that things now forever seem to be going from bad to worse. The Department of Transportation is not only opening an investigation of the timeliness of Toyota's reporting of defects with its accelerators (the company possibly forgot for five or seven years that it had a problem) and is likely to open a separate investigation into Corolla's possibly defective electronic power steering, affecting hundreds of thousands of cars. Then, the company announced that it was recalling 8,200 Tacoma pickup trucks for defective propeller shafts, purportedly damaged in the manufacturing process by their supplier. In addition to recall of 400,000 Prius models, for a separate set of braking woes, a wrongful death suit has been filed against the company following a fatal crash of a Nebraska man involving one of the once-revered hybrids.\n\nWith over 1000 complaints alleging Prius braking problems already lodged with the government, one fears the suit is not the last. Meanwhile, normally even-tempered Japanese regulators are so hot and bothered with Toyota's fall from grace they're threatening to review their entire recall system\u2014and this in a country where engineers and senior ecutives have already been convicted and sent to jail for wrongful deaths involving product defects .\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n And, if all that's not bad enough, Akio Toyoda, Toyota's president and grandson of the company's founder, goes before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday. After imprudently saying he didn't plan on attending, but would if invited, committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns, (D-NY), hastened to issue a formal invitation for Toyoda to testify, making his non-appearance not only a potential etiquette breach and marketing demerit but a legal one. With Toyoda's early attempts at addressing American audiences considerably less than soothing, expect this damage control ercise to be more about damage than control. One thing he'll be hoping is that grandstanding congressmen don't ask him about the boast Toyota's chief U.S. ecutive Yoshimi Inaba made in an internal document last summer (recently turned over to congressional investigators and reported by the Detroit Free Press) that the company had saved $100 million by arranging to limit the recall of its runaway vehicles to floor mat repairs. The heading? \"Wins for Toyota. \"\n\nRestoring confidence won't be easy. With regard to the Corolla's alleged steering problem, Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota's chief quality control officer, said last week that while people may think they're losing control of the steering, Toyota doesn't know that there is a defect, or if there is, why. They might be or they might not be\u2014it could be tires, brakes, Sasaki said . Not exactly image-rebuilding, confidence-inspiring stuff.\n\nBut, increasingly, it seems, the Toyota Way."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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