Thursday, February 18, 2010

More on the Toyota Recall...

It seems like everyday, a new beloved Toyota model is being recalled. Their highly hyped new Prius with seemingly spaceship qualities (keeps you in your lane while drifting?!? what....!!) has been recalled, along with favorites such as Corollas and Highlanders.

It's a huge shame for the company, and I'm glad that Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, has decided to appear in front of Congress (see link in title for more details). Apparently, he tried to first send the North American cheif in place of himself (which I think is ridiculous). After all, the US is probably Toyota's biggest market, and are most affected by these recalls. After talking about government's role in the economy in Econ this week, I think the House oversight committee's request for Toyada is a good example of positive government oversight. I'm glad they're stepping in on behalf of the people. Especially since it's been speculated that much of the evidence of the malfunctioning cars was covered up. On the local news about a week ago, they had a person go undercover to the Toyota dealsership. Even two days after the recall, Toyota was still trying to sell the cars that were defected! Toyota has always been known as a very reliable car company, and have been tremendously failing at dealing with this crisis.

But every cloud does have it's silver lining, for lack of a better cliche. After years of being in the shadows of Japanese automakers (Honda, Toyota...), I think this whole recall business is going to finally open up the doors for American automakers in our market again. They should be doing everything possible to capitalize on this huge gaff.

2 comments:

Brian Stephens said...

I'm glad that this whole business is finally being straightened out, and I think that what the Toyota company was doing was terrible.

Despite the huge amount of money that they must be losing due to the recalled cars, the continued selling of the recalled cars could put many peoples' lives in danger.

Yvonne Lee said...

I can't believe even after the recall Toyota was still selling cars that were defected. Toyota should've made sure that the cars were problem free. Toyota needs to ensure that they don't make any more mistakes like this because it can cause people to question whether or not they want to buy a Toyota.