hsukaria

I think companies have their ups and downs, just like people. Some companies have better quality and reliability, some better style, some better performance, some better value/price. What we cannot accept is safety problems being swept under the rug, from any manufacturer.

Lunchboxer

You will need quite a few Paseos then...

There are a lot of GM cars that I wouldn't mind!!

I wouldn't mind a Pontiac G8 GXP (or whatever Chevy equivalent when Pontiac is completely out), a Corvette Z06 / ZR1, or a Caddy CTS-V... !!

And all the trucks are nice...

Not a fan of the new Camaro, though...

The_Shark

the G8 is one sweet ride- its Holden Commodore 100% Australian. lots of bang for your buck.

Lunchboxer

Yeah, it is nice...

But in the mean time, I will continue to kick around my 223k miles Toyota...

The_Shark

limited knowledge? do you know those brakes have to get RED hot before they completely fail? all cars are designed for such harsh situations, hence the throw away spec for rotors/drums. Toyota's (generally) have very large thick brakes, these brakes could be suited for a 350hp car.
yes the brakes will fade and rotors will warp, but it will make the stop easy.
and as far as i know, programming doesnt allow throttle and brake while moving.
like said i can believe a few fender benders and a death or two, but now there are so many people suddenly traced to the throttle?

IF THIS PROBLEM STARTED YEARS AGO, WHY WOULDNT WE HEAR ABOUT IT EARLIER?? WHY WOULDNT ALL THOSE UNSOLVED DEATHS BE TRACED TO THE THROTTLE?? WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN RIGHT WHEN THE NEW MODEL YEARS COME OUT??

hedgehog

Just curious how many Ford owners here have recently received their recalls for a possible fire hazard resulting from a cruise control fault. It involves many years of vehicles. I just had mine replaced yesterday. Not blown out of proportion by the news.

Ken

The_Shark

my dad and his mark 8 (lovley POS)

did you know that some chevy cavilers had a bad rack that caused sudden loss of power steering or the system to make the car turn by itself (creepy and possesed like) i had a neighbor with this problem, he went to the dealer fixed it for free. it effected thousands of vehicles.

two things that can get you killed fast- sudden loss of steering, and no brakes.


im not bashing US cars, but all cars all over the world have recalls- some (like toyota) worse than others, even volvo had a seat that caught fire if your too heavy (ahh toasty)

joedam

My Feedback: (11)

I THINK WE SHOULD GIVE THEM MONEY======HA HA DUM ASSES

The_Shark

waa?

The Hedgehog

No one probably died from it.

hsukaria

I'm not sure about the steering, but if it was the power boosting, then it still can be overriden manually with the driver since it is still mechanically linked. All cars' brakes can produce more torque than the engine, regardless of software. The cruise control catching fire does not cause injury or death, the vehicle will continue to function long enough to pull over. All of these are serious problems of course, but sudden uncommanded acceleration and complete loss of braking are not just lack of quality or reliability, they are design flaws in the safety of a vehicle. Any hint of the manufacturer dragging their feet or suppressing the problem is serious. That can be a criminal case.

ThunderbirdJunkie

My Feedback: (3)

It's been a joke on legitimate automotive sites for over a year, the sticking throttle on Toyotas.
Also, modern Toyotas have got to have the WEAKEST brakes - per - horsepower of any vehicle ThunderbirdJunkie has driven.

It doesn't take long for brakes to get red hot, TheShark.

jjkirby

My Feedback: (20)

Im a Toyota fan and will continue to be. I still they think they build a better car than anything GM or Chrysler produces and they didnt take any bail out money to do so. Yes its a bad set of circumstances that has caused the recall but its not like Toyota is the only car company out there thats had a recall. GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc... have all had recalls but I think its actually a standup thing that Toyota has come out and publicly addressed that they have a problem and are working towards a solution instead of doing like the rest and sweeping it under the rug and send the owner a letter telling them they need to bring it in to the dealership for repairs. AND...anybody remember the Pontiac Fiero, the car caught on fire...lol and was not a big public thing and lets face it, a car that catches on fire is ALOT worse than any Toyota recall.

tes21966

An ***** load goes overseas but a wad of the money stays here in the USA. There are 100s of 1000s of people that feed there families from Foreign Auto Makers who have built plants here that employee Americans. Not to mention the dealerships who employee a vast number of people (including me) to sell and service there cars, which includeds fixing recalls. I am not preaching buy a foreign car nor a domestic brand. However, I would say buy your brand of preference foreign or domestic but buy one Made In The USA and support American jobs. As I stated earlier in this thread, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Hyundia, Lexus, and others all have plants here in the USA.

Being one who feeds my family from the automotive industry, and have for over 20 years, I hate to see negative press of any kind. There has been enough of that over the past couple of years with the Bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler and now these recalls. Domestic or Foreign, the automobiles of today are works of art and quality is outstanding but there are from time to time going to be trouble.

I would also like to point out that Toyota did not make the part in the pedal that is causing the trouble. This was made by a third party company for Toyota. Much like the Firestone tires were in the Ford/Firestone issue from a few years ago.

ThunderbirdJunkie

My Feedback: (3)

The Japanese gov't not only bailed them out, but paid for their hybrid development entirely.

And the Fiero would at least STOP if it was on fire...and it was ONLY early production '84 2.5 liter models, not EIGHT LINES.

Casper06

The_Shark

yes, but Toyota put it in their cars, so immediately they are fully responsible- guarantee you that they wont have that account with that company anymore.

and its ford's fault for buying cheap firestone tires- for a already crappy car (exploder)

GerKonig

I like Toyota too (I do work for them), but the problem the way I see it is not the recall itself, really. The problem is that they were so slow in reacting to the problem, and did nothing until forced. It was a bad, very bad decission on the part of some Toyota execs. So, they DID know for the longest time they had a serious problem, and swept it under the rug... A bad judgement call.

All cars sooner or later have recalls... I guess the list of those that did not have recalls would be a very short one. I had 2 recalls on a Ford Explorer I used to own (yes, I got new tires), and my current Mercury Mountaineer also went in once. On the oher hand, my wife's Accord was never recalled so far (4 years old now)...

Gerry

Iflyglow

My Feedback: (79)

How many years did GM dodge the recall for the side saddle gas tanks in the old Chev truck's? There were many deaths, and explosions, and the recall finally came came out after most were completely shot, or in the junk yard.[X(] It seams to me that the Domestic companies have had far more recalls than all of the imports put together in the last 10 years.

Iflyglow

My Feedback: (79)

Ford had a large recall a few years back for faulty ignition switches. This problem burned quite a few Ford products to the ground. What about the Focus, it had like 6 recalls in the first year. If I remember correctly, one was for the wheel's comming off the car. There was also a recall from a Domestic company a few years back, that the steering wheel would come off in your hand. There is no question in my mind, that the Imports are built to a higher quality level. Allthough the domestic's are catching up, they still have a way to go. Remember, that for GM, the Toyota Based car's "VIBE, NOVA, PRISIM" are ranked the most reliable GM products.

nukervilletrolle

the program SHOULD be set to drop throttle with brakes applied during high speed operation.

Toyota did not have this feature until last year or this year

rvnrcer

My Feedback: (4)

I also have been reading this thread and trying to stop myself from posting, However:

In response to those that think the US government is biased against Toyota, Why was the "cash for clunkers" program not restricted to purchases of new cars from Ford, GM or Chrysler only? Toyota, Honda and the rest all benefitted from this program.

I have purchased 2 new vehicles in the last 5 years. Both Chrysler products, an 04 Ram and 09 Journey. Neither have been in for recalls nor have they left my wife or me stranded. I have also owned mostly American cars since I started driving 31 years ago. Most were older cars at the time and I usually had good luck with them. Only foreign car I had (Hyundai Excel) was a piece of junk.

I think we as a country need to start watching our purchases. We all should be looking for items made in the US or by US companies. Maybe the bean counters will see that US citizens would rather support their own country and bring manufacturing back to this country. Every dime that goes to a foreign country is more that this country owes. We and your children can not afford to owe any more to any foreign country.

My .02 cents.

Lunchboxer

Figured that some of you might interested (research from organizational point of view). Whether you agree or not, that's a different story.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/3q-spear.html


For decades, Toyota has been viewed as a paragon of corporate improvement, innovation and effectiveness, qualities that helped it become the world’s largest automaker. But the firm’s reputation has been sorely tested in recent weeks amid a string of well-publicized recalls involving millions of Toyota vehicles due to problems involving sticking accelerator pedals and brake systems. In the words of Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, the firm is “in a crisis.”

Steven Spear, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, is one of the leading experts on Toyota’s management system. He wrote about the topic extensively in his book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition (McGraw-Hill, 2008), and in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.” With Toyota in unprecedented turmoil, MIT News talked to Spear about the Japanese automaker’s problems — and potential solutions.


Q. What went wrong with Toyota?

A. What went wrong with Toyota is the flip side of what went right over so many decades. In the late 1950s or 1960s, Toyota was a pretty cruddy car company. The variety was meager, quality was poor, and their production efficiency was abysmal. Yet by the time they hit everyone’s radar in the 1980s, they had very high quality and unmatched productivity. The way they got there was by creating within Toyota exceptionally aggressive learning. They taught employees specialties, but more importantly, they taught people to pay very close attention to the “weak signals” the products and processes were sending back about design flaws, and then responding with high-speed, compressed learning cycles to take things that were poorly understood and convert them into things that were understood quite deeply.

That allowed Toyota to come from behind, race through the pack, and establish itself as the standard-setter on quality and efficiency. But since then, things have affected Toyota in terms of their ability to sustain this kind of aggressive learning.

One was just the sheer growth of their business. Toyota historically had operated out of their base in Japan, Toyota City, and was largely an exporter. Then in the 1980s they opened up plants in California and Georgetown, Ky., and over time added plants in China, Europe and so forth. And that put a burden on developing people at those plants and the regional supply networks that supported them. Toyota had traditionally depended on a very intimate mentoring-apprenticeship model, where someone might have a coach for up to two years — a real Karate Kid-like approach to developing people. But the sheer number of people in a given year who had to be in this mentorship model went up. And I think Toyota got in trouble because they just overburdened that capacity — not necessarily the technical capacity, but the capacity to develop people.

Q. So the drive to become number one seems to have affected them?

A. Yes, but also, when you look at the auto industry as a whole, the mid-1980s was something of a watershed as you go from mechanical cars, as they were in the 1950s and 1960s, when everything was just steel — engines, gears, bodies — to being electro-mechanical with highly intertwined electronics. If you look at the modern car, the amount of computation on board with traction control, anti-lock braking systems, air bags, cruise control, navigation, entertainment, and more, makes it a very sophisticated, complicated machine, far beyond anything made 20 years prior. Bringing electronics on board brought huge advances in performance and reliability but with it came an exponential jump up in the complexity of the systems you’re managing. And the complexity puts even more demands on the concept of aggressive learning, that is, building something, paying attention to what’s wrong, and rapidly doing the experimentation to make it better and better. In short, the mentorship concept gets doubly stressed — by the need to scale up and by products and processes that are far more complex.

Q. What can Toyota do now to fix things?

A. There are three challenges: technical, organizational and public relations. The basic questions of why do accelerator pedals stick, why do braking systems suffer difficulty — I have confidence that Toyota will concentrate their engineering talent on those problems and make them go away. And I’ll leave others to comment on how you manage the public relations side in skillful fashion.

But then there’s the organizational piece: How do you develop people more quickly? The good news is that some people in Toyota seemed to see this problem coming five to 10 years ago, as I mention in my book, and started to build new ways into the organization of teaching people that didn’t depend on this very slow-moving mentorship model. Obviously they have to step up their understanding of how to develop people more quickly.

In terms of thinking ahead, when I first studied Toyota I noticed they had this kind of cultivated paranoia. Every time I would try to compliment people at Toyota about their success, they would say, “Wait a minute, hold on. Don’t compliment us. GM, the sleeping behemoth, may awake.” Or “Who knows if Kia will develop the capacity to catch us, like we caught others.” Then there was, “In China there must be 1,000 car companies, and we can’t even name them all, let along identify the one that may catch us.” So I think this really bad product failure is probably fuel for another two solid decades of cultivated paranoia. If there was a complacency problem at Toyota, which there may have been, my goodness, if this doesn’t flush that out of the system, nothing will.

Srewinkel

I personally knew a friend in california that was killed in a crash due to the accelerator problem with toyota. There is a recorded phone conversation with a 911 operator. So yeah there are deaths, and yeah people are losing loves ones, and yeah this is a HUGE deal. next time your driving imagine what would happen if your coming up to a crosswalk with children crossing, and as your slowing down to stop, the brakes stop working, or your car accelerated suddenly... Driving down the highway not as big a deal, but city driving were accelerating and stopping is more frequent and at much greater rates.

The simple fact that toyota refused to acknowledge the problem will hurt their reputation. I can tell you that if my wife, daughter, or any family member owned a toyota I would urge them not to drive it until the fix has been made.

Srewinkel

I have a chevy truck in the two years yet.  I wont ever buy toyota, not because of quality, but because of features, and how stuff works..  Couple years ago, looked at getting a sequia. 2006, 30,000 they want 35,000 for it, test drove for a couple days. decided didn't like it shifted, didn't like the window locking (lock windows and even driver can't roll them down) didn't like auxilary power shutting off with car.