Toyota's troubles & response

[cam76034]

Once Toyota finds a solution to their current problem and recall, what steps do you think they will take to regain lost market share and, most importantly, customer confidence? GM and Hyundai are offering $1000 to any Toyota owner to make the switch and I'm guessing everybody else will have a similar incentive by this weekend.

I'm wondering what incentives Toyota will offer to get buyers back into the showrooms this spring.

[jrj512]

I'm wondering what incentives Toyota will offer to get buyers back into the showrooms this spring.

Cheese, most likely.

[altiain]

Sounds like Toyota's troubles may get worse before they get better: the NHTSA was investigating complaints of sticky throttle pedals in Toyotas back in 2004.

From the "This story just keeps getting uglier" department comes a new bit of information concerning Toyota and its growing sticky pedal problem. The Detroit Free Press is reporting that Toyota and the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration were looking into the problem back in 2004, but an interesting twist led the investigation down a path that ultimately turned up nothing.

The Freep says that this early investigation was strictly limited to incidents of unintended acceleration lasting one second or less, which strikes us as odd considering prolonged periods unintended acceleration are a lot more dangerous than a blip of the throttle. And this is where the story gets a bit tricky. The Freep reports that a 2008 lawsuit stemming from an alleged unintended acceleration-related death of a woman driving a 2005 Camry says that the decision was made to limit the investigation right after a former NHTSA employee, Christopher Santucci, took a job with Toyota.

The lawsuit alleges that the new Toyota employee negotiated a deal with his former coworkers at NHTSA to limit the investigation of unintended acceleration claims to instances of one second or less. Santucci said in a deposition that the NHTSA investigation involved 2002 and 2003 Toyota Camry, Solaras and Lexus ES300 models. NHTSA had reportedly received 139 complaints in the 2004 investigation, but found no defects.

Now that Toyota has officially recalled millions of vehicles, the question remains whether these older models will eventually be recalled as well. The short answer is that we have no idea, but former NHTSA head Joan Claybrook feels that the government safety agency should have taken unintended acceleration claims more seriously in the past.

[dark shadow]

this sucks for me all our loaner cars are corollas and that makes for less work for me. damn you toyota.

[scruffs]

The transmission in my company's Chevy died at 33k. After that it was brake issues one after the other. My co-worker's chrysler 300 is on it's second transmission, which died soon after the warranty expired of course. I'll take a vehicle with a one in a million chance of the accelerator sticking any day. In fact, I'm going to purchase a new Highlander next week. So long Detroit.

[POS Racing]

You can't get a Highlander until Toyota sells them again.....

My dad has a 2008 Highlander Sport it's been a tank much more reliable that the Honda Pilot it replaced.

[cwisenheimer]

News today is that Toyota is shipping new/revised pedal assemblies to their factories but none to dealers to repair the cars of existing customers. Supposedly this is because they don't have a "fix" identified yet, something less than replacing the whole assembly. Nice way to foster that customer service image.

[jrj512]

They are sending them to dealers, now...

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/01/30/t...air-component/

[trickyrix]

Looks like the precious little Prius is having troubles now.

LINKIE

Ruh-roh!