Toyota apologises to customers on YouTube
Two weeks after Toyota announced the recall of an estimated 8 million vehicles worldwide due to a sticky accelerator problem, some rear guard PR work has surfaced in the form a video apology from the company’s US President & COO, Jim Lenz.
Two versions have been created, one on a recall website page, accompanying a formal letter of apology and a longer, stranger version on YouTube that includes promotional clips of Toyota models, zooming photos of the USA HQ and cars being made in the factory, presumably cut from an old corporate video.
Watching Jim Lenz explain that he wouldn’t put his family and friends in a Toyota if they weren’t safe is reminiscent of MP John Gummer feeding that beefburger to his 4 year old daughter at the height of the UK BSE crisis in 1990.
In the US, Toyota’s reaction to the crisis has also been criticised for being too late and too centralised, not allowing local dealers to communicate quickly with their customers or enabling a dialogue online. Toyota’s general Facebook page, which has 70,000 fans, presumably mostly customers, directs enquiries to their static website recall page.
The crisis may get worse for Toyota before it gets better. Not only are competitors conducting opportunistic marketing campaigns to woo disgruntled Toyota customers but reports are surfacing that Toyota may have known about the sticky accelerator issue as far back as 2007.
Dawn Marie Driscoll, a business ethicist in the US commented: ”I assume now (Toyota) will do the right thing, because now they are under the gun..the question is whether their ethical reputation will be so damaged, that everyone will think twice before they buy a product from them.”
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Some years ago in the 80s, Audi had a problem with their gear selectors on automatic boxes. It seems that the Americans were uniquely able to shift directly from P (Park) to D (Drive) bypassing N for neutral while still pushing their feet on the throttle. At the time this was trumpeted as ‘sudden acceleration’ problems by the safety lobby. After the 60 Minutes program ran the story there was a deluge of claims. The result of this incompetent behaviour meant that we all now have to suffer with auto boxes that cannot be shifted out of P or N without having your foot on the brake pedal.
Thanks to the poor skills of a minority of drivers, Audi’s reputation was trashed for years and is in fact still in recovery mode in the US.
Toyota which is a byword for manufacturing quality and integrity will need to fix the problem quickly before the press once again whips up public hysteria. Strangely the exact same accelerator assembly is used in the Pontiac Vibe for which there has not been a single claim.
Separately from the recall for the alleged sticking accelerator pedals, Toyota is in the process of recalling vehicles to address rare instances in which floor mats have trapped the accelerator pedal in certain Toyota and Lexus models (announced November 25, 2009). Presumably there will be a rush of drivers asking their dealers to move or replace the offending floor mats.