The Trouble with Toyotas: Is the media being too hard on the automaker?

In my first post on this little recall matter, I asked, Could it get any worse for Toyota? Well, if you’ve been keeping up with the media maelstrom surrounding the Japanese automaker’s multiplying recall fiasco in the ensuing few days, apparently the answer is an emphatic, Yes. If only Toyota had to deal with one of the largest automotive recalls in history. But the media feeding frenzy is a totally different matter. Toyota has become the Tiger Woods of the auto industry. Just when you thought you had heard the worst, the Japanese company is turning around and either stumbling over themselves, or shoving their collective corporate feet in their collective corporate mouth. An unabated, runaway train wreck of bad publicity that doesn’t look like it has an end.

From Toyota’s U.S. head being accused of lying on national TV, to an Apple computer co-founder publicly saying he had some "very scary" trouble with his 2010 Toyota Prius’s brakes, to being mocked on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, above, when all is said and done, it may be how Toyota publicly dealt with the crisis, and how the media covered it, that will decide how bad or worse this gets for The World’s Largest Automaker. What a mess. But like Tiger, the lines between perception and reality have been blurred with Toyota. Do we really know if the World’s Greatest Golfer had “transgressions” with 19 women? Was it four times that? Only Tiger knows. But it doesn’t matter now. The world thinks he did. And that’s that. Toyota’s in the same sinking ship. Regardelss if you think Toyota has done the right thing in handling this fiasco, the world thinks less of the brand today than it did a few weeks ago. And like Tiger—which has lost billions in revenue now from sponsors abandoning his leaky boat—based on the January sales numbers in the U.S. and Canada, car buyers have decided to punish Toyota for its own transgressions. At this point the media has Toyota owners fearful that they’ll lose control of their cars at any moment. But some think concerns have been blown way out of proportion. Michael Karesh owns and operates TrueDelta, an online provider of auto pricing and reliability data. He figures 5,400,000 Toyotas that have been recalled for a problem that has been reported about 2,000 times. Even assuming that the problem has occurred ten times for every time that has been reported, we have something that happens in one out of every 250 cars and that results in an accident in perhaps one out of every 5,000 cars. “Sorry…but something that occurs in one of every 250 cars, and that only if we assume that 90 percent of cases have not been reported, is not a sign of a general lapse in quality,” argues Karesh. Maybe. What do you think? Do you think the media is being too hard on Toyota? Or is the Japanese automaker getting its just desserts? [Sources: The Daily Show, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Toyota, The Truth About Cars, The Comedy Network]

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