Foreign vs. Domestic, Part II - Toyota's Self Inflicted Wounds

Bet you Toyota owners never thought it would come to this. Your favorite company is on the ropes, their fixes only make things worse, and even you are getting the Willies driving your beloved and mythically reliable Toyota. Was that a slight tug you just felt as you hit that bump? Is your floor mat tucked up under the brake pedal? Why does your car accelerate rapidly all on its own? And why is it that your car doesn't decelerate when you stomp on the breaks?

Worse, it seems no model style is immune. Toyota's problems cross most of their platforms, including sedans, SUVs, Hybrids, and even the luxury Lexus line.

Toyota's rope-a-dope has been a thing of beauty to watch. Imagine successfully stiffing federal investigators at the NHSTA (National Highway Safety and Transportation Administration) for a decade over your surging acceleration problems? Early on, Toyota craftily decided to employ the time-honored "the dog ate my homework" defense to stonewall any investigation, first, by refusing to even acknowledge the existence of their own internal studies of the decade-long problem; next, by corrupting NHTSA officials with cushy post-government jobs; and lastly, by conveniently having but a single computer in the United States in the past five years that was capable of downloading on-board computer data from affected vehicles.

Oh yeah, and the software that drove it - unlike most of Toyota's competitors - was proprietary to boot, making it impossible for auditors to access the data without Toyota's fingerprints being all over it first.

And all the while, their public face has been one of denial. What is amusing is that - for a nation that prides itself on subtlety - these tactics are anything but. Conjure up a mental image of Spicoli caught alone in the Boys Room, reeking of marijuana smoke but coyly denying anything was wrong. Same thing. And very un-Japanese.

The PR effort has been a trip down the rabbit hole as well. Since thousands of cars were running out of control, something had to be at fault, so Toyota blamed, in order, a) their customers' stupidity, b) floor mats, c) gas pedals manufactured by an American company, d) their customers' stupidity and e) most recently, the efforts of their customers to conspire against Toyota along with American trial attorneys. Now, this is not to say that there aren't some opportunists out there, but it is to say that - whatever or whomever is to blame - Toyota has been engaged in a decade-long cover-up, and continually doubles-down on their increasingly fantastical narrative.

Their most recent actions provide a perfect example. Having investigated a Prius that allegedly ran out of control, Toyota announced - with the certainty of Sherlock Holmes and not without a little bit of his flourish - that "the car in question is functioning properly" because "they could not reproduce the problem". Well no shit, Sherlock. Would it be inconvenient to point out that you've been unable to "reproduce the problem" in any of the vehicles you've investigated, including the Lexus occupied by a California State Trooper and his family, all now dead? In point of fact, prior to this week, the only thing all parties could agree on, including Toyota, is that the problem could not be reproduced in testing.

Ironically, Toyota's efforts to deflect blame to sinister forces within the United States are not entirely without justification. It seems to have largely escaped The Media's attention that Toyota's Inquisitors are 1) the US government, the folks who own two of their competitors; 2) the UAW, partners with the Feds in both GM and Chrysler; and 3) our predatory Trial Lawyers Guild. And it is no coincidence that all three are functioning subsidiaries of the Democrat Party, the true face of Evil in America.

How pissed off must Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda be that the Unions he had so gleefully spurned when he offered his devil's bargain to the likes of Kentucky back in the 80s are now the arbiters of Toyota's fate? Even as Toyota continues to embrace implausibility as a savior, rather than the millstone it most surely is, it's worth remembering that - however bad the Sudden Acceleration problem proves to be - Malefactors within the Democrat Party will make it orders of magnitude worse, attach a dollar value to it, multiply by ten, take a 50% cut, and then benefit from Toyota's lost market share for a generation.

Toyota should come clean now.