Toyota executives to testify in Ottawa

More and more stuff is coming out about this Sikes guy....

Toyota owner James Sikes tells reporters that his Prius reached speeds topping 150 km/h after the accelerator became stuck on a San Diego County highway.

Several Toyota executives are scheduled to appear at a House of Commons committee hearing in Ottawa to answer questions about recent recalls.

Toyota has recalled about 8.5 million vehicles worldwide since last fall because of acceleration problems in multiple models and braking issues in the Prius.

MPs will question Yoichi Tomihara, president and CEO of Toyota Canada, about sticky accelerators and safety concerns.

Yoshi Inaba, president and chief operating officer of Toyota North America, is also scheduled to appear before the Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities. The company had originally said Inaba wasn't relevant to the Canadian hearings, but the company later reversed that decision.

Inaba recently appeared before a U.S. congressional committee to discuss quality concerns, alongside Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.

Ray Tanguay, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., and Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada Inc., are also expected to appear.

Liberal MP Joe Volpe, vice-chair of the committee, said a key question will be whether Toyota Canada responded to complaints about sticky accelerators quickly enough.

"We’re going to be looking at the relationship between Toyota and transportation officials and the Minister of Transport, on whether they had the interest of Canadians at heart when they were applying the law," Volpe said.

Tuesday’s testimony comes after a California man claimed that his Prius sped out of control on a freeway last week. Toyota tested the vehicle after the incident and released preliminary findings Monday.

After testing the vehicle, Toyota said the accelerator pedal was tested and found to be working normally and a backup safety system also worked properly.

"It does not appear to be feasibly possible, both electronically and mechanically, that his gas pedal was stuck to the floor and he was slamming on the brake at the same time," a memo prepared for Congress by a Toyota official said.

Toyota said it found severe wear and damage on the front brakes from overheating, but it noted that the rear brakes and parking brake were in good condition.

Toyota owners have complained of their vehicles speeding out of control despite efforts to slow down, sometimes resulting in deadly crashes. The government has received complaints of 34 deaths linked to sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles since 2000.

Source;
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/16/toyota-house-committee.html

Toyota Pulls a 'General Motors'...Again

This is something that I am not happy seeing, Toyota is going down a slippery road taking this route....
As the February 2010 have rolled out, a number of sources noted that Toyota is responding to its plummet in the figures with incentives and 0% financing. While this seems like a sure-fire way to boost their sales in the short term, it also makes Toyota sound more and more like the General Motors of the 1970s and 80s.

Consider this: Over the past decade Toyota has gone against longstanding traditional mores governing parent company/parts supplier relationships by putting the screws to their suppliers even in the best of times in order to milk the most profit out of each part. In addition to abusing their suppliers, Toyota has put international growth above all else (even by their own admission). After the first indications that this growth strategy could be taking its toll on vehicle reliability (sludging problems and other issues in the early 2000s) they respond not by becoming more proactive about beefing up reliability, but by spending tens of millions on lobbying to either kill or postpone new safety regulations and limit the scope of their mandatory recalls. When their efforts to skirt around costly recalls finally begin to catch up to them, they issue a massive recall that still manages to not cover all of the cars the NHTSA has recieved complaints about (i.e., the pre-2007 Camry). This recall is quickly "resolved" with a fix that not everyone is entirely certain will even solve the main problem in the first place. In response to the sales numbers lagging from the recall, Toyota creates incentives the likes of which they have never before imagined, which will certainly lead to a further devaluation of the other Toyotas on the road and the erosion of one of their biggest selling-points (resale value).

It doesn't take a historian to see the General Motors-esque pattern developing here. ("Profit Above All Else -> Short Term Thinking -> Negative Results from Short Term Thinking (unreliability) -> More Short Term Thinking (lobbying to avoid repair costs rather than simply recalling the product and fixing future models) -> More Negative Results (increasing numbers of complaints and/or deaths) -> More Short Term Thinking (hastily executed recall that may not have even solved the problem entirely) -> Product Devaluation -> More Short Thinking (incentives) -> Further Product Devaluation) Heck, GM got it down to a science in the 1970s and 80s, right before they were forced to pay the price. One has to wonder how long Toyota will play the old school General Motors game, and what kind of impact this will have on them in the long term. As anyone familiar with the history of the domestic auto manufacturers knows, you can only mortgage against public goodwill and favorable opinions about your company for so long before your company's reputation is upside down and your credit is damaged irrevocably.

Source;
http://www.toyotamonitor.com/blog/1043077_toyota-pulls-a-general-motors-again

Honda Warns Toyota Troubles Could Spread Through Industry

Honda's top finance executive warns that Toyota's growing recall effort could have a ripple effect throughout the industry, as consumer lose faith in the world's automakers, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Honda Chief Financial Executive Yoichi Hojo tells the paper that "if customers start to harbor doubts about [quality and safety], that would be problem for the whole industry.

Hojo says Honda will be ratchetting up incentive programs in the United States to reduce inventory, but will not target them specifically at Toyota owners.

Honda's refusal to go after disaffected customers from its main rival offers a unique opportunity for other automakers, like General Motors and Ford, to pick up customers with the host of deals they are offering to current Toyota owners, including rebates of up to $1,000.

By contrast, Honda has said it will continue offering "orthodox" measures such as leasing services and the usual discounts to any kind of customers, not limited to Toyota owners. Toyota's troubles "won't necessarily be a positive," said Mr. Hojo.

Worse, Toyota's quality issues could cast a shadow over other auto makers. "I think we should see this Toyota problem from a broader viewpoint," he said. "If customers start to harbor doubts about [quality and safety], that would be problem for the whole industry."

Mr. Hojo's comments illustrate the difficulties that Toyota's quality woes present to the rest of the industry. The world's No. 1 auto maker by sales volume is a fierce competitor with a strong presence in fuel-efficient vehicles such as its gasoline-electric Prius hybrid. The company has recalled 8.1 million vehicles for sudden-acceleration problems and will likely start a separate effort this week in Japan to fix braking problems on some Prius models, weakening its competitive edge.

At the same time, Toyota's troubles have raised sensitive industrywide issues, including the role of U.S. safety regulators such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in probing Japanese-made cars after Washington-led bailouts of their U.S. rivals. Mr. Hojo played down those tensions. "I don't think that NHTSA is anti-Japanese," he said.

Mr. Hojo said that Honda, Japan's No. 2 auto maker, is set to increase incentives to car buyers in the U.S. to $1,400 per vehicle in the quarter ending March 31, up from $800 provided in the previous quarter.

"Competition remains tough. We have relatively low inventory levels. But for the Accord and the Civic, their inventory days came to around 70 days in January [compared with the company's average of 60 days]. So we'll spend incentives for these," he said.

Among the major car makers in the U.S., Honda offered the lowest incentive average of $1,281 last year, according to data by Edmunds.com.

Mr. Hojo said that industrywide U.S. auto sales grew to 11.2 million in December on a seasonally adjusted annualized selling rate basis, the second-best month of 2009 after August, which received a major boost from the "cash for clunkers" U.S. government-rebate program.

But he said the growth was driven mainly by fleet sales to rental and commercial operators, which are generally less profitable than retail sales to individual customers. "Demand from individuals hasn't yet recovered yet," he said.

Mr. Hojo said a full recovery in the U.S. market was necessary for its earnings to return to pre-financial crisis levels. "We sold 1.15 million vehicles in 2009 and plans to sell 1.23 million in 2010. But these numbers are 300,000 to 400,000 fewer than the past volume," he said. He added, "we don't see yet" a sign of when it will return to the past healthy volume of around 1.60 million vehicles, he added.

The car maker, which also makes jets, lawnmowers and water pumps, expects net profit to soar 93% to 265 billion yen ($2.96 billion) in this fiscal year, which ends March 31.

Mr. Hojo said that in India, sales of Honda's motorcycles "are growing explosively" with a 30% sale increase in the three months ended in December. The overall market will likely increase 35% to nine million motorcycles sold annually, he said.

Honda is also set to launch a newly developed low-cost car with a price of below 500,000 rupees (about $10,720) in 2011 to tap the booming market. Honda's auto sales in India jumped 43% from a year earlier in the October-December quarter to 15,800 vehicles. "The market will grow further," said Mr. Hojo.

Source;

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575052844021894912.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular