When we reported that unintended acceleration in general and Toyota in particular are not a big topic in Europe and Japan, the answer was: “What do they know? They use their excellent public transport system and drive less.” (A myth, by the way. Unless there are mandatory annual odometer readings, nobody knows for sure. But the generally accepted average number of miles driven by year and car is 12,000 in the U.S.A. In Germany, the industry works with a 20,000 km average. Which is 12,427 miles.) The only countries halfway accepted as comparisons were Australia and Canada. Well, their numbers are in. Read More >

At the Geneva car show, this year’s bon mot among the journos is: there are two kinds of auto companies, those with problems and those that will have problems in the future. That’s one of the many reasons to take interest in the latest crop of concept cars: today’s concept could just be tomorrow’s catastrophe. Look past the bright lights and posed displays, and you can see visions of designers gone mad, branding gone astray, and a complete lack of any managerial imagination. Luckily, not all is dark on the horizon…
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In testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Energy and Transportation, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said he was “looking at the possibility of recommending” mandatory brake override systems on all new vehicles sold in the US. Given the congressional hysteria about auto safety in the past few weeks (not to mention the already-expectant MSM headlines), such a requirement would likely face little political opposition. When Toyota first announced that it would be installing the buzz-worthy “failsafe” system on its new cars, we whined that the days of doing burnouts in Mom’s autobox IS350 were over. Which, frankly, was fairly petty of us. At this point it’s become fairly clear that, whether there are unfound defects still lurking in the evil minds of our appliance-mobiles or not, Americans need to feel that they could stop their cars in a worst case demonic possession scenario. So let them eat brake override systems, say I. At least until I hear someone advocating for mandatory manual transmissions.

Toyota and GM have both announced 0% financing on 2010 models, reports Automotive News [sub]. GM will offer the 60-month financing deal on 55 percent of its new models, while Toyota will offer the same terms on its Camry, Corolla, Matrix, Avalon, Yaris, Highlander, RAV4 and Tundra (not including hybrids). According to GM’s Susan Docherty, Toyota’s woes had nothing to do with the decision to offer finance deals, telling AN [sub]:

Obviously, with our hot launch products, we don’t need to put 0 percent financing for 60 months on that. That 0-for-60 will be primarily on products like our pickups. That’s completely in line with what our marketing strategy is. We’re going headstrong into truck month for both Chevrolet and GMC, which is a traditional play that we have normally done during March.

And no wonder: GM’s truck sales were flat in February. According to Automotive News [sub], Toyota will also offer several lease and dealer cash deals which vary from region to region.

Is it good news or bad news? After January’s 16% drop, February’s 9% slide could be evidence that the worst is behind Toyota’s fall from sales grace. It certainly seems that the models most connected to the recalls and bad news are being hit the hardest, with the flagship Camry down a nasty 20%. Just to show how the tide has changed, Camry outsold the Fusion by exactly 93 units. The Avalon was off 65%, suggesting that the gray panthers are avoiding its UA issues; let’s just hope they’re not buying Town Cars instead. The newly revised Lexus ES 350, also a UA posterchild, was off a fairly mild 9%.

Overall, Toyota brand vehicles were hit harder (-11%) than Lexus, which was up 5% in the month. The Lexus GX (+185%) helped keep the division in the positive side of the ledger. Prius managed a tidy 10% gain despite the bad publicity. Corolla was down a modest 6%. The new 4Runner is off to a good start with almost 3k units and up 55%. Full details after the jump: Read More >

Here’s a question for you automotive sales historians: when was the last time (month) Ford outsold GM? Four hundred and seventy one cars was the difference, but the bragging rights would have been worth it if Ford had given them away. Here are the highlights: Sales were up a Toyota tidy 22% from January. Camry-fighter Fusion experienced unintended sales acceleration, rocketing ahead at an unrestrained 116 mph percent.Ford brand vehicles were up 46%; Mercury +24%; Lincoln +19%.  Company wide, passenger cars were up 54%, utilities +39%, trucks +36%. Retail sales were up 28%, as fleet sales came back to “normal” after a near stand-still a year ago. Ford estimates its February market share at 17%, up a hefty 3 points from a year ago. Detailed charts follow: Read More >

TTAC Commentator Toyondai92 writes:

Mr Mehta and Lang, I’m writing in for my non-tech savvy parents who are starting to look for a “new” car. I say new with quotes because only one of the choices is actually a brand new car. Background wise it’s simple, my parents are in their 50s and I am 17, both of my parents work, typical stuff etc. We have three cars, a 2000 Hyundai Elantra Wagon, which despite my mother driving it like an Integra- yes it’s a five speed- has been bulletproof to us, a 1989 GMC pickup and a 1999 Chevy Metro whose auto trans is starting to clunk out. Thus, the need for another car. I should add that I, the 17 year old, will most likely NOT be driving said new car, as I have my eyes set on an 80s Acura Legend. This is an import-biased comparison, helped by the fact that GM and Chrysler don’t offer manual transmissions in their family sedans and you can’t say the F(ord) word near either of my parents. (Don’t tell me to try and break that grip, I already tried!) Toyota’s declining quality and recalls have scared them away from that brand, hence no Camrys or used Lexus in this list. The main choices we’ve been looking at are:

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Yesterday I asked our Best and Brightest if congress should hear testimony from former Toyota lawyer Dimitrios Biller. The lack of unqualified endorsements mirrored my own skepticism about the testimony of a guy who has sued Toyota several times, and today it seems that congress may just agree. When the House Oversight Committee wrote Toyota’s Yoshimi Inaba asking for a response to Biller’s accusations, it attached several of Biller’s apparently damning documents to its letter [PDF of original letter and attached Biller documents here]. But, as the Detroit News reports, the letter has been reposted without the attached Biller documents after Toyota claimed they violated attorney-client privilege (the alleged internal memos all have non-disclosure requests attached). Senate hearings on the Toyota recall have just started, and are available at Cspan.org.

We at TTAC, (well, me, only) have said that since everyone is raining a storm down on Toyota other recalls are slipping by without equal scrutiny. So when I read this article, I thought it fair, in the interests of journalism, to blog it. Not because of who it is, but the reasoning around it.

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Toyota was listening closely to the “revolving doors” talk at last week’s hearings.

In today’s Senate committee hearing, Toyota will announce that former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater has come on board to lead Toyota’s new quality panel of independent experts, reports The Nikkei [sub] this morning.

Slater was Bill Clinton’s LaHood. He since joined the lobbying firm  Patton Boggs and became a partner in James Lee Witt Associates, a risk management firm headed by former FEMA head James Lee Witt.

Hybrid cars may be green, but are they dangerous? According to Israel’s of Environmental Protection, this may be the case. A research committee funded by the ministry studied radiation from hybrid vehicles over the course of the last nine months, found ‘surplus’ radiation in some models sold in Israel and worldwide, reports Israel’s The Marker.
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Tomorrow the Senate will be taking its shot at the Toyota scandal, with hearings scheduled before the Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. Giving testimony will be three Toyota executives including Yoshimi Inaba, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland and Clarence Ditlow of the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety. Conspicuously absent from the list is Dimitrios Biller, the former Toyota lawyer who claims that Toyota hid documents related to vehicle design from discovery in several suits against the automaker. The House Oversight Committee has reviewed a number of Toyota communications courtesy of Biller, and a letter from chairman Ed Towns (D-NY) demands that Toyota answer Biller’s charges [Towns’ letter and Biller documents in PDF format here, courtesy of DetNews]. By invoking Biller’s charges, Towns has dragged yet another witness into the fray whose story raises more questions than it answers [one of Biller’s several suits against Toyota can be found here.] And yet, probably because of his complex backstory] there are no plans for Biller to testify under oath before congress. Should he, or does his testimony just cloud the picture even further?

„Itai!“ Or rather, „tong!“ Ouch, that hurts: Toyota boss Akio Toyoda bowed deeply to 300 reporters assembled in Beijing, and to 1.3b Chinese who could watch the drama live on national TV. Four times in one hour, Toyota’s chief  “apologized to customers in China for the company’s quality problems and emphasized the significance of the nation’s fast-growing market to his company,” as Shanghai Daily has it. There must be nothing more painful for an upstanding Japanese captain of industry than to bow deeply in front of the Chinese. But as they say in China: „bú tòng bù qiáng.” No pain, no gain.  Even more astonishing: Read More >

Edmund’s has been leading the NHTSA data dives to shed light on the UA issue. I used their numbers of NHTSA complaints in our attempt to correlate the complaints to specific cars and their sales in the ’05-’10 period to determine the rate of UA complaints. Now there’s a major new wrinkle that throws that effort into question: Over half of UA complaints against Toyota since 2005 were filed after Toyota issued their On Sept. 29, 2009 consumer safety advisory regarding floormats that could trap the accelerator pedal and cause unintended acceleration. That still leaves Toyota with the highest rate (4.81 per 100k cars sold)  number of complaints for UA events before that date, but only marginally ahead of Ford (3.12). That means our stab at individual car model rates is flawed, and we’ll try a Take 2 when we have more accurate sales and adjusted NHTSA complaint numbers before that cutoff date. It’s obvious that incorporating the flood of complaints against Toyota since the mat issue hit the media would just be feeding the frenzy. Read More >

Ask a non gearhead on the street (or pub, restaurant, clubs, etc) “who builds the most reliable cars?” and names like “Toyota”, “Hyundai”, “Ford” and “Honda” will crop up. Ask who builds the safest cars on the road and almost certainly, the name “Volvo” will be said.

The thing is Volvo lost their safety crown a long time ago to those 35 hour a week working, industrial action initiating, part government owned Frenchies. Renault. Renault consistently set new standards in safety and crash tests, lapping up praise from Euro NCAP. Some of this technical know-how has even trickled into Renault’s partner, Nissan. The Nissan Qashqai (thankfully renamed Rogue in the U.S., although it wasn’t a big improvement) achieved the highest ever Euro NCAP score. But now, it seems, Volvo is fighting back to regain the coveted safety title. Read More >