Wild, Out Of Control Toyotas? Baloney.

I cannot sit quietly on the sidelines any longer. This whole Toyota-recalls hoo-ha has morphed into nothing but yet another “crisis” that a ravenous media and 21st Century Americans — a people who live better and more safely than any humans in history — have transformed into their panic du jour. This morning I watched a video “report” on CNN.com showing a Toyota owner who drove her Tundra off a rain-slicked road and down a cliff — and claims she could do nothing to stop the car. The victim appeared on camera with the requisite tears and even the cliché neck brace to bolster her plight. Naturally, the possibility that said driver might in fact be woefully lacking in skills or — yes, I’ll say it — even talking on the phone or texting before the crash never arose during the interview. These days, it’s always someone else’s fault.

I was in this business when the same joke of a “problem” hit Audi in the 1980s. Thanks to a few witless drivers and a barrage of breathless, clueless news reports (including, most prominently, a fear-stoking segment on “60 Minutes”), the entire country began treating the Audi 5000 sedan as if it were a four-wheeled Beelzebub. Only years later, after an exhaustive Federal investigation costing millions in taxpayer dollars, did the truth emerge: for whatever reason, Audi owners were stepping on the gas instead of the brakes

Did “60 Minutes” do a follow-up piece on that? Of course not.

Lest you assume at this stage that I’m a Toyota apologist, let me state my position clearly:

1) Poorly fixed floor mats very possibly did contribute to sudden acceleration or a “stuck throttle” in some Toyotas. Then again, there likely isn’t a brand of car made whose throttle hasn’t been fouled by an errant floor mat on occasion. Car “defects” are part and parcel of creating a machine of such breathtaking complexity. All automakers suffer from them, and 99% of the issues are minor and dealt with swiftly.

2) There very well may be some mechanical issue in the throttle linkages of some Toyotas that causes the gas pedal to bind in some way, even if only slightly.

3) There also may indeed be a software glitch in the brakes of the Prius. My wife drives a 2010 edition, and well before these stories hit the news she’d told me that the brakes “act weird at times — they can be really jerky” (and, yes, she knows the difference in feel between standard and hybrid-regen brakes). But, of course, they’d always stopped the car.

4) Toyota has completely bungled the handling of this entire affair. True, the company is in a lose-lose situation. Blame Toyota drivers for panicking and slamming on the wrong pedal, and your customer base will tear you down in fury. Conversely, admit to a defect in your cars and you scare potential buyers away — perhaps for good. Still, Toyota should have owned up and addressed these issues openly and immediately. Instead, as Angus MacKenzie notes in his previous blog, the company has floundered in “feet of clay.”

5) I do not believe that Toyota vehicles are poorly designed, dangerous, possessed by Linda Blair, etc. It’s possible that some software or hardware anomaly is causing Toyota gas pedals to behave strangely, resulting in drivers who panic, even slam on the wrong pedal, and crash.

6) I’m concerned that we do not know the full story behind the tragic incident in which a “runaway” 2009 Lexus ES 350 killed everyone aboard — including an allegedly skilled driver — last August. The crash simply makes no sense. This is a vehicle that was “out of control” on a SoCal freeway for several minutes — enough time, in fact, for a passenger to call 911 and ask for help. Are you telling me that said Lexus suffered an absolutely stuck, wide-open throttle, a total failure of the braking system, and also could not be shut down, slowed, or stopped on a freeway with a trained driver at the helm (even crashing obliquely into the guardrail would’ve been preferable to rocketing head-first into an embankment)? Sorry. Doesn’t pass the Baloney Test.

Toyota is now in serious trouble — and in many ways, deservedly so (just how long ago did Toyota execs know of potential throttle issues, anyway?). But the notion that Toyotas are rising up and rocketing uncontrollably across highways, into walls, or off cliffs is nothing but media-fueled twaddle. Step on the correct pedal — the brakes — and your vehicle will stop. But if a vehicle hiccups, for whatever reason, and gets wadded up as a result, the fundamental defect is a clueless driver.

Those, apparently, a like-minded media has access to in droves.

The 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid Limited, an AW Drivers Log:

EDITOR WES RAYNAL: Not a bad little piece but holy crap, that sticker price is at least $7,000 more than I would have guessed! Ford has done some serious revamping of this little ute.

Toyota’s Feet of Clay

There was no magic to Toyota’s rise to the top; no voodoo in its relentless climb to surpass General Motors as the world’s largest, wealthiest automaker. Just 60 years of gut-wrenching slog. Sure, you could argue Detroit’s breathtaking arrogance and stunning complacency gave Toyota a free pass. But it wasn’t Motown’s myopia that created the dependable, efficient, value-packed cars and trucks that made the former weaving-loom manufacturer rich beyond belief. That was all Toyota’s work.

Toyota’s reputation for low cost and high quality reached near-mythic status by the beginning of the 1990s. Its all-new luxury car, the Lexus LS400, sent engineers at Daimler and BMW scurrying back to their workstations to figure out how they could match the silky smoothness and refinement of its drivetrain and the millimetric precision of its panel fits. The Machine That Changed The World, the 1990 book written by MIT researchers James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos detailing Toyota’s innovative lean production system, was required reading for enlightened auto industry executives around the world.

When The Machine That Changed The World was published, Toyota was just half the size of GM, and American cars still dominated their home market. But within seven years Toyota’s Camry would be the best-selling car in America, a ranking it would cede only once — in 2001, to Honda’s Accord — in the subsequent 12 years. And when Toyota’s global sales numbers finally overtook those of GM in 2008, ending the General’s eight-decade run at the top, not even the most die-hard GM lifers were shocked. Those Toyota guys had the car biz nailed.

Or so we thought.

What started with that horrifying fatal car crash involving a runaway 2009 Lexus ES350 last August has since ballooned into two separate recalls covering what could reach 10 million vehicles worldwide. Toyota’s once gilt-edged reputation for quality and reliability now looks like a dented spittoon.

But consider this: The automobile is one of the most fiendishly complex products developed for, and sold to, ordinary citizens. The average automobile comprises something like 20,000 individual components, each of which has to be designed, manufactured, tested, and then correctly assembled to ensure it works perfectly. Even if 99.9 percent of the parts in your car are absolutely perfect, it still has 20 things wrong with it.

So no matter how rigorous an automaker’s development process might be, there’s still potential for problems with quality or reliability. That’s why there is no such thing as the perfect car. That’s why you’ll find almost every automaker in the business, even those with the toniest brand image, regularly represented on our Wide Open Throttle recalls page.

Car buyers will — and regularly do — forgive automakers their quality and reliability hiccups as long as they feel they have been treated fairly and honestly, and that the problem is fixed promptly. The real issue at the core of Toyota’s current travails, therefore, is not that it may be building cars and trucks that are defective in some way. The real issue is who inside Toyota knew exactly what the defects behind these recalls meant for consumers. And when did they know it.

I suspect the answers to these two questions are where you’ll find Toyota’s feet of clay.

The 2010 Lincoln MKS EcoBoost, an AW Drivers Log:

EDITOR WES RAYNAL: I had a good time squirting around town with the Lincoln MKS EcoBoost, but I about spilled my coffee when I saw the price of this beast.

The 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer GTS, an AW Drivers Log:

SENIOR EDITOR FOR NEWS BOB GRITZINGER: It’s no wonder the Evolution is such a great car, with this car as a base.

2010 Mazda Mazdaspeed 3, an AW Drivers Log:

MOTORSPORTS EDITOR MAC MORRISON: I had a lot of fun in this car over the holidays.

Toyota’s Fall is Speeding Out of Control

Wacky conspiracy theories about the Obama administration trying to deal a setback to “Government Motors’” fiercest competitor aside, Toyota is in big trouble. All Toyota Motor Sales in the U.S. could do when Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood retracted and apologized for his “misstatement” Wednesday was to respond, “thank you.”

LaHood retracted this recommendation made on Capitol Hill early Wednesday: “If anyone has one of these vehicles, stop driving it. Take it to a Toyota dealer, because they believe they have the fix for it.”

LaHood is frustrated with Toyota’s slow response to charges of unintended acceleration and defective brakes, two dubious charges for anyone familiar with the way cars are engineered. Yet there are the complaints, and there is that awful, fatal Lexus ES crash in San Diego County last year. And there was LaHood, telling us that federal safety officials had to go to Japan to get Toyota to recall the vehicles. There’s a continuing investigation and threat of civil penalties that could exceed the record $1 million General Motors had to pay in 2004 when it was too slow to recall 600,000 vehicles for faulty windshield wipers.

By Thursday morning, Toyota admitted brake design defects in the 2010 Prius launched last year, and that it had been quietly fixing the problem.

The Toyota throttle mechanism recall affects 2.3 million cars and trucks and shut down sales and U.S. production in late January, contributing to Toyota Motor Sales’ 8.7-percent drop in U.S. sales last month versus January 2009. Toyota is throwing in a stipend to U.S. dealers, in addition to the new throttle assemblies, to help pay for them to stay open and fix the problem. Toyota dealers aren’t considered the most consumer-friendly, but many will stay open 24 hours a day until the recall is completed.

“Unintended acceleration,” whether it’s really a sticky throttle pedal that doesn’t return to “coast” quickly enough, or whether there’s some sort of electrical interference with Toyota’s throttle-by-wire system is far more serious than bad windshield wipers. In any case, it’s silly to think of LaHood’s harsh criticism as trumping up charges. Toyota figures, as LaHood noted in his retracted statement, that it has a fix for something.

“Toyota’s engineers have developed and rigorously tested a solution that involves reinforcing the pedal assembly in a manner that eliminates the excess friction that caused the pedals to stick in rare instances,” the company says.

Even as Toyota went from blaming floor mats to blaming throttle pedals, the company mishandled the message. It’s a faulty part from a supplier, Toyota said. The supplier, CTS of Indiana, said it made the part to Toyota’s specifications. Blaming the supplier does, indeed, seem like passing the buck. And in any case, all cars and trucks are assembled with parts from many suppliers. To try and transfer the blame is cheap and disingenuous.

Worse, on the Public Radio International show “The World,” Tuesday, a Japanese correspondent quoted two Toyota line workers there blaming American factory workers. The problem would never happen in a Japanese Toyota factory, the two said. Yikes. This is an automaker that has worked hard to identify itself as a “domestic” U.S. automaker, with a full-size pickup truck, NASCAR participation and its largest non-Japanese factory in Georgetown, Kentucky. The workers made those comments probably without management knowledge, of course.

Under the leadership of its president and chief operating officer, Jim Lentz, TMS has been scrambling to diffuse this problem, to preserve Toyota’s reputation at a time when the entire industry is suffering a huge downturn in the market. The reaction appears to be the reaction of a fumbling, arrogant company.

That’s not TMS. It’s Toyota Motor Corporation. Like most its Asian and European competitors, TMS pretty much can’t loosen its necktie at 5 p.m. without getting permission from Tokyo. And in Japan, the business atmosphere is very different. Toyota has been 1950’s GM there for much of the postwar period, dominating the market. If a new Nissan or Honda takes first place in sales there, it’s only for a few months, until a Toyota can regain the lead.
 
Toyota has the kind of relationship with the Japanese government and its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) that would make the “Government Motors” crowd cringe. The Japanese press would never have chased such a story there the way myriad media outlets have chased it here.

This is why LaHood had to send safety officials to Japan to talk to Toyota executives.

As I’ve written before, the world’s largest automaker has handled the problem, so far, like GM would have handled it when it was the world’s largest automaker. As we’ve become used to instant news and shortened attention spans, it seems as if Toyota’s quick rise to Global Number One will lead to a GM-like fall, but on an accelerated schedule.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Complaints of Toyota Priuses suddenly “surging” to 100 mph sounds as silly to me as it should to you. Electrical interference with throttle-by-wire systems is apparently impossible. With all the wonderfully high-tech stuff being packed into our modern conveyances, I wonder whether what we’re driving these days should still be called “cars.”

Recently, I received a Facebook message from a friend and former colleague, and an owner of a Mark II Prius, who asked whether she should buy a Mark III Prius. Today, I sent her the message, “you sure you want that with the self-parking feature?”

Daily Godzilla: Living with the Nissan GT-R

It’s nice having a Nissan GT-R waiting in your driveway each morning. Even if the only thing on the immediate agenda is your commute to work, you know it’s going to be out of the ordinary. Godzilla wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve spent plenty of time driving various GT-Rs — including the car currently in service in our long-term test fleet — and even took one on an exploratory lap in search of Vmax. But only last week did I actually use a GT-R as an owner might. I kept our long-termer for a full week — commuting, running to the store, driving my daughter to school, blowing out the cobwebs with some spirited dashes on my favorite civilian Nürburgrings (daughter parked at home). Did I enjoy myself? Well of course not. This is serious scientific stuff, see?

What I noticed right away is how well our family Godzilla has held up. The odo is showing around 23,000 miles now, and — rest assured — all but maybe a couple hundred of those have been clocked with the twin turbos whirling in fury. The GT-R hasn’t complained. It starts easily, idles smoothly, doesn’t creak or groan or rattle. There’s a bit of hiccup in the dual-clutch transmission when pulling away from stops now, but it’s not serious. And that’s just amazing. The stunt-performing star of myriad YouTube and MT.com videos, this particular car has endured probably 50 or more drag strip launches without complaint or failure. This ain’t no dainty, high-strung performance prima donna.

The GT-R is a relentlessly insistent automobile. Few other cars I’ve driven — even big Vettes or mega Ferraris — seem so eager at all times to go fast. Just rolling down the Interstate, you’re constantly aware that the mighty, 485-horse six is straining at the bit. A mere breath on the throttle and it’s wide awake, pulling, tongue hanging out and ears pinned back as if to say, “Finally!” You’re aware, too, of being at the helm of an all-but-invincible street fighter. A few premium rides might ultimately be faster, but in almost any impromptu stoplight or freeway acceleration-flexing the GT-R is going to triumph. It’s simply blinding out of the gate (aided, of course, by all-wheel drive), and the combo of its high-pressure six and rifle-shot dual-clutch shifter create withering, all but foolproof sprints. Most drivers already seem to know this. Such is the street cred of the GT-R: You’ll notice hot cars pulling up behind or alongside for an admiring look, but they tread lightly. No one wants to risk getting bitten by Godzilla.

Yet perhaps the greatest achievement of the GT-R is this: It doesn’t have to be driven hard to be appealing. It will roll around town running errands without overheating, making noise, or embarrassing you by throwing a Supercar Hissy Fit. As low-maintenance as a Sentra, in other words. If you’re traveling, the GT-R will eat miles at speeds that would leave most cars breathless — but it won’t seem dramatic. You’ll feel only relaxed, enjoying Bose audio and guided by sat nav. Now check that speedo again. Can that really be right?

Nor is the sublime powertrain the only draw. The various displays and graphs available for viewing on the central performance monitor are endlessly entertaining. Perhaps you’d like to check transmission-oil temperature? Or how many g’s you just pulled in that turn? Or steering angle? Or torque distribution? Or…? You can summon all of that info and much more. It may be well-behaved, but there’s nothing ordinary about the GT-R. Even a trip to the post office feels like you’re plotting a course for Mars.

We made the right choice naming Godzilla Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for 2009. For sure, the Nissan GT-R stormed into the supercar arena boasting some pretty bold claims. I’m impressed all the more that it hasn’t backed down.

2011 Audi A8: An AW Flash Drive:

What is it?

The 2010 Mazda Mazdaspeed 3, an AW Drivers Log:

MOTORSPORTS EDITOR MAC MORRISON: I had a lot of fun in this car over the holidays.