Toyota Sticks with Lexus Excuse: Floor Mats!

 Toyota's builds great, increasingly smart cars.  Always has.  But willful cars?  Ones that accelerate of their own volition and pretty much refuse to stop.  Yep, Toyota builds them, too.

As a result of its pursuit of GM's top-seller crown, Toyota's great tradition of no-excuses, quality car building might have changed just a bit lately.  They knew it and some customers did, too.  Toyota-built cars would simply decide to go super fast and damned the breaks.  This would be fine if your Camry was sitting at a light next to some rich punk in Lamborghini, but that wasn't part of it.  All of which Toyota was finding out.

So, you'd think, Toyota would take the responsible step of recalling suspect cars to fix the accelerator pedal mechanism itself, which would include some up-market Lexus Models already  fingered in some uncontrolled acceleration accidents.  You'd be wrong.

Toyota already issued a recall in September 2009 for an acceleration problem ant that did include Lexus models.  The recall did not come easily and Toyota was in no hurry to be too publicly embarassed about the need for one.  Then it was.   

Thanks to a harrowing 911 call broadcasting the seconds preceding a deadly crash.  That driver surely saved more lives than a Toyota statistician can count, even if he couldn't stop one of their cars.  He pretty much recalled 1.8 million cars all by himself, including many, many a Lexus.  And eventually a lot more.

And I'm damned sure the playing of that heroic 911 tape ruined a bunch of perfectly good Sushi dinners all over Tokyo. 

If I'm Toyota's CEO--and after I've quickly thanked God(s) that another tradition involving employer humiliation and including samurai swords had changed, too, and I can just blush and stammer instead of spilling organs on the Sashimi---I'm telling everyone at the table, "The poor American just mistook the brake pedal for the accelerator."  The chucking all around probably stopped at this, "Uh, CEO-San, he was a California Highway Patrolman." 

The honorable consultants, probably hosting the gig and who did the fatality-versus-better-pedal-design statistical cost-risk analysis, stand up and leave the table, presumably to get their katana blades or no-excuses sharpened up.  They had forgotten to factor in the risk of a 911 tape becoming really bad publicity for quality car building.

But to whomever was left, "The floor mats!" is a tried-and-maybe-true response.  No chuckling this time.  Just a recall.  For the floor mats, probably a fancy option on that dandified Camry first being offered in 2006 Lexus ES...  Okay, forget that.  But it's still the floor mats.

Later, as complaints and accident reports flood in from everywhere including The Big O's Indonesian boyhood hood, Toyota's CEO finds out that accelerators suck--and stuck--on, maybe, eight million Toyota-built vehicle. Including Vibes from now-defunct Pontiac, of all bizarre things! On most of them, CEO-San comes to admit, it is the pedal itself that deserves the sword.  On the high quality, luxury Lexus cars?  Still just--up-market, but still just--floor mats.  Lexus accelerator pedals are just fine. On other Toyota's?  Not so much.

By the way, since the Lexus recall only involves removing the current luxury L-logo'ed mats and putting them in the luxury trunk, you can do it yourself.  On your way to trade up to a Buick.

Toyota Stops Selling. Suddenly.

Can it be?  Toyota has stopped making Camry's and Corolla's?  And it is telling its dealers to stop selling them?  Due to quality concerns?  No way.  Really?

Really.

The story seems to be that Toyota has a problem with these best-selling cars.  But so does GM and Ford, last seen chugging along way behind in a Camry's rear-view sale volume mirror.  How bad a quality problem can a Toyota car have?

This raises a lot of question marks (see above).  Toyota has already recalled over four million US sold cars, more than it, and almost everyone else, for that matter, sold in 2009.  They seemed to have recalled that the cars don't work quite right.  In large part, they were built well and looked sweet, that's for sure.  They still have great acceleration for their respective classes of vehicles, but, I guess, it ends there.

Or, more accurately, not.

These cars love to accelerate so much that they will just suddenly do it on their own.  And keep on doing it until you land in the ocean, if you are lucky enough to as live near to an ocean as I do.  Your new Camry might generate more G force than the last Space Shuttle roaring into the skies of Florida and later landing in the drink, too.  Except, NASA's ten thousand MIT and Cal Tech PhD's carefully planned for all that and your less schooled Camry didn't even hint at it.

Toyota did assure us all that this sudden-and-endless acceleration is even rarer than that Space Shuttle launch, does not cost nearly as much and won't require a tow back to Texas.

So.  Have you driven a Ford lately?  It might not be as exciting as a Corolla, but it won't deform your cheerful smile into Zombie-face, either.