Toyota Outlines New Quality and Safety Initiatives, Is it Enough? | Car Accidents

Toyota North America gets more "regional self-reliance" as part of its parent company's sweeping plan to improve quality, and quality perception, after suffering several major blows to its reputation in the past year. This is the most important action for Toyota's U.S. and Canadian customers, as it became clear last year when Toyota Motor Company President, CEO and scion Akio Toyoda testified about unintended acceleration, misapplied floor mats and rusty Tundras before a rabid U.S. House committee. It was clear from those hearings that Toyota in Tokyo gave its North American operations far too little authority and autonomy in dealing with quality, safety and overall engineering and management issues.


Now, having studied 3600 complaints of "unintended acceleration" so far, Toyota has found no reproducible cases, and it may be turning the tide on this issue after a couple of out-and-out hoaxes followed sincere, though ridiculous "demon runaway car" claims. Unspeakable as it may be, the unintended acceleration issue looks to me like it's largely the product of a quickly aging Toyota buyer base. There have been no such cases regarding its Scion youth brand.

Its quality initiative is designed to take on all such issues, real and imagined. It has added a layer of management to train its workers. And about 1000 engineers are being added to Toyota's quality innovation activity. It's stepping up evaluation of quality and safety problems from consumers' points of view and it's adding about four weeks to a typical new model's development time.

All this comes as Toyota has recalled 139,000 V-6- and V-8-powered Lexus rear-wheel-drive models in North America for broken valve springs, a problem that may cause engine stalling. In a Q&A session on its quality initiatives with reporters in Toyota City, Japan, I asked why it took two years for the recall, and whether the new systems would improve the company's response.

"We think it was in the year 2007 when we identified the failure," Toyota managing officer Hiroyuki Yokoyama said, through an interpreter. Toyota found foreign matter, zirconium and silicon oxide, in the valve spring metallurgy and "found this very much difficult to eliminate" from the manufacturing process, so engineers instead increased the valve springs' diameter.

At first, the number of claims was very low. Even now, Toyota has about 100 claims out of the 136,000 recalled, said Dino Triantafyllos, Toyota North America's new vice president for the Quality Division and regional product safety executive, and former chief of the NUMMI plant.

The valve spring defect was initially a consumer satisfaction problem. Lexus owners complained their cars were noisy and had too much vibration, but reports of engine stalling have just recently surfaced, Triantafyllos said. No data indicated it was a safety defect, until now.

This seemed to contradict a point Toyota had just made to us earlier Thursday morning, showing off its quality assurance facility, a kind of defect forensics outfit. ("Our job is like Detective Columbo," said consumer quality engineering manager Hiroaki Sunakawa.) One demonstration showed how Toyota tested a Japanese domestic market model in a chamber at extremely cold temperatures in order to identify a problem with breaking foglamp mounts. The company conducted the test after just seven complaints from 2005 to '10. The foglamps are part of Japan's lighting standard, though, so if they don't properly work, it could automatically be considered a safety problem.

For that matter, Toyota notes that in the U.S., engine stalling, even at speed, isn't automatically a safety problem. That assessment overestimates American drivers, though. If you can't distinguish a throttle pedal from a brake pedal, can you safely bring a car with a dead engine from 70 mph down to a complete stop?

Toyota has spent two days, so far, trying to convince us that its thorough quality and safety programs are about to get much better. It desperately wants to salvage its hard-fought reputation.

While there's a clear distinction now between consumer satisfaction with a model's lack of quality defects and the quality of its design, including ergonomics and ease of use, the distinction may be going away. Thanks largely to Toyota's leadership, consumers now are conditioned to expect zero defects and such ease of use that the car should virtually drive itself and let its owner text. After all, nobody even reads owners manuals, anymore.

Under Toyota's newly enhanced system, it gives priority to identifying and solving problems when safety is involved, as compared with quality problems that simply annoy the driver. The valve spring problem proves that mechanical defects can become safety defects. Even the floor mat issue that began Toyota's woes is the result of consumer "preference" for stacking more than one mat on the driver's floorpan, or changing into winter mats without proper installation has become a problem that endangers safety.

In an age in which consumers don't expect to have to maintain their cars and trucks anymore, Toyota may find itself investigating more and more consumer preference design defects as out-and-out safety problems.