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Another Recall? Toyota’s Vaunted Ad Campaign

Featuring Safety Emphasis . . . BOGUS AGAIN!

Rajjpuut has predicted and now been proven correct three times on Toyota’s total management incompetence. The mainstream media has not followed the story correctly, and of course, believing this is a recent Toyota aberration, has not emphasized the true underlying problems and causes: Toyota’s culture of internal and external lies; and acute mismanagement.

In recent times a braking problem was covered up by insisting that extra thick floor mats were the problem; then roughly 3/4 of a year later they acknowledged they had a real braking problem; followed by a real steering problem; and now a real engine problem that manifests as stalling when the engine operates at high speeds. For this new problem, Toyota is once again returning to its resource of last resort: new car recalls.

But in fact, Toyota has had a slightly different braking problem, which they’ve flat-out denied since roughly 1998. Rajjpuut first became aware of the Toyota problem when several instances of customers wrecking their garages and cars and parking lot accoutrements and even killing by-standers were reported in ’98 and '99. Toyota, denied the problem but angry customer letters continued for at least five years attesting to its continuing reality.

Where does all this Rajjpuut clairvoyance come from? Actually, it’s nothing of the sort. Trained long ago in Kepner-Tregoe** management techniques as all Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas employees were at that time, all the facts since ’98 have pointed to a corporate Toyota culture that was in denial and which really didn’t understand the simplest item in any effective manager’s arsenal: distinguishing real problems and real causes from B.S. Let’s look at the recent braking problem . . . .

Toyota has pretty much acted like their problems are all in the past, all of it. Their new ad campaign emphasizing customer security and safety is totally bogus, or in management language: completely specious. Their P-R ad campaign sounds nice but is fundamentally flawed, did you ever once hear them state the exact nature of the problem; or their exact “fix” for the problem; or the exact way that their “fix” operates? Unless these things occur and, in the case of public relations disasters like Toyota’s been suffering, unless those things occur and then are publicly acknowledged and explained, count on it, the problem is not only NOT FIXED, it has most probably not even been discovered yet.

In the face of all this Toyota denial, Rajjpuut has the last three times ventured the educated guess that Toyota’s problems are NOT mechanical as the company insists, but rather tied into their cars’ computer oversight systems. Could Rajjpuut be wrong? Damn straight, amigo! Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that mechanical problems are relatively easy to discover and fix . . . (and again, reminding you that Toyota has NOT stated the exact nature of the problem; the exact “fix” for the problem; or the exact way that their “fix” operates) Rajjpuut still suggests that computer problems (perhaps caused by lack of shielding for stray external signals) lie at the heart of both the braking and steering problems. While it’s possible that such a transient-caused computer problem might also tie in to the new engine-stalling problem, there are ten thousand potential causes for such a stall (for example, vapor lock! as well as “random over-ride” by some other <perhaps safety-oriented> system) and much less is known thus far about the engine problem than has been reported about the other situations.

Rajjpuut suggests that Toyota invites the Kepner-Tregoe folks to examine the four problem areas they’ve experienced as well as their whole operation top to bottom and to give Toyota managers at every level in every division much-needed K-T training before their cars kill more people.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut