Word: toyota
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Congress may be struggling to pass much legislation these days, but its members remain masters at summoning indignation. As political theater, the first few days of congressional hearings into Toyota's customer-safety crisis had it all: testy exchanges, Clintonian hairsplitting, obnoxious grandstanding--even multiple references to Marisa Tomei's automotive wizardry in My Cousin Vinny. On Feb. 24, Toyota president Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder, sat before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to apologize. "Quite frankly, I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick," he said, as members...
...hauling Toyoda and his deputies to Capitol Hill for a public flogging, House members got to vent their outrage at the company's sclerotic response to quality issues ranging from troublesome floor mats to sticky gas pedals to faulty brakes. Committee members asserted that Toyota has failed to sufficiently address the possibility that the computers in its cars could be causing problems. Toyota executive Jim Lentz insisted on Feb. 23 that the company has identified the defects responsible for some 2,600 instances of sudden, unintended acceleration--resulting in 34 deaths--since 2000. But he also conceded that...
...watchers generally took the news as a sign of GM's new assertiveness on image control. "The GM recall is a result of the heightened awareness that the manufacturers have on the quality of their products in the wake of Toyota's problems. We will continue to see automakers be very proactive about owning up to manufacturing problems before the issues become PR nightmares," says Jesse Toprak, an analyst with TrueCar.com...
Toprak believes that GM is moving to regain some of the ground it lost to rivals during the company's financial crisis. Ford Motor Co. actually sold more cars than GM in February, the first time that has happened since August 1998. GM also faces stiffer competition from beleaguered Toyota, which is launching a new wave of sales incentives...
...Toyota Recall...