Eating Crowolla

Okay, so Toyota is finally doing what they should have done a few weeks ago and that is trying to get out in front of the confidence crisis, which really is more of a media event, than a real crisis but that's another story. Frankly, we should be more afraid of cars catching on fire from faulty window switches than we should about gas pedal issues, but that's just one opinion. In any event, now that people are coming out of the woodwork to pile on, there's news that an investigation is under way into Corolla steering issues. Apparently that was enough to get Toyota to take out ads in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post and the New York Times in which the company promises to learn from its mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes it made was in how it handled the crisis. Toyota did a lousy job of pointing out that it was actually doing the right thing by putting a stop sell order on the vehicles in question and that recalls happen all the time in the car business. The company also did not do dealers any favors by not making it clear that a large number of vehicles among the best selling models - Camrys and Corollas - did not have accelerator problems. My guess is that Toyota had a lot of goodwill capital going into this "crisis" and will survive - to some degree in spite of itself.