Toyota Recalls Update

 

In recent days, news of continued woes caused by problems with various 2009 Toyota models has been everywhere. Speculation on the truth about Toyota's problems and the damage caused to the previously flawless reputation of the Japanese automaker have both been immense, and Toyota's VP of North American operations has been making the circuit of news networks assuring people that Toyota has been doing everything it can to fix the problem. He is doing this amid stringent demands from American safety watchdog organizations like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that Toyota focus more seriously on the fixing the problem. Since then, people have been waiting for a Toyota recalls update, but until now, recalls updates have been slow to come.

Toyota came under fire recently when it was forced to recall over four million vehicles due to problems with unintended sustained acceleration, which caused several wrecks, injuries, and deaths. Initially, the automaker blamed the problems on faulty floor mats, saying that the mats were simply slipping and wedging themselves into pedal mechanisms which kept the car accelerating against the driver's will. After more incidents occurred in vehicles with floor mats already removed, Toyota was forced to look yet again at the problem, ultimately making the decision to recall about 2,300,000 vehicles in the United States alone. The Toyota recalls update was due to the company re-examining the problem and finally determining that there was a real issue that had gone unfixed by their massive recall in late January which included millions of cars in the US and over a quarter million vehicles in Canada. Toyota is now claiming that after further inspection they determined that there could be a problem with the actual gas pedal mechanism itself: a suggestion many have been making all along.

Toyota, who also owns the Lexus brand, recently reached top status among automakers for sales in the United States during the initial downfall of the big three in Detroit (Ford, GM, Chrysler), and has been accused of cutting corners in order to increase their market share in America even further while the compeition was reeling. While Toyota has roundly denied such claims, the fact remains that public opinion has shifted firmly against an automaker which built it's company on a sterling reputation for affordable, safe vehicles.

After almost a week of intense scrutiny during which he was attending a conference in Sweeden, Toyota's CEO Akio Toyoda finally addressed the media today, apologizing for recalls across the globe, but many argue that it is far too little and far too late to rescue the company's reputation. Toyota's problems are indeed global, the announcement of this US recall comes just one day after similar Toyota recalls in Japan and  recalling an additional 181,000 cars in the UK.

Many found Toyota's initial assessment that problems were caused by faulty floor mats to be the result of laziness and reluctance to spend money on examining more serious possibilities in their accelerator system. While this may or may not be true, populist anger towards the Toyota corporation has been high ever since the cathartic release of a frightening and emotional 911 call from an off-duty experienced highway patrol officer whose car was accelerating uncontrollably. The call ended when the officer was finally unable to find anymore places to safely manuever the car and wrecked into stopped traffic, causing himself and the three other members of his family to be killed. More Toyota recalls update stories will surely be coming in as time goes on, and people are anxious to see if this latest fix will be able to actually alleviate both the problems in the vehicles and the damage to Toyota's trusted name across the globe.

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