I believe the Toyota problem teaches us a couple of things:
1. 'Why should one tell the truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?' This, according to Ray Monk, author of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, was the subject of Ludwig Wittgenstein's earliest recorded philosophical reflections. Finding no satisfactory answer, Wittgenstein concluded that there was, after all, nothing wrong with lying under such circumstances. Wittgenstein is arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Even before reading the article entitled Toyota's Not the Only One on Seeking Alpha, I did believe that recall was not rare among automakers and I could not believe there could be no massive recalls from manufacturers as worse as Ford or Chrysler. Perhaps it is to one's advantage to tell the lie rather than be honest about one's own problems.
2. No mass production can be superior in quality no matter you are Toyota or Daimler-Benz. 40 years ago, a Mercedes-Benz was a masterpiece - a quintessence of engineering and craftsmanship, but the Germans, learning a bad habit from the Anglo-Saxons, began to cut corners in order to save a few Deutsche marks. Anglo-Saxons were particularly mean so they thought of a way to save a dozen more dollars than the Germans by moving manufacturing plants to cheap countries such as Mexico, India or China. The Japanese, keen to catch up with their even better dexterity, thought of even more ways to cut down costs. So, among other means, Toyota used common parts for various models. This saved a lot of money but planted the seed of the problem that arises today. Also, those cheap countries are to blame. That these countries are cheap has a fundamental reason. That these countries never go expensive imply another reason. All-in-all, it is like to tell a Hong Kong youngster to assemble a car. He won't do it. He simply can't do it because he will just ignore your instruction. He is lazy and useless but luckily he is 'nourished' by his parents. He won't starve to death - he won't even get hungry. He is led into believing that he is not lazy but only sick - those psychologists love this tune. But he is lazy and he is useless. He simply can't assemble a car. In other countries such as Mexico or China, millions of people will starve to death if they do not work for food so they must learn to build a car. They do because if they don't they will be dead. But do you really think the cars are well built when 8.5 million of them are built in these countries every year with parts from over all the world and software from different vendors? I shall only believe a Rolls Royce, hand-built in England by a team of passionate technicians, is of high quality. I do not believe 1 million Camrys, 3 millions Comforts and 4 millions Corollas are 'high quality' because a Toyota logo is hammered into the back. No. Quality depends on craftsmanship - that's why in the context of quality assurance Rolls Royce is good Toyota is bad.
I've talked to much. I would like to share with you a short writing on Seeking Alpha, on 10 February 2010, by Rick Newman, Chief Correspondent of U.S. News:
They're rare. On the contrary, millions of vehicles are recalled every year. So far this year, Toyota's recalls have obviously dominated the news, but they haven't been the only ones. Chrysler has recalled about 20,000 vehicles to fix a clip on the brakes. And Honda (HMC) has had two major recalls. One is to fix a power window switch on 141,000 Fit subcompacts that could melt or catch fire if water leaks in. Another, affecting 129,000 Ridgeline pickup trucks, is to place a protective cover around the wires for an A/C blower motor, to prevent damage that can occur if a passenger kicks the motor. In December 2009 alone, there were at least eight separate recalls that each involved thousands of passenger cars.
They reflect an urgent safety problem. By their nature, recalls involve flaws that could affect safety, but most of the time, there's no immediate risk. Recalls often involve problems that are rare but could cause a serious problem if they occur. So the risk to any given driver is often remote, even though there may be a few high-profile incidents traced to the problem. That seems to be the case with Toyota's gas-pedal problems: The likelihood of sudden acceleration is extremely low, but with more than 4 million vehicles potentially affected, even a tiny rate of occurrence would make it a big problem. Even Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is confused about how pressing the danger is. He said recently that anybody with a recalled model should stop driving it—then he corrected himself to say owners should simply bring their cars to a dealer to get them fixed, whenever possible.
They're handled by the government. Regulators certainly have a role, but the majority of recalls are carried out by manufacturers without government involvement. Automakers sometimes resist a full-blown recall, since it means they have to foot the bill for every repair. And occasionally, they'll argue that a problem affects convenience or reliability but not safety and therefore doesn't require a recall. If regulators at the Department of Transportation disagree, they can persuade an automaker to order a recall or order one themselves. The Toyota recalls are "voluntary," which means they were issued by the automaker—but LaHood has said that the government forced Toyota to take the drastic action.
Automakers usually know in advance about problems that lead to recalls. Sometimes they do, but many problems are discovered only after years of use under real-world conditions. The notorious August 2000 recall of 14.4 million Firestone tires used on Ford (F) Explorers, for example, occurred after 4,300 complaints about tread separation piled up for nine years and Ford and Firestone fought a bitter duel over which of them was at fault. Even government investigators had a hard time figuring out if certain Explorer crashes were due to faulty tires, the vehicle's high center of gravity, or other factors. It's also worth noting that a huge controversy in the 1980s over sudden acceleration in the Audi 5000 was ultimately attributed to driver error, with a simple fix being to space the gas and brake pedals a bit farther apart. But Audi sales plunged nonetheless, partly because the company was perceived as arrogant.
Recalls are ruinous. Usually not. For owners, it typically means a trip to the dealer and a free repair. Big recalls can cost automakers a lot of money—which is one of the strongest incentives for them to avoid problems in the first place. But most recalls amount to the cost of doing business, and automakers tend to bounce back from safety controversies. The faulty Firestone tires on Ford Explorers, for example, were linked to 148 deaths and 500 injuries, causing both companies deep financial and reputational damage. But the Explorer remained popular, and Firestone continued to sell tires. Ford is still dealing with another huge recall—involving faulty cruise control switches on 9 million vehicles—yet that hasn't pre-empted a recent surge in Ford's reputation or the popularity of its vehicles.
They indicate poor quality. Excessive recalls might, but virtually every manufacturer has to occasionally fix problems that slip through the manufacturing process. Automobiles are complicated machines with dozens of computers and thousands of moving parts, subject to bad roads, extreme temperatures, lousy drivers, and outright abuse. An automaker that never issued recalls, in fact, might be hiding problems instead of fixing them. Toyota's challenge now is to convince customers that it's committed to making them whole and permanently solving problems, not just dodging blame, evading lawsuits, or taking the cheap way out. Others have done it.
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