This will get a bit long. Bear with me.
I have no problem believing that in at least some instances, driver fault was the problem. But Toyota hasn’t been doing themselves any favors by boasting in internal documents that they had saved money by successfully avoiding a recall.
For the first month or so Japan was willing to blame all this on overseas ‘Toyota bashing’. As far as Japanese consumers were concerned, the cars in question were made overseas, and the parts were made by a foreign supplier, so their domestic cars were still safe, right? Except now it turns out there have been dozens of similiar cases in Japan that Toyota specifically, and Japan’s automotive industry overall, has been able to keep quiet: consumer protection is simply not that important of a concept in Japan, where consumers have bought in big-time to the perception - perpetuated by corporates - that ‘Japanese companies only care about product quality and consumer safety, not like those big nasty foreign corporations that only care about profit’.
And yet, Japan has had numerous scandals the past couple of years: food being sold well after the use-by date, use-by date labels being re-marked when they were about to expire, tainted rice being sold for cooking use when it was supposed to be sold to make glue, restaurants re-using uneaten food from diners’ plates, cheaper imported food being purposely mis-labeled as expensive domestic food, companies re-using ingredients past their expiration date, and another auto company (Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus) systematically covering up a serious design flaw in front wheel hubs. And those are just the problems that have serviced in the past few years.
Almost all of these problems came to light because of internal whistle-blowers. In many cases problems stretched back decades. Why are they coming out more frequently now?
By and large, Japanese citizens first and foremost avoid at all costs avoid getting involved other peoples’ problems. I personally suspect its why women on trains more often than not avoid saying anything when they get groped: they want to avoid calling attentoin to themselves, and they know most people around them won’t help them. As long as employees were being paid sufficiently and were secure in their employment, they would stay silent. But Japan’s workers have suffered almost 20 years of essentially zero wage growth: for example, for the period from 1990-2003, wages rose by about 1.2% on average - but all that growth was in the first five years; growth actually declined between 1995 and 2003, and real disposable income continued to decline, by about 0.7% on average (CAGR), between 2005 and 2009. And this despite Japanese companies recording years of record profits, from the end of the IT bubble through 2007. Workers didn’t enjoy any benefit from the record profits, and now they’re taking the brunt of the blow of the downturn, as companies, flush with cash but scared to spend any of it, react to falling sales overseas by cutting full-time hires and hiring them back as temps at a third of the cost. Workers feel that companies are no longer holding up their end of the bargain - and so you get whisleblowers.
The whole ‘Japanese quality’ and ‘employment for life’ things in Japan are, and always have been, myths; Japan (and foreigners) simply believed Japan’s own press clippings. I’ve worked in Japan or at Japanese companies for nearly all of my adult life, and I can tell you that there is no difference in the level, frequency, or scale of screw-ups. The only difference is, it’s a heck of a lot easier to cover it up at a Japanese company, because its usually almost impossible to easily and correctly assign responsibility. Projects are handled on a nebulous ‘team’ base that may span any number of teams in any number of divisions - which means no one can be said to really be in charge.
I think Toyota clearly has a problem on their hand, and by all accounts they knew about it years ago. Cause for mass alarm? Perhaps not - I mean, I suspect that any car could potentially have some fault with it. The potential defect rate overall seems awfully low, and besides, no matter the car or the brand, the defect rate will also be > 0.
If nothing else this issue helped me put a ‘marker’ in my brain to think to hit my car’s on/off button for three seconds to kill the engine if there ever is a problem.
But I still wouldn’t rush out to buy a car from an automaker that for years seemed more concerned with covering up the potential problem and stonewalling any fact-finding in Japan than actually fixing it.