Toyota Recall Timeline

By 2003, Toyota had surpassed Ford Motor Company in annual sales and had become the number two car company, second only to General Motors and by 2006 had moved into the number one spot (Toyota Recall Timeline, n.d.). Parnell (2014), relays that the fall of the “big three” was related to “product deficiencies, too many brands, brands that lacked differentiation, poorly negotiated labor contracts, and stiff foreign competition from brands like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan”. The foreign automakers capitalized on failing U.S. car makers by building new manufacturing facilities in Southern U.S. cities; employing large numbers of domestic workers where the labor force was inexpensive and typically ununionized (Parnell, 2014). These states were very

On August 28, 2009, an off-duty officer and his family was killed in a deadly crash in a Lexus vehicle that had been loaned to him while his Lexus was being serviced (Evans, 2010). During the time that the vehicle in question was accelerating out of control, one of the occupants called 911 and reported that the vehicle didn’t have any brakes and it was later found that the vehicle may not have had the correct floormats in place (Evans, 2010). The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) quickly linked this accident to the previous recall related to floor mats and urged Toyota to issue a broader recall (Toyota Recall Timeline, n.d.). Toyota begrudgingly made the recall in October but had to expand it again in November increasing the number of cars in the recall to 4.2 million vehicles (Parnell, 2014). During an evaluation of what may be causing the accelerator problem it was identified that the two manufacturers of the accelerator pedal mechanism were not making their products based on the exact specifications given by Toyota. Toyota began to place blame on the CTS group out of Elkhart, Indiana for the malfunction and the CTS group was placing blame on Toyota, claiming that the issue was related to a Toyota’s design flaw that was not caught by their

NHTSA continued to question if Toyota had acted timely in their notification of the government related to recall information. Toyota’s Chief, Akio Toyoda and Yoshimi Inaba, head of Toyota’s North American operations would be brought before a congressional hearing committee to answer to the issues that Toyota was experiencing and to the claims that the company didn’t respond in a timely manner (Ohmae, 2010). U.S. regulators began demanding documentation from Toyota in an attempt to determine their timeliness (Parnell, 2014). NHTSA announced that they would fine Toyota 49.1 million because of the delayed reporting of problems (Parnell, 2014). Toyota promised that they would rectify the issues of missed identification of quality issues by implementing a product safety committee and an Automotive Center of Quality Excellence (Parnell, 2014). Many still deemed this as a fix that was not as substantial as the