TOYOTA stops production in USA (Recall)

[vztrt]

The flow on effect (even if this has been shown over the past two years)

http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-new...0215-o02w.html

Toyota's quality reputation slips
VERONIQUE DUPONT
February 15, 2010 - 9:42AM

AFP

Toyota's growing safety woes are hitting hard at a company that has seen a meteoric rise in the United States fueled by a reputation for reliability.

Surveys by independent firms such as Consumer Reports and JD Power have ranked Toyota at or near the top for years, allowing the Japanese giant to overtake General Motors in 2008 as the world's biggest carmaker.

"Everybody's been chasing Toyota for years and now people are catching them," Rebecca Lindland, analyst at IHS Global Insight, told AFP.

"The speculation in the industry is that some of the very high standards may have been relaxed when the production increased dramatically and left Japan."

The analyst said that Toyota "had quality issues as soon as they brought production of the Lexus to North America" a few years ago.

Lindland said that "obviously some element of loss of control" was felt by the Japanese automaker in the initial quality of Canadian-made vehicles, which can occur when automakers start producing in new countries.

Toyota has been selling in the US for more than 50 years. But its share of the US market has exploded in recent years, rising from 9.3 per cent to 17 per cent in the 2000-2009 period.

North American production has soared in the past decade as Toyota has brought more of its assembly plants closer to their point of sale.

Even with sales growing, complaints have been rising against Toyota at the national safety watchdog, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

According to the car buying website Edmunds.com, between 2001 and 2010 Toyota was the subject of 9.1 per cent of the consumer complaints on the NHTSA website.

Jake Fisher, senior engineer in auto testing at Consumer Reports, said that before the first recall over the accelerator problem, the complaints involved one Toyota vehicle in 13,000, compared with one in 20,000 for other automakers.

"It's a very severe problem but, if only affecting one of 13,000 vehicles, (that is) a normal message of collecting reliability data," he said.

In searching the NHTSA database, "we found that every automaker has problems of sudden acceleration," he said.

"There's certainly something going on with Toyota but it's not exclusive to them," although no other automaker has issued a recall of almost nine million vehicles in recent months as Toyota has done for accelerator and braking problems.

The complaints registered in 2009 and this year against GM, Ford and Chrysler are minuscule compared with those against Toyota, and on certain models only one or two complaints have been lodged.

"Ford and GM have been working at improving their quality," said IHS Global Insight's Lindland. "All their hard work is showing results."