Toyoda: We're Sorry for Being Opportunists

My parents were very frugal folk. Mostly because my paternal grandfather is a cheap bastard and my maternal grandmother didn't understand how credit cards worked in the 1980s and sent herself into a ravenous volcano of debt. So they had nobody to rely on except for themselves if shit went financially south.

They were constantly teaching me lessons on how to not waste money. One of those lessons was to never buy an American car.

Why?

Because I'd constantly be repairing it and paying a little bit more up front, for quality, is ultimately cheaper than paying for repairs throughout the life of the vehicle.

I'm sure in many cases this isn't true. Also, it's highly likely that this was one of my parents' many fear mongering inventions designed to help get me through life. At least their intentions were good.

Now, this goes against all my recent revelations about "buying American". The only way to really resuscitate our shriveling, quadruple bypass needing economy, is to buy American. I try to buy everything American now...except cars. Because, if mom and dad were right about American cars, the last thing I need in my life is to be stuck on the 405 where there's no shoulder, and be too poor to afford AAA for a tow or to repair my car which would undoubtedly have a busted timing belt or something of great importance.

My personal experience with American cars hasn't been so great, with or without my parents' influence. Numerous repeated repairs of seemingly non-remediable problems, weird noises, quickly fading paint, just to name a few issues. And in general, the designs produced by Ford, GM, and Chevy over the past twenty years haven't been too sexy. Definitely not as luscious as BMW or even...Toyota.

Toyota won over the American market by being fuel efficient, not pretty. Later the company mastered both. Toyota was able to dominate the United States by not just being efficient and pretty, but figuring out how to be amazingly reliable.

This came to be true of all Japanese cars, not just Toyota.

When Toyota recently failed in the quality department, it was one big massive, morbid failure. Which apparently seemed mammoth in comparison to American automobile manufacturers' decades of making shitty cars that didn't necessarily kill anyone, just cost them a lot of money unnecessarily - and for frequent repurchase.

It was also a huge opportunity to for congress to help re-energize the market for American cars. Given that the big competitor had just made the one huge fuck up that could give American car companies a chance - congress helped them go for the guttural.

And maybe, just maybe, it was a touch unfair. A touch opportunistic. It was a marketer's dream, as well as the congressional budget office's. We bailed out the automakers over a year ago and we best be workin' on gettin' our money back. What better way to do that than to exploit a folly of the one, single, biggest competitor?

It seems extremely underhanded and black-markety. It seems corrupt. It seems as though we're attempting to get back at them, in the most high school cheerleaderish way possible, for using our Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing methods better than we did.

But Toyota will recover from this. I don't believe their image is that tarnished. They provided the world with extremely high quality cars, that ran for over 200,000 miles with regular maintenance, for almost thirty years. Consumers tend to have a painfully short memory, but the quality of Toyota is hard to forget.